Human Movie was screened in 2025 and can now be watched on Vimeo. The film considers AI as a filter for noise and asks what is being modelled?
Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm
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Cybernetic Forests/Eryk Salvaggio
Cybernetic Forests—Sifting Through the Techno-Cultural Debris is Eryk Salvaggio’s newsletter. A researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence, Eryk has been published in journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy.
Reading “The Market in the Model”
Eryk Salvaggio offers a “very light gloss” of the paper, The Market in the Model, which extends dataset critique by examining the latent diffusion model’s internal mechanisms as a neural economy.
Thoughts on Hinton
If Geoffrey Hinton and others agree that the greatest danger in AI is its capacity to persuade, we need to develop more resistance to every claim it makes.
What Was ChatGPT?
Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history.
What Machines Don’t Know
Much of the most intense debate in AI defaults to “you don’t even understand the technology.” But I suspect the most significant distinction is not whether we understand how a model works, but in how we interpret what the structure is doing.
Is the Media Studies Cabal in the Room With Us Right Now?
A great deal of suffering arises when we act on our imaginations of the world, rather than working toward clarity. As such, it’s the role of those who care about a topic to articulate the contours of the space. AI is one such space, and debate, at the current moment, is pretty vigorous.
The Audience Makes the Story
This is a discussion between Camila Galaz, Emma Wiseman, and Eryk Salvaggio, collaborators behind an experimental workshop linking puppetry and generative AI.
Complete Accuracy Collapse
Reasoning models are part of a shift in strategy for AI companies as model developers turn to different architectures or strategies for how the models construct text. It also, some argue, allows for more complex problem solving.
The Decision Not to Decide
By saving time, AI means designers have the option not to think about parts of the process. The decision not to decide, paradoxically, requires enormous expertise. The cultivation of that expertise comes through the experience of making decisions.
Democracy & the AI Question
Remarks from an in-person debate, ‘L’IA en question, questions à l’IA’, a two-day event at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on May 24/25. The event focused on debates about the role of AI in contemporary society.
Human Noise, AI Filters: “Mr. Watson, Come Here.”
Eryk Salvaggio’s remarks from the Artificial Intelligence & Contemporary Creation Conference, May 24, 2025.
A Personalized Ecology of AI (What’s the environmental impact of AI?)
Salvaggio: “In London, the question was a bit more pointed: How do I justify using AI as an artist, knowing the technology’s environmental impact?”
Machines Cannot Feel or Think, but Humans Can, and Ought To
The recent re-emergence of chatter about whether AI “experiences the world” and therefore ought to have something akin to human rights. In the piece, Eryk Salvaggio argues that they don’t need them.
What Does It Mean to Use Generative AI?
Are pro- and anti-AI camps talking about the same thing when they say “useful”?
Possible Noise
HUMAN ITINERARY TOUR. More information, more noise. More noise, more freedom to choose. And then what? It’s the hope of the curators that this exhibition mirrors that process of sense-making: moving the visitor from overwhelm to detail, then allowing a greater view of the whole.
Signal to Noise (and Back Again)
Signal to Noise examines the history of noise in communication technologies. It includes switchboards for telephones, computers and desktops for the Internet, and the algorithmic restructuring of the social media feed. It is an examination of evolving definitions of noise, and the struggle to keep noise out.
DOGE and the United States of AI
Justin Hendrix in conversation with four individuals who are following DOGE closely: Eryk Salvaggio, Rebecca Williams, Emily Tavoulareas, and Matthew Kirschenbaum. Podcast & transcript. (Image from Salvaggio’s film “Human Movie: Meditations on a Compression Algorithm.”)
Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century
Gaining traction in the bleakest depths of 2020, Generative AI offered something more than just a tech product. It proposed a way of reimagining the future. Having lost all hope for a democratic process in which biopolitics, climate politics, racial politics and electoral politics were exhausting us all, we turned to a hype network.