[NetBehaviour] on Walter Benjamin and AI

[Michael Szpakowski]

 RheaI'm touched and delighted by your positive response to my piece. I would be absolutely happy for you to share the .pdf link anywhere you see fit! I'd be very pleased if it was to engender comment and discussion around the issues, whether that be enthusiastic, hostile or in territory between.I've been running around a bit (and will be for a couple of days more) but I want to sit down and read your comments and the linked material carefully and reflect upon it. From long experience I know that even in the cases where I have disagreed profoundly with you that what you have to say is always more than worth reading and thinking about. I hope our fucked up world is treating you as well as possible and I send my thanks and my warmest wishes.MichaelPS chuffed to bits you like the paintings!
    On Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 11:35:56 PM GMT+1, Rhea Myers via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:  
 
    Heya Michael.

This is truly wonderful. Thank you for sharing it!

Just to check - can we share the PDF link on social media?

I ranted briefly about social media anti-AI invocations of Benjamin a little while ago -

https://rhea.art/2025/09/25/walter-benjamins-superman/

Regarding your paragraphs:

12 -> The latent space of a model is the *unrealised* surplus value of cultural production. We are in an era of the rapid updating of "frontier" models, in some small part in response to their use by workers and artists. Some artists train and update their own models (Shardcore has been doing this for many years) as part of their ongoing artistic production. Open Source models and "skills" are shared and built upon publicly and iteratively.

The isolation of objects produced by isolated individuals is therefore, *in theory*, a product of the promotion of access to AI via web services that rely on individual accounts, billing, and use by people in a quantifiable way whether for the AI companies' metrics, or their promised reduction in labour costs to executives. 

15 -> https://rhea.art/2006/02/19/an-excerpt-from-a-recounting-of-an-adventure-by-baron-munchausen/ 😸

16 -> "slop" has become a before-the-fact dismissal of AI output rather than a characterisation of its lowest common denominator results by many users of the term. 

30 -> I am extremely wary of appeals against the "synthetic" to assert a (moral) lack to something that is nonetheless real, relying as I do for my existence on synthetic (but bio-identical) hormones and steroids. Fascism has never been a fan of the inauthentic (as it defines it).

31 -> AI shares this opaque brute force use of computation with Bitcoin's proof-of-work. Both technologies are hated by gamers for taking all the GPUs. 😸

40 -> I've always thought that the Aura went into brands, and more recently into memetic internet """aesthetics""" - https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki

45 -> Many social media responses to AI slop do make the mistake of throwing out modern and postmodern art by taking, essentially, fantasy book cover illustration as their model of what art is and must be defended as. It is here that I think that social media would-be anti-fascist anti-AI sentiment becomes indistinguishable from its "retvrn" classical-art-fetishising other.

47 -> https://rhea.art/util-inu-aura/ 😸

https://rhea.art/2007/05/30/the-aura-of-the-aura/ 😸

https://rhea.art/2007/05/31/aesthetic-aura-investigation-one/ 😸

78 -> Is this indexicality? Is this auteur theory? 🤔

I love the paintings, as well!

Thank you.

- Rhea.

On May 1, 2026, NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:

Hi

I have just had a short paper on Walter Benjamin and AI published in the journal ‘Arts’. It’s entitled: ‘Art and AI—Benjamin’s ‘aura’ as a Locus of Resistance: Notes, Theses and Images’

If you’d like to read it there’s a pdf here

 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/15/5/93/pdf

 

If you can think of anyone who might find it of interest, or indeed be completely outraged by it, please feel free to forward!

With warm wishes

Michael





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