• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Machine Driven

November 24, 2022 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

01001101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01000100 01110010 01101001 01110110 01100101 01101110

I was rereading Geoff Dyer’s fascinating essay collection See/Saw when its subtitle stimulated a question. Which of these images would a computer like if it was ‘Looking at Photographs’? My computer is already involved in photo management, development and chapbook layout so why not have it make the selections for once? And so I ‘invited’ my desktop computer to collaborate for this edition.

The outer covers for Machine Driven
Available now from Bracket Books Ireland at outlets like FabHappy or WalkingCommentary.

This probably occurred to me because nearly all of the software I use has been updated to integrate ’artificial intelligence’. Some champions call such tools ‘narrow AI’ but the narrow truth is that these AI tools are just a collection of algorithms, each as devoid of intelligence as the elemental silicon that underpins them. 

My collaborator is no smarter than a toaster or a car alarm or a weather balloon or the fountain pen on my desk. And I’m not allowed to know how the algorithms work because that knowledge is the intellectual property of various software companies. Nor is there an option to train the algorithms. The only criterion available was similarity.

I selected seventeen photographs from Dyer’s book and tasked my collaborator to search for ‘similar’ content in one of my digital photo catalogues which holds over 130,000 images. 

My collaborator assembled this collection using ‘machine learning’ since ‘machine opticality’ hasn’t yet evolved. That is to say, my blind collaborator used a collection of unknowable algorithms to inform its choices. 

Human photographers. Human essayist. Human selection. Human criteria. Machine learning. Human selection. Human refinement. Human subscribers.  

‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our ideas are suggested largely by men we have never heard of … It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind’ warned Edward Bernays in Propaganda (1928). What will become of us when machines replace ‘men’?

With thanks to Geoff Dyer for See/Saw (2021).

—> I’ve created an online gallery of this month’s pictures here.


The Bracket Books chapbooks are available for online purchase through FabHappy but perhaps you’d prefer to enquire here. They’re being issued by the calendar month, each copy uniquely numbered and posted at the end of each month.

Advance subscriptions for 2023 are available here.

Click PRICING for the 2022 series subscriptions and single edition purchases.

Filed Under: Chapbooks Tagged With: artificial intelligence, booklink, bracket books ireland, edward bernays, fabhappy, geoff dyer, machine learning, photography, photos

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on Lady Birds
  • Simon Robinson on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Catherine Dunne on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Lia Mills on Apertures
  • Lia Mills on Limerick Walls

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers food geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • Lady Birds
  • Rounded
  • Watershapes
  • Machine Driven
  • 2023 Subscriptions

Archives

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Copyright © 2023 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework