A generative adversarial neural net is a model in machine learning that can generate new images based on a dataset. Perverse Affordances begin with one was trained on 10000 screenshots of global social media platforms and asked to dream new screenshots, and also encompasses an interactive online sketch based on these images. In some ways, it is a new social media network made in collaboration with this algorithm.

The processes by which we identify and imagine images happens on a level of our awareness that is, at least most of the time, invisible and pre-conscious. In contract to this familiar biological process, artificial intelligence is profoundly alien – visible. Watching the images created by generative adversarial neural nets evolve gives a rare opportunity to see “seeing” itself.

This piece turns the alien eye of machine learning on the interfaces that mediate our online lives. Like seeing itself, these interfaces are ubiquitous enough to have become invisible, and when using them we perceive them only as proxy for one another. But of course, this belies their constructedness. Interfaces are not transparent. They cannot give us pure proxies to other humans. What about a network allows us to confidently say it is social?

Much like a perverse incentive, which is emergent behavior within a system that contradicts the intentions of its designers, Perverse affordances invites us to consider interfaces as systems that have been designed – and the assumptions they contain or conversely do not contain, about the humanity of their users.

生成對抗神經網絡是一個可以根據數據集而衍生新的圖像的機械學習模型。作品《負擔不良》開始於在一萬個全球社交媒體平台的屏幕截圖上「學習」並生產出新的截圖，並包括根據這些圖像而同時生產的互動在線草圖。在某方面來說，這是一個與數字運算合作而生產的新社交媒體網絡。

我們人類在識別和想像圖像的過程通常發生在我們的意識之上，是不可見的，也是不可預料的；而在這類同的生物過程中，人工智能是完全的異種，一切都是可見的。觀看以生成對抗神經網絡所創的圖像之時，提供了一個難能可貴的機會去看見「看見」本身。

這件作品把機械學習中的奇異點轉化成我們線上生活的介面；就像「看見」的本身，這些介面無處不在，無容忽視，而當我們使用它們時我們只會把它們視為彼此的「代理」(proxy)。但這個理所當然地掩蓋了它的構造，而介面是不可能透明的。它們不可能提供單純的「代理」(proxy)給其他人，那麼一個網絡如何容許我們可以自信地稱呼它為「社交」的？

就像一個不正當的誘因，即是在一個系統裡與設計者反動的新興行為；作品讓觀眾去思考把介面變成已設計完好系統的可能性，以及它們包含或相反地不被包含用家人性化的假設。

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