Since 2022, when the use of text and image generation with artificial intelligence became widespread use, the discourse around these tools has been either a blind faith in it or apocalyptic criticism—not to mention the ethical concerns around the perpetuation of racist bias and potential safety risks associated with developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI). To clearly state our point of view, we stand with the healthy skeptics.
The purpose of this magazine is to counter-balance techno-determinist narratives around art and culture—a response to the belief that hoarding the work of artists within a database that a few pretend to exploit is a way to “democratize” art. It would seem that AI companies do not to like adhering to copyright laws that protect artists and creators. Just recently, court documents showed that Anthropic had spent millions of dollars to physically scan and destroy print books to build Claude.
Automation of culture, arts and creativity should be rejected. Techno-deterministic biases try to deceive us into believing that a future where AI is the norm is just the way of progress and will happen inevitably, apparently at the cost of true human connection, emotion, and expression; that the norm for art are generic AI images, that the norm for literature and writing are mediocre AI prompt outputs.
AI tools cannot at this point replace expert creators for a couple reasons. The expert creator trains for years, even a lifetime, to master the process of iterating and solving problems through craft, which is in itself a rather chaotic process. Chaos in the creative process allows surprises and mistakes to happen. In the case of an artwork, a design project, a movie, this means arriving at solutions or final forms that are unexpected, and would not have come to be even if planned for. AI generated text or images lack this expert iteration and selection process; all these tools can really do depend from the data they get information from, incapable of spontaneous idea addition, yuxtaposition, substraction or correlation. In this sense, AI content is not actual creative thinking but an automated process in which elements are remixed until one version is close enough to the desired output.
The essence of creativity relies on the meditated balance of soul, form and emotion, something that cannot and should not be reduced to machine hallucinations for profit. We believe that the value of creativity lies in the sense of serendipity, of chaos that inhabits craft. There is no one single factor that can determine the creation of futures, however, engagement with images, notions and words help shape mindsets towards what is yet to come. Human creativity brings into existence stories that allow mistakes and surprises to happen, which in turn enable us to re-discover social structures and realities. We should allow that to be lost for automated convenience.
A magazine is by no means the solution to a foreclosed future. Nonetheless, by orbiting towards alternative narratives, choosing human-curated content, telling the stories of creators outside the anglo-sphere and stubbornly insisting on painting a different picture of the present, we challenge the algorithmic aesthetic. We stand against automation by default. Orbita started as an idea to counter-balance false optimism around technology and the capitalistic idea that culture exists for the sole purpose of being consumed rather than experienced. In further developing the concept of why this magazine should exist, we have adjusted this idea. Orbita is a counter-balance, but it is most importantly a hopeful guess at the future.