For notions of truth and correction to exist, they require a shared understanding of intelligence. The paradoxes of contemporary intelligence in the Western world can be found in its very construction, rooted in: sociability—the vehicle of this intelligence being the establishment of a shared language; criteria—an agreed upon metric for validity of such intelligence; modernity—the negation of intelligences that have existed prior; and singularity—the establishment of one type of intelligence (often, at the expense of all others). First, I’ll present how the aforementioned pillars of contemporary intelligence have been formulated, currently exist within society, and the implications of their shortcomings. Shortly after, I’ll address their ubiquitous recursiveness through artificial intelligence (AI) implementation, one of the most advanced and increasingly pervasive forms of technology. I’ll also share ways I’m studying such behavior through a practice I’ve developed entitled Computational Anthropology.

A

Sociability of Intelligence

For an agreed upon intelligence to exist, an agreed upon language is required to communicate such. Language identifies and labels entities as what they are and what they are not, or what they should or should not be. Without language and its imposition of boundaries, these dualities would not exist. The boundaries simultaneously create room for culturally conceived judgment, and values. And these values are subliminally embedded within the sentiments implied by semantics. These often unrecognized effects of language exist as an unspoken form of communication, expressing their encoded metadata of cultural morality. I will further elaborate on the role of language not only in contemporary Western forms of intelligence, but also in its digital immortality as foundational to AI technologies. First, I would like to begin with language’s impetus role in establishing dualities, thus creating metrics of validity.

Criteria of Intelligence

Modern forms of science are rooted in identification and objectification, both being products of duality. Science finds a commonality amongst phenomena by identifying recurrent factors and objectifying such behavior. The foundation of science is empirical measure. Through empirical practices, perceptions of singular truths can be enforced and socially agreed upon. These truths exist because of collectively accepted metrics. The dominating culture decides which metric is most appropriate, and society follows. But these metrics often enact a rigidity that overlooks opportune possibilities, as it detrimentally imposes previous understandings onto new and foreign frameworks. One of my favorite examples of this is the work of Octavia Butler. Where traditional scientists found alignment between slime mold behavior and concepts of hierarchy and patriarchy, Butler recognized slime mold as queer and non-conforming in its activity—truer to the organism’s nature and less dependent on accepted societal norms. [1]

Modernity of Intelligence

One form of negation through the modernity of intelligence is the societal progression from nondualism and mythologies that have been practiced for thousands of years, to contemporary forms of science and duality of the past few hundred years. Mythology takes each phenomena as a singular act to be defined individually, not comparatively within a formula of assumed normalities. Western contemporary science discredits the metaphysical, spiritual, and cosmic nature of natural world sensemaking that humanity has done since fruition, and replaced it with an empirical order that strives for the perception of factual and objective knowledge. This can also be found in the second negation I’ll include: non-linear time dimensions and their effects on sense-making.

It’s largely agreed that human life began on the continent of Africa, and that Egyptian hieroglyphic script was one of the first written languages. At its foundation, the structure of language is based on our perception of time. Ancient African and Eastern civilizations subscribed to a circular dimension of time, while Western civilizations developed and have at this point successfully and ubiquitously ingrained the notion of linear time dimensions into the contemporary psyche.

The reality of linear time seems unquestionable; most of us believe that our reasoning methods are based on past experiences, not the experiences we will have in the future. But our understanding of reality is determined by the values of our culture. To have a circular, even cosmic, understanding of time today as Ancient African, Eastern, and other civilizations had in the past would require a level of awareness that I posit predates the notion of Ego—the unconscious dichotomous delineation between the world and one’s sense of “self.” The contemporary world exists within the structure of linear time. Linear time also negates the credibility of “unknown” truths. In the contemporary Western world, we have only two options for understanding truth: the remembered past or the present moment, while the future is synonymous with unquantifiable knowledge. But in a society rooted in circular time dimensions, and a level of existentialism void of Ego, the “unknown” remains both valuable and credible. Language rooted in nonlinear time fosters alternate experiences of the world, presenting different value systems and epistemologies.

Singularity of Intelligence

Contemporary traditional pedagogy offers one framework to study the phenomena of the natural world. This framework is heavily influenced by the philosophical legacy of the Platonic Academy. Anthropologist Marimba Ani has developed a profound body of work in the form of a book called Yurugu, which challenges contemporary Western norms by providing alternate understandings of knowledge. Yurugu also subverts the practice of anthropology by studying Europeans through an African lens. The book starts with charts that Ani claims to be “intentionally aggressive polemic,” as she maps out how Europeans designed ways of being for “Mind Control for World Domination.” She argues that Plato’s development of epistemology transformed previously politicized mythologies into ideologies that now exist as objectively true in today’s societies. These ideologies include the following equations:

Thinking Being – Spiritual Being = “Knower”
Reality – Meaningfulness = “Fact”
Phenomena (Experience) – Interconnecting Context = “Object”
European Controlled Ego (controls emotional being; detaches itself from the senses; denies spirit (which it fears); dominates objects/the objectifies “other”/nature) + Detachment = “Refined Rational Thought” [2]

Due to Plato’s legacy, universities and colleges have been able to design theories of knowledge that singularly dictate contemporary ways of being and understanding. This design can be recognized through our metrics of intelligence. These contemporary metrics synonymize one’s familiarity and adequacy of Western cultural norms with intellect. They are ubiquitously presented as pedagogical benchmarks for all levels of education, from K-11 grade-level state-wide assessments, to college-level examinations like the S.A.T. and G.R.E. This can also be observed in our current forms of healthcare, which are Platonic as well. Physical care doctors, like dermatologists and physicians, aren’t trained to respond to the ways psychological trauma impacts our bodies, nor do they consult with our therapists or attempt to include aspects of our mental health in their analysis of our bodily functions. Yet, studies have increasingly shown how certain illnesses like cancer are social issues, finding strong correlations between stress, loneliness, depression, and cancer metastasis.[3] Included in Plato’s philosophies were the mind-body dualism, arguing that the mind and body were fundamentally different. The mind held logical reasoning and the body sensationally adept, which has directly influenced the inadequate modern practice of healthcare.

Returning to Sociability of Intelligence

Continuing the thread on the Platonic effect of society, it’s also crucial to study the work of Plato, himself. Foremost, the philosophical concepts that we’ve defined as Platonic were not Plato’s alone, but a synthesis of a variety of different scholarchs that succeeded Plato in leading the Academy. Secondly, language that exists across eras is naturally subject to misunderstandings due to translation. Unfortunately, these rhetorical fissures are often unnoticed without in depth scholarly research. This results in understandings misaligned with their source’s intentions. For example, in his translation of Plato’s The Republic, Allan Bloom emphasizes how different his style of translation is from previous translators of Plato’s work. Bloom’s translation is literally word for word Greek word to English word equivalent, with no attempt to modernize the original language. Bloom shares how when other translators have, for instance, rephrased Plato’s expression of “examining the beautiful and the good” with “discussing moral values,” it introduces concepts that were foreign to Plato himself. “Value,” a word of German origin and only popularized within the last century by sociologists, has a different connotation and is not equivalent to Plato’s original concept. But this is the nature of translation. This is the nature of deriving meaning of past concepts and attempting to place them into contemporary worlds. This becomes the application of antiquated rules and imposing them on different ways of contemporary being.

Culminating Effect of Western Intelligence Construction

The purpose of highlighting these foundations of contemporary Western intelligence—from the use of language as a communal vehicle of intelligence, the empirical practice of truth, and the discrediting of ancient ways of being, to the prioritization of singularity vs. plurality in definitions of epistemologies—is to emphasize their effects both societally and technologically. These pillars of western intelligence dictate our cultural values, rhetorical natures, metrics of respectability, and plenty more. All of which are encoded into the technological interfaces of AI. Society places significant authority on contemporary Western ways of thinking, often overlooking their defects and detrimental impacts to humanity and ecology. So it becomes particularly concerning when these errors are immortalized through technological advancements, specifically considering the currently emerging forms of AI  that are built on top of the foundational layer of language through the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model technique. As an artist, technologist, researcher, and cultural theorist who is actively using these emerging forms of AI, I recognize an interrogation of language and forms of knowledge as an important space of inquiry to better understand how these tools situate themselves in reinforcing or dismissing notions of truth and correction—and specifically whose notions and through which cultural lens.

B

C

Computational Anthropology

Back in October 2022, I started to use these foundational understandings of society and technology to undergird a practice I’ve been developing, Computational Anthropology. Through this practice I study how the machine (which I use synonymously for AI, computation, online society, etc.) understands us based on how we’ve presented ourselves, and designed it to understand us. What can we learn from our own metadata, online performance, and digital practices of language?

My initial studies began with re-contextualizing my own identity via a single image of myself and either with a characteristic attribute or with the name of a known figure. In images A and B, I uploaded a portrait of myself and prompted it with a generic characteristic (that either did or did not describe me) and observed how it would render me differently based on its understanding of language, or specifically the ways we as a society have used that language online in relation to imagery [4]. I observed what it retained of my original identity and what it altered. Depending on the prompt, it would age me, change the complexion of my skin, reveal teeth in my originally stoic smile, or even change both my race and gender to more closely align with the stereotypical image of a “programmer.” These alterations revealed societal tropes of what it means to be, for instance, “born in Miami” or “Afro-Latina,” both of which I am, but apparently the way I typically carry myself or phenotypically appear differs from revealed norms. In image C, it was fascinating to see how AI blended my identity with that of other currently or previously existing women, and to study what traits remained, but also which ones it took away. The joyfulness of Michelle Obama, Zendaya, and Josephine Baker were superimposed onto my calm exterior, and the middle part in my hair was ignored when combined with the likenesses of Oprah, Beyoncé, and Viola Davis. This recognition of identity bending and performance most dramatically revealed itself to me when I moved beyond short prompts of characteristics for my identity manipulation, and instead personalized a model that was rendered to my facial likeness and manipulated them using more elaborate prompts. These prompts reimagined, re-contextualized and, in a sense, corrected my way of being and presenting myself to the world. I saw myself dressed, posed, and oriented in ways that I had never witnessed before. I existed in locations I had never stepped foot in, and I lived a life I never previously imagined for myself.

Language, identity, and their encoded levels of power within technologies of today’s society have revealed to me a symbiosis that is often unquestioned and assumed in their enactments in our daily lives. To question the origins of objective vs. subjective, normal vs. abnormal, political vs. apolitical, is important. Our investment in artificial intelligence also needs to be met with a constant inquiry as to how the technology actually exists within our world and to be seen more for what it is at a core understanding. Is it truly intelligence, or is it the mimicking of a behavior, set of values, collection of norms that have now become automated. Societies that operate within cultural frameworks differing from that of contemporary globalized Western ways of being would inherently produce different automated forms of “intelligence,” because AI represents what is most natural to the programmer building the technologies, reenacting their ways of being. A single truth is not universal, or even global, as we often believe in the Western world. Globally, societies exist pluralistically. The hierarchies derived from today’s flattened understanding of Plato’s philosophies are not optimal foundations of all humanity’s ways of being, they simply reflect one truth, and in the case of Plato, for political purposes. While we continue to critique the outputs of AI and the ways in which the technology will influence society, we must also examine and redesign the inputs to make the technology best serve us in humane, ecological, and pluralistic forms. To continue interrogating when, where, and why truth and correction are applied, to examine the boundaries between them, or whether such a boundary should or should not exist at all. To be open, leave room for non-duality, for other forms of knowledge, and question all truths, reflect on all of their paradoxes, intelligently.

Ari Melenciano is an artist, technologist, researcher, and cultural theorist. Her art and research practice explores computational anthropology, societal subconscious intellect, the ethnographical morphing of artistic expression across diasporas, speculative design, the formation and embodiment of mythology and rituals, and the materialization of omni-scoped research in the form of quasi-pseudosciences. She currently teaches courses on emerging technologies like AI, art, and design at New York University. She is also the founder of Afrotectopia, a cultural institution that is imagining, researching, and building at the nexus of new media art, design, science, and technology through a Black and Afrocentric lens. She guest lectures at universities around the world. Previously, she was a technologist at Google’s Creative Lab and taught at The Pratt Institute, The New School, and Hunter College. Her work has been supported and published by Sundance, The New York Times, The Studio Museum of Harlem, MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, Forbes, The Ford Foundation, and more.