Colloquium on "Objects of Interest and Necessity" – HIAS

Nicolas Malevé (Sciences Po, Paris) & Christian Ulirk Andersen (Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies)

Hamburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Nov 25, 2025

AGENDA

1) Introducing AI imaging (the interface Draw Things)

2) Hardware (the GPU and how to access it through a network)

3) Currencies ("Kudos" in Stable Horde)

4) Organisations of AI imaging (Hugging Face, in particular)

5) The question of 'autonomy' and why 'infrastructures' are not trivial.

Model: 8-10 minute short presentations, followed up by one or two questions.

"Draw Things": Introducing AI imaging

Draw Things" is a free, AI-assisted image generation app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that uses Stable Diffusion to turn text prompts and images into art. It is known for being able to run offline on devices for privacy

It includes a extensive control over many Stable Diffusion settings ("basic" and "advanced") and variety of features for professional-level image generation and editing - as opposed to the simple presets of e.g. DALL-E (OpenAI)

EXAMPLE prompts:

"A highly detailed illustration of the 2008 version of Hulk, standing in a dynamic pose, muscles exaggerated and glowing green skin, wearing torn purple pants and hugging a teddy bear in his arms. The background is a dramatic cityscape with smoke and debris, emphasizing chaos and strength. The art style is cinematic, with realistic lighting and shadows, smooth brush strokes inspired by Pixar's aesthetics for animated movies. Ultra-realistic textures, sharp details, and vibrant colors."

"The 2008 version of Hulk in a calm, contemplative standing pose in a garden landscape, wearing a long green sleeve-less dress. Warm orange and purple hues in the sky, soft lighting, and a serene atmosphere. Hulk’s expression is thoughtful, with detailed facial features and realistic textures. The art style is cinematic, with realistic lighting and shadows, smooth brush strokes inspired by Pixar's aesthetics for animated movies. Ultra-realistic textures, sharp details, and vibrant colors."

Negative prompt: blurry, low resolution, extra limbs, distorted anatomy, watermark, text, logo, bad proportions, unrealistic lighting, harsh shadows.

Base model: SDXL Base (v.1.0) // good for anything – large scale, automated

LoRA: animte/pixar-sdxl-lora // 'tweaking' the base model - small scale, community made

Trigger word: Pixarrrable

LoRA "The Incredible Hulk (2008)." By the user 'BigHeadTF'

Screengrab of the LoRA page on the civit.ai platform. Civitai.com is a platform for images and models (LoRAs) and features a mix of fan-fiction, role-playing game characters and stereotypical (incel-like) gender representations.

What we have seen is what we call the "pixel space" of AI imaging. There is much more to AI than just the 'algorithms' and statistical "diffusion" models that generate the images.

Hardware (the GPU and how to access it through a network)

// AI horde - edge AI vs commons, common property / Nicolas

Currencies ("Kudos" in Stable Horde)

/ Nicolas

Hugging Face: The organisations of AI imaging

Where is the model?

https://huggingface.co/animte/pixar-sdxl-lora (the LoRA used before)

Hugging Face is imply put, a collaborative hub for AI development – not specifically targeted at AI image (and other) creation (including speech synthesis, text-to-video. image-to-video, image-to-3D, and much more).

It attracts amateur developers who use the platform to experiment with AI models, as well as professionals who use the expertise of the company or take the platform as an outset for entrepreneurship.

Screenshot of huggingface.co, 2017. Made by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. The company was entirely focused on building a new chatbot app for teenagers. Received their first round of investment of $1,2 million in 2017.In 2021 they received a $40 million investment to develop its "open source library for natural language processing (NLP) technologies."

Screenshot of huggingface.co, 2025. There were (in 2021) 10,000 forks (i.e., branches of development projects) and around 5,000 companies using Hugging Face in one way or another, including Microsoft with its search engine Bing. I.e., the company has moved from providing a service (a chatbot) to becoming a major (if not the) platform for AI development – for speech synthesis, text-to-video. image-to-video, image-to-3D and much more.

Huggingface' community section reveals how users are predominantly with high developer expertise and knowledge of how AI models work, and how to employ or experiment with them. Mainstream platforms offer very few parameters for experimentation - whereas Hugging Face enables a richness. An intrinsic part of the delinking from commercial platforms may be attached to a fascination of settings and advanced configurations.

Democratizing AI?

By making AI models, datasets and also processing power widely available, it can be labelled as an attempt to democratise AI and delink from the key commercial platforms, yet at the same time Hugging Face is deeply intertwined with numerous commercial interests. Hugging Face is not only for amateur developers. On the platform one also finds an 'Enterprise Hub' where it offers, for instance, advanced computing at higher scale with a more dedicated hardware setup and 'Priority Support'. For this more commercial use, access is typically more restricted. This may also explain the investment of e.g. Meta in the company (as en entrepreneur hub). It is suspended between more autonomous and peer-based communities of practice, and a need for more 'client-server' relations in model training, which generally is dependent on 'heavy' resources (stacks of GPUs) and specialised expertise - perhaps explaining the investment by Amazon Web Services. Other investors includeGoogle, Intel, IBM, and NVIDIA.

A diagram by the European Business review representing Hugging Face business model. The excessive (and growing) market value of Hugging Face reflects, in essence, the high degree of expertise that has accumulated within a company that consistently has sought to accommodate a cultural community, but also a business and enterprise plane of AI. Managing an infrastructure of both hardware and software for AI models at this large scale is a highly sought expertise.

The question of 'autonomy' and why 'infrastructures' are not trivial

The digital (AI) imaginary - in Silicon Valley design

Cover of book

Microsoft's vision of a digital future. A world where the digital (AI) surrounds us, we immerse ourselves, experiential AI - very electric blue vision.

Abandoning the marvels of the digital future:

Why 'disconnecting', 'decentralising' and 'autonomy'?

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s critique of Silicon Valley: “The Californian Ideology” is combining libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm .

“Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this Utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness toward – and dependence on – the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born.”

A) A dissatisfaction with the content and experience

B) A (Marxist) dissatisfaction with the ideological construct (i.e., the separation of labor from capital + society's self-creation independent of capitalist control)

Dependencies and chosen dependencies

+++++++++++

Themes (suggestions):

Intro to our project - "autonomy" and "decentralisation" of AI (and other knowledge infrastructures)

How to imagine with objects

Maps and cartography

Pixel Space: Interfaces to AI imaging

Pixel Space: Visual cultures of AI imaging (where do images come from - where do the go?)

Latent Space: LAION, Models, LoRAs (how are images collected and what happens to them?)

The material plane: The infrastructures of GPUs - earning and spending currency.

The organisations involved: LAION, Hugging Face, etc. – the grey zones of autonomy