Flusserstudies.net

In Dialog With the Black Box: Poetic Resistance to AI’s Algorithmic Homogenization Through Translation

Rafael BrescianiGraziele Lautenschlaeger

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Some scholars believe that it is a speculative bubble that will soon burst, but the consequences of this period will remain. This paper analyzes this phenomenon through the lenses of Vilém Flusser’s work, in the search for a better understanding of these consequences in our processes of signifying and experiencing the world. Framing AI algorithms as agents of technological contamination over human semiosis, we analyse how the Machine Learning (ML) technique reduce linguistic and perceptual reality to vector embeddings in latent space, enacting a violent abstraction that flattens experience and accelerates cognitive overload. The chain of mathematical and statistical operations needed to train and operate ML algorithms echoes Flusser's reflections on how language and translations work, enabling us to create a dialectical bridge between both visions of the critique of technology. Once the bridge is built, the essay traces parallels between Flusser's theory of translation as ontological impossibility across linguistic cosmoses and algorithmic "similarity" mappings (embeddings) in multimodal generation, highlighting standardization and an impoverished experience, as anticipated by Franco Berardi and Arlindo Machado. Examining AI slop, model collapse, and programmed totalitarianism, we aim to build a reflection about the exclusion of human agency in signification processes of reality, where apparatuses predetermine responses and functionaries become excluded. In this context, Flusser’s practice of translation—where meaning jumps from one cosmos to the other, forcing the intellect to surpass the boundaries of language—is considered an act of creation. The essay brings elements of Flusser’s attention to the aesthetical experience of this practice, which puts it in constant friction with the apparatus of Language to resist uncritical automation. This practice shows us a pragmatic but propositive methodology of counterattacking from inside the apparatus against machinic stereotyping to reclaim dialogical semiosis from computational domination through aesthetic experience.