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
Hardware (the GPU and how to access it through a network)
Artbot demo (pre-recorded)
Currencies ("Kudos" in Stable Horde)
The funding mechanism of open infrastructures imposes limits to their development. As the material base is mutually shared by the contributors, the Horde as a whole considerably reduces its costs. In this manner, it is able to operate with minimal funding such as an occasional grant. Its economical structure is further extended by an internal currency. The Horde uses a system of incentives that takes the form of Kudos (DB0 2022a) rewarding those who dedicate computer time to the project by giving them priority in the queue and the means to generate their own images faster. Importantly, Kudos are also conceived as a mechanism against appropriation. If someone builds a commercial interface on top of AI Horde, the commercial app will not be able to siphon all resources for its purpose. The more it will use the Horde without giving back, the slower the network will respond to its queries. Unless the commercial actor gives computer time to the Horde, thereby feeding back into the project.
A partnership with LAION for the production of better algorithmic aesthetic predictors (Thoukydidis and hlky 2023). The quality of a predictor is key to image generators as their value lies in their ability to provide users with environments to generate images that correspond to their taste. Producing good aesthetic predictors is a complicated task. In general, predictors are trained on large collections of images where microworkers rank them according to a set of aesthetic criteria. Even if the click workers are badly compensated, the annotation of large data collection remains costly. And the annotators often struggle with the aesthetic criteria they have to apply. Therefore, communities of users who are engaged in the production of images are highly valued by engineers both for their expertise and their interest in getting predictors that reflect their taste. AI Horde’s partnership with LAION can be understood as a convergence of interests. Horde users evaluate images produced by Stable Diffusion models and rank them in order of preference. And LAION is responsible to turn these human judgements into data to feed aesthetic predictors. Further, to encourage participation, AI Horde distributes Kudos to those providing such ratings. In accordance, users who rate images have priority access to the Horde’s queue. And Stability occasionnally donates access to its GPUs to the Horde in exchange.
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 – targeted image generation, 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.
Democratizing AI?
The question of 'autonomy' and why 'infrastructures' are not trivial
The digital (AI) imaginary - in Silicon Valley design
Abandoning the marvels of the digital future:
Why 'disconnecting', 'decentralising' and 'autonomy'?
Gregory Ulmer: (1991) the new interfaction/interface industry is a direct continuation of Hollywood cinema’s drive for “occultation of the production process in favour of a consumption of the product as if it were ‘natural’ […]. The ‘twin peaks’ of American ideology – realism and individualism – are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution),”
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s critique of Silicon Valley: “The Californian Ideology” (1995) 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.”
Fed Turner, the Texan Ideology
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
