Counterfeit Poast
Jon Rafman
You have thousands of pictures, texts, and archived posts on your phone. But how often do you actually revisit them? How many are gathering dust and digital cobwebs? What is the point of remembering anything at all, when we can always check for digital traces of what happened––and most of the time, remembering is painful.
Take a moment to exit your usual filter bubble and algorithmic echo chamber to enter the universe of Counterfeit Poast, a series of character studies by Jon Rafman loosely inspired by reddit copypasta. We know that audiences (and bot repost accounts) for such confessional poasts don’t seem to care whether the stories they encounter are AI simulacrum or not. In a post-truth world, what is the point of knowing what actually happened––if your boyfriend actually ran over your dog or not, if it’s your wife or a Federal Agent Spy who wants to have sex with you, if it’s right or wrong to eat dogs?
Regardless of the fact that these characters and narratives are AI generated, their stories are poignant because nothing can take away the meaning we have imbued words with. Just as the content created by AI is determined by the limitations of the algorithms whose training material is dictated by our social mores, our responses and ability to find meaning in this content is similarly subject to biological and social constraints. So is the AI just another mirror of us, or are we of it?
Read Rafman’s reflection on the value of AI-generated art, Ebrah K'dabri as an accompanying text HERE.