My friend and colleague, the remarkable Tugrul Keskin has recently produced a very short reflection that is worth some consideration. With his permission I repost here:
The attached video of ByteDance’s (https://www.bytedance.com/en/) AI video generation model Seedance 2.0 (https://openart.ai/video/i2v/seedance-v1) signals a transformation that extends beyond a routine technological upgrade. Rather than merely exemplifying “technology with Chinese characteristics,” it points to the emergence of a new movie industry with Chinese characteristics, increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. When viewed through Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry, this development reflects an advanced phase of the rationalization and standardization of cultural production—now mediated by algorithms rather than traditional studios.
Walter Benjamin’s notion of art in the age of mechanical reproduction offers a complementary lens. AI-generated video further diminishes the uniqueness and “aura” of cultural artifacts by making high-quality visual production infinitely reproducible, editable, and scalable. As the video demonstrates, AI-driven filmmaking reorganizes creative labor and aesthetic processes within global technological systems that transcend national boundaries, even as they are embedded in China–US competition over AI leadership. Together, these perspectives suggest that contemporary AI innovations are accelerating long-term structural changes in the global political economy of culture. The broader implications—particularly for labor, authorship, and cultural value—are likely to become visible earlier than previously anticipated, potentially well before 2030.
In one sense the movement toward tech art represents a manifestation, in the sphere of cultural production, of innovation in the service of collective power. It fits nicely into China's 3rd Plenum high quality productivity within socialist modernization initiatives, but also those of the United States and Europe with respect to tech based dominance of production in all spheres of human activity. In this sense, one can understand Seedance 2.0 as the competitor and analogue to Open AI's Sora 2. Both efforts , and those lesser known efforts either being developed in the global informal sector or by "middle powers" as the Canadian Prime Minister calls them (see here), suggest that one has passed the point of no return in the production of producers of objects in all spheres of human consumption.
That opens the question raised, in another era of mechanical reproduction, by Benjamin--but perhaps changes its trajectories. Two brief points here. First Benjamin was worried about reproduction--the mimetic quality of something that was deliberately meant to copy to produce again something that had been undertaken before and then produced again. That touches not just on the mimetic, but also on the temporal--reproduction is a means of overcoming time by recapturing the essence of a thing or event in time in the present. It is also spatial in the sense that, at least with respect to reproduced objects--it is meant to have it occupy more than one space at a time. Yet the essence of the "problem" in the cultural sphere is the mimesis itself ("The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of
authenticity." Banjamin, p. 3) which can never be the same as the original.
But what happens when one moves from reproduction to displacement? That is Keskin's central point. Keskin focuses on the uniqueness of cultural actions/performances/artifacts, and thus the intimate connection with the essence of Benjamin's almost a century old worry/critique. That focus draws attention to the premise--which had been so fundamental to avoid conscious attention until recently--of the intimate connection between human production and the essential humanity of culture. One moves from human structures of cultural production built around (the sometimes constraining and always annoying) human institutions of power leaching onto and managing both production and the cognition of the value of production, to one in which what drives and produces cultural objects are coded programs that may be increasingly self-reflexive, even if the structures of power remain (somewhat) human. Thus the reference to a movie industry with Chinese characteristics (the same insight may apply to movie industries elsewhere with distinctive political-economic models).
Yet even with Seedance 2.0 and Sora 2, etc., the human remains in the loop--these are producers of culture (movies in this case) with human characteristics that are directed and the authority for the distribution of which remains firmly entrenched in human authority organs. The effects, though, as Keskin correctly notes, will be significant. While the human may well remain in the center, the role of humanity in the production of cultural objects will change, and perhaps dramatically changing the forms of production, its economics, and of course, its consequential power relationships. Much has been written about this, but it is especially important, and powerful, in cultures which have invested significant resources in the mechanics of celebrity and celebrity culture, as well as in its management--with national characteristics. Yet it may be important to note that like all things, there is no binary here--one encounters, at least at the beginning, a sort of hybridity that my itself produce cultural innovation (see, e.g., Movies you didn’t know used AI!).
Keskin is correct in this view, and in the process invites one to reflect further. Is it possible to distinguish between reproduced cultural objects and cultural objects that displace the human not at the center but as the direct source of creation? One the one hand, it may be worth distinguishing between mechanical reproduction and AI or tech based production that displaces the human as the direct creator of the cultural object/performance etc. Indeed, one may understand these new technologies as cultural production n two levels--first at the level of the coding of the structures of production (its mechanics) and two in the form of the cultural objects produced from within it. Two thoughts may follow from that. The first is that what displacement produces is a distance between the creation and its human input. That is that Seedance and Sora 2 are still means of human cultural production, but now that production is in direct int he sense that its mechanics are not directly the product of human intervention. The second is that one now has to consider that it means for humans to engage in cultural production--and certainly in the production of "art". If displacement makes the resulting production inhuman then one might be required to consider the relationship of tech based mechanisms, including self reflexive and auto generating intelligence to the human (see here).
The broader implications, as Keskin correctly notes, remains. Like the printing press, or the plow, etc., but perhaps at a faster rate, these tech based transformations will produce substantial changes in the organizaiton and undertaking, in the valuation, of human activity within their collectives. It will also put pressure on political-economic models to manage their theoretics to suit the times, or to become irrelevant. People ave been debating this for decades--but perhaps it may be time to shift the analytics from its framing in and through the Industrial Revolution of the 18th through 20th century, and understand that the current focus on innovation may require some adjustment to the way in which the human approaches their relationship to themselves, their tools, and the objects around which they understand themselves as themselves and in relation to the world. . . . Or, as Benjamin suggested as the essence of reproduction, to choose to reproduce culture and cultural reproduction itself as and at some ideal point sometime back in time. That has also been done before; and often within the great cultural civilizations. Nonetheless its success, as Benjamin suggested, is to to travel back to the original but in the replication to create something new in its shadow That has all the makings of a silver rather than a golden age.
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