K Allado-McDowell

K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with what they refer to as “neural media” began a decade ago with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network.

Before the creation of “trippysquirrel.jpeg” within Google, convolutional neural networks had previously been used primarily as tools for classifying: taking an input like an image and passing it through a set of hidden layers that perform mathematical operations on it, eventually comparing it to a pre-set distribution of classes. 

What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the role of the neural network: transforming it into a tool for the generation of material rather than the classification. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence.

Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, K Allado-McDowell sees our culture as one erupting into a new age of creative practice: one of “neural media.” In their view, we are in the early days of a great technological and artistic shift flowering out of prior modes of broadcast and network culture — a shift fueled by new tools and phenomena like AI and generative media.

When Allado-McDowell refers to “neural media,” they refer not just to generative AI but all forms of media based around networks of neurons (or mathematical abstractions modeling them, in the case of AI). As we engage with neural media, we interface not just with each individual node or neuron within the net, but the layers of meaning embedded in the connections between those points. In our encounter with artificial neural networks, we find ourselves — for brains, too, are neural media — the first of their kind, but not the last. 

Could we have an embedding space that understood the Earth better and reflected us within that? Would that give us a different kind of embedded identity and possibility for what AI could become?

Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new paradigm of media. Inspired by the work of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Fred Turner, Allado-McDowell’s concept of “neural media” explores how creative interactions between human and non-human intelligences will transform both. We reshape AI in our image, but AI shapes us in turn. 

In their Long Now Talk, Allado-McDowell embarked upon a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media, telling a story that involved statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. 

Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell noted that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.   

Where to go next

• Read K Allado-McDowell’s essays on Designing Neural Media and Neural Interpellation in Gropius Bau.
• In MoMA’s Magazine, K Allado-McDowell explores the potential of AI as a poison — one that can be used to harm or to heal.
• Watch K Allado-McDowell’s TED talk on how Our Creative Relationship With AI Is Just Beginning.
• Watch Fred Turner's Long Now Talk on Technology & Counterculture from World War II to Today
• Neural Media is one of the three core frames through which Long Now Talks seek to understand our world in the long view. For more on these frames, read Long Now Board President Patrick Dowd’s introductory essay on Reframing the Future.