Performative Cruelty

Performative Cruelty (The "Strategic Bully" Reflex) Influenced by the global rise of "Trumpian" politics and the far-right, this trait is characterized by the use of aggression and demeaning behavior as a primary tool for social and political dominance. In this mindset, bullying is seen as a deliberate display of strength. On a global scale, this manifests as a rejection of empathy in favor of "owning" opponents, where the goal is to humiliate and exclude rather than to persuade. SEVEN CONTEMPORARY TRAITS As with his previous works, Tresset continues to explore traditional themes in Western culture. In this series Tresset uses AI agents to look at us and describe seven traits that characterise our contemporary society. Here the computational models trained on our culture are used as naive outsiders using the same mechanisms as in Voltaire’s Candide. This series of animated and still images depict fables about our traits and are produced through a collaboration between two AI agents: a storyteller and an artist. The animation process unfolds on a single surface, using a cycle of drawing, erasing, wiping, and overdrawing to depict the passage of time, a technique Tresset compares to the moving drawings of William Kentridge. Rather than forcing a style onto the agent, the artist equipped it with only simple tools: lines, circles, splines, hatchings and scribbles. Although these multimodal models have a vast knowledge of human culture they do not have a visual perception or imagination, their understanding of the world remains semantic and statistical. Tresset observes that when the agent constructs an image, it is translating data tokens based on descriptions rather than recalling a visual memory. This computational approach strips away human emotional influence, resulting in a visual language that feels naive, cryptic, and akin to Art Brut. While human visual memory is influenced by emotions by psychology, the AI’s memory is probabilistic, causing the stories and compositions to develop in strange directions that diverge from what we would choose. The system used to produce this body of work is based on the research Tresset conducted as part of the EACVA project: where Markus Wulfmeier from DeepMind served as an advisor. The framework Tresset developed incorporates embodiment across various mediums, driving robotic installations as well as producing digital works, sculptures, and paintings. This research is a continuation of the concepts originally described in his paper "Artistically Skilled Embodied Agents," published in the proceedings of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) in 2014.