Adversarial Hacking in the Age of AI

My previous publishing activity has demonstrated that comics are particularly amenable to programmatic processes. Some of the most creative bits of comics art are happening today at the junctions of various disciplines and technologies. It is certain that Deep Learning will ultimately re-shape comics, contributing to the formation of a new reader’s sensibility and force a radical re- alignment for the practitioners’ artistic ethos. As recent cases of deepfakes and other manipulated videos have shown, these technologies risk undermining the trust on the information commons. How can we ensure a critical distance that highlights the novelty and empowerment of these tools but prevents the elevation of these experimentation fields to the status of unquestioned authority? Keen to explore the possibilities for myself I founded Applied Memetic; an organisation which utilises and studies, through a rigorous research program, the set of operations that do not conventionally account for the production of comic books, i.e web-scraping, image classification, computer vision, indexation, coding, database building and cloud computation. Aside from the educational mission of the organisation, Applied Memetic is also working towards the publication of the first graphic novel entirely generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). As such, the workshop Adversarial Hacking in the Age of AI presents a fitting opportunity to share my experience of working with GANs in the creation of a graphic narrative. I would propose that my contribution to the workshop is in the form of an artist talk based on two papers I recently authored to substantiate my research; in part within the framework of my doctoral research at the Aalto University. The first paper, “Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice” published in The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship (September 2019) reflects on the future of comics in an interconnected globalized world where digital technologies both accelerate change in partly uncharted territories, and redefine the contemporary disenchantment with information flows. I use as a case study my project Peanuts minus Schulz and discuss the ethos of post-digital conceptual comics and how distributed digital labor is used as an opaque, material and possibly disruptive compositional practice. The second paper titled “What are the Futures of Comics?”, co-authored with futurist, fin-tech entrepreneur and comics artist Lex Sokolin, speaks on the digital ecosystem composed of micro-workers, artificial AI (AAI) and their role in challenging preconceived notions of authorship and labour. This paper will appear in the upcoming December issue of the Scenario Magazine published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. Both papers will be presented for the first time within the context of Adversarial Hacking in the Age of AI.