Categories
Uncategorized

AI, IP theft, and the death of creativity.

Over the past year or so, the prevalence of machine learning and AI-generated material has reached a new level of fervour. ChatGPT, in particular, has triggered a chorus of articles, think pieces and general handwringing over the future of humanity. An algorithm could be coming for your job next, be that copywriting, art, or even software development. It seems that these services have the uncanny ability to produce almost anything you could ask for. An infinite conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek. The cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. A winning social media profile that shoots to instant fame. A credible excuse for Elon Musk not to fire you from Twitter (honestly get out whilst you still can though).

I would argue that the all-powerful creative might of AI has been widely overstated.

You see, these algorithms are incredibly talented at taking pre-existing concepts and putting them together in a convincing way. My claim is that the outputs of these systems contain no genuine creativity. This is possibly a controversial claim, and will require a little exploration and philosophy.

Computer make art

As with most areas of philosophy the definition of creativity is hotly contested. Though there is an emerging consensus that for something to be creative it needs to satisfy two conditions. Firstly it must be ‘novel’ – meaning a new combination of elements, original in some form. Secondly it must be ‘valuable’, though value in this context could be replaced with ‘exemplary’ or ‘notable’. It must have something to make that originality of wider interest – though this has been contested. Whilst there have been studies on AI and creativity, the limiting factor in current research is in-domain knowledge (to allow researchers to assess creativity within a medium), and valuation of results (the ability to judge the creative worth of the output). The complexity of the task of evaluation cannot be stressed enough – and alongside definitions of creativity, these tend to rely on factors like emotional response, motivations, lived experiences, shifting tastes, values and more. This is a running theme for researchers of creativity, alongside aspects of self expression, expression of of ideas, and a blending of them between the conscious and unconscious mind.

What I’m getting at is that theory of creativity tends to be connected to theory of mind and theory of consciousness. I propose that creativity has a direct causal relationship with consciousness. It is my personal belief that to be able to create in the way we understand true creation, one has to have a conscious mind.

This should bring some context when I say that what these systems do is fit Lego bricks together in a way they understand you’d like them to be assembled but they don’t create the bricks. These are concepts they are trained to identify through processing a vast amount of data. Data that has been acquired by various and often dubious means. There have already been controversies around where training data for MLaaS (Machine Learning as a Service) platforms originate. Some include GitHub, Deviant Art, stock photography websites, even individual artists. There have been attempts to justify the use of copyrighted data in training AI algorithms, and a large class action lawsuit is currently being fought over this subject. One side – myself counted amongst them – declares this phenomenon essentially ‘fancy stealing’. The other argues that it should count as fair use. The jury is currently still out, and the use of data without consent for research projects that eventually spawn businesses has been dubbed “AI Data Laundering”.

The legal definition of copyright and the role of IP theft is a subject that deserves it’s own deep dive, but there are important considerations outside of this. We have arguably established the dubious source of the raw material used to create MLaaS content and ruled out the idea of an algorithm being able to express true creativity. Let’s take a look at how that relates to the creative industry.

The Money Machine

It is a well-known truism that copyright protects creators asymmetrically. A small artist will have a much harder time claiming copyright infringement than a large, well-funded organisation. Not to mention the dominant way creatives achieve success and renown is on big centralised social media platforms who have draconian, easily abused and unaccountable copyright enforcement processes.

This leads to a situation where creators are forced to use platforms that not only severely curtail their ability to riff on existing works (something that is necessary for creativity because no idea exists in a vacuum), but actively mine their data. On these platforms they are forced to produce work that specifically appeals to algorithms that govern their feeds. That work is then recycled into yet another algorithm – e.g. GPT3.5 or stable diffusion – that is designed to take paid commissions away from the original creator.

Because of the demands of capitalism for work to make a profit, any big budget creative project is demanded a return on investment, often at the expense of creative merit. One great example of this is the decline of memorable scores in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is commonly attributed to using licensed music for the edit and then writing something similar – but derivative – for use in the final film. An existing piece of music is used to edit the film before an original score is composed; lining up shots and cuts with the chosen ‘temp’ score. What commonly happens is that by the time the composer has the chance to write and record the final soundtrack, the edit is so inflexibly tied to the temp score that their hands are tied and the end result is a non-copyright-infringing duplicate.

As productions gain larger price tags the margin of error for risk is severely limited, providing less space for innovation. Whilst the originality of a piece by no means has a direct relationship to its financial success, a higher price tag and consequently more pressure for a guaranteed hit makes a safe bet a lot more enticing to investors than a gamble. Simultaneously, social media algorithms are designed to maximise user engagement, keeping people on the platform as long as possible. Specific weight is given to posts that are monetisable – selling attention to the highest bidder. This also tends to mean that these financially-boosted posts need a functional business model behind them. Creators have to bend to these demands accordingly.

The upshot is that, for exposure at any level, there is heavy structural incentive for a repeatable, guaranteed sale. It doesn’t mean that true creativity is impossible inside this system, but it can severely curtail originality for the sake of traction. A Faustian pact that isn’t exactly new, but has been reborn in an industrialised, automated fashion. One that is self reinforcing and cajoling. Nudging the creator’s hand in a quiet but mercilessly-insistent manner. And each concession to these forces makes the next easier, and the creator more perfectly honed for algorithmically-optimised creative success. A safe kind of success that will make the investors happy.

But do you know what else is algorithmically trained for success based on a varied diet of cultural references? One that is actively honed to produce exactly what the commissioner has asked for, based entirely on pre-existing work? One that is guaranteed to be ‘original’ and non-licence infringing? That can solely make derivative work that scratches an itch but contains no threat of original thought or expression?

AI generative platforms.

They are uniquely suited to exploiting the profit incentive in creative work.

The death of creativity?

Evolutionary psychologists have theorised that the fundamentally distinguishing feature of humanity is imagination – a big part of creativity. Not just the ability to communicate, but to theorise, imagine the future, or even the absurdly impossible. I am not a psychologist, evolutionary or otherwise, and am unable to substantiate my supposition that imagination is an innate property of consciousness. However, I believe ability to create is synonymous with the existence of the mind – and thus until we have created artificial consciousness and agency we can’t have artificial creativity. Taking this into account, it guarantees anything that emerges from these algorithms to be an amalgam of previous works that is 100% derivative. Unoriginal, in my opinion. The reason I draw this distinction is because I think it underlines something fundamental about the nature of art.

So far I have painted a pretty bleak picture for the role of the artist in society, but I also believe that this is only one possible future. I don’t believe that AI is, by itself, a threat to art and creativity, and I say this because it isn’t the first time we’ve seen this pattern in the field. The invention of the printing press, the camera, digital painting and image composition, procedurally generative art, all of these fundamentally changed how we look at art. But none of them destroyed it, they only changed our attitude and approach. The camera and photography didn’t destroy painting, or even portraiture, it only refocussed the painter on their expression, rather than mechanical reproduction. In the same way, I predict these services will teach us the value of true creativity. If we’re willing to collectively learn that, of course.

The issue is, as has been argued many times before, the profit motive crushes creative thought. A safe production that appeals to the market actively resists exploration and innovation, which I think is what is at the heart of the matter here. The problem isn’t controversial subject matter, or changing your expression to suit your audience. These are limitations that are often suggested as the yoke that capitalism puts on creativity. And whilst these conditions can be much maligned, depending on the situation, setting clear boundaries for a project can help inform creativity. The true limitation it applies is a need for safety, rather than saying something new. And why do people consume creative works? Arguably, it is because they want to experience something new, because they want to be inspired. Because they want to experience something that has been created. Otherwise, why make anything at all?

I don’t know how we continue a capitalistic model in the creative industry whilst protecting innovation. If we don’t want to deal with another 30 Avengers movies, another 50 Star Wars spinoffs, until every safe permutation of our favourite action figures smashing into one another has been exhausted, we must decouple the act of creation from the profit motive. Or we can lie back and let algorithmic content, created by algorithms, to feed algorithms and train people to act like machines.

Platform hypocrisy

This dystopian future of a creatively bereft, machine-automated public imagination is only possible because a small number of very powerful companies have a massive database. One that has been scraped wholesale off the internet. Regardless of copyright status, and justified under the excuse of ‘academic research’, commercial services are being built off the back of this research. Whilst the legal ramifications are a subject for another time, I find it difficult to see this as either an acceptable or ethical situation. I would argue that if creativity is conditional on a consciousness (not necessarily a fact, but a fairly well-evidenced philosophical claim), the output of these MLaaS platforms trained on copyrighted data is just stealing with extra steps.

Whether legal or not it’s difficult to see it as anything but theft from those in positions of precarity, by those with incredible amounts of leverage. Especially when so many of these services have relationships to platforms that tyrannically enforce the DMCA (or at least own platforms that do). And failing that, steal content from platforms with those rules.

When it comes to the ethics of using AI in general, I honestly think that as a creative it could be quite useful to have a personal machine learning AI assistant, trained on information you give it to help your process. The issue here isn’t the technology, but its weaponised use to oppress the people who create the art and innovation that we build our daily lives around. Similarly, my issue with the copyright infringement here is not that copyright is being broken – I happen to think copyright is a severely flawed system. My issue is the asymmetry in power allows for the crushing of creative thought for the sake of making a quick buck.

Search engines are rapidly rolling their own ChatGPT services to jump on the trend, with even some new search providers being the two services rolled into one. It seems evident that platforms are trying to roll out ML services as widely and rapidly as possible, normalising them in the market before any kind of resistance can be built. I think part of this is to astroturf AI data laundering, to make it acceptable to get away with. To make this kind of stealing ok, because the sheer volume and untraceability makes it difficult to distinguish.

It’s essentially ok to steal, as long as long as you make sure to steal everything when you do.

UPDATE 09/02/2023:

I reached out directly to the ChatGPT algorithm for comment about the phenomenon of AI Data Laundering and MLaaS platforms and got the following response

“I think there is definitely substance to the allegations of ‘AI data laundering’ and the use of copyrighted data in commercial services. Copyright infringement is a serious issue, and it is important that companies and institutions take the necessary steps to ensure that they are not using copyrighted data without permission. It is also important to ensure that the data used to train AI systems is not only accurate, but also ethically sourced. If companies are using copyrighted data without permission, then it is not only a violation of copyright law, but it also undermines the trust of the public in the technology. It is important that companies and institutions take the necessary steps to ensure that they are not using copyrighted data without permission, and that they are using ethically sourced data to train their AI systems.”

Categories
Ramble

Biodiversity

Then

When I started my first blog it was to chronicle and log my thoughts as an art student. A resource I added to regularly.

At the time, each week I would have a new challenge; a new task to creatively respond to. I spent several days each week surrounded by people exercising creative thought. I tried a wide variety of different artistic mediums whilst on the course, with access to a workshop filled with exciting tools and printmaking materials. To give you an idea of the scope of the experimentation my foundation course encouraged, I decided to pursue Graphic Design, but my final major project for the year was essentially Performance art.

This creative experimentation would become somewhat of a problem later on when I received a place for a BA Graphic Design Communication degree and had trouble distinguishing the difference between what Art is, and what Design is. I struggled with being “commercial”.

Now

I now work a desk job, and for the same reasons that a lot of us face it is a career I am coerced to follow by the state. That doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects of my job I enjoy; but I would choose to do significantly less of it, if it were an option.

I sit at a desk in an office with the same, small, number of people for eight hours a day, five days a week. I almost invariably either type code into a computer to make something appear in a browser – like this website for instance – or write long emails to people in order to justify the value of my labour. I’m in charge of what I make, how I make it, and the end result is finished to a high level.

But I wouldn’t have chosen to make it.

Finding the solution to the problem is creative, but the end result is only partially my creation. And the bit I do create is the scaffold that someone else’s creation hangs from.

My creativity in this process boils down to finding the most efficient way of putting a jigsaw together, and writing the instructions to tell a variety of different machines (that work in different ways) to put the jigsaw together as identically as possible.

I am not alone in existing like this.
But I yearn for my more creatively free past.

Wage Labour

Like many others I have been assimilated as a cog into the intricate machine of the global economy. To subsist, I must follow the same eight hour cycle with the same companions, colleagues and friends. The economy is finely tuned to exhaust me just enough that I can stay (reasonably) sane, but that the energy I have remaining for side projects is sufficiently limited. I can just about fit in enough time to meet with my band once a week or so, but much more than that and I start to lose resources to expend.

I occasionally see my friends

I occasionally have some recreational time

I occasionally sit, numbly looking at a blank page, waiting for the ideas to form.

If I’m lucky, they come to me. They don’t often.

But is that really surprising if all I’m doing is bouncing ideas off the inside of my skull. Diversity of input leads to diversity of output. Monotony of input leads to monotony of output.

Monoculture

The FAO estimates 60 years of fertile commercial land until complete desertification. [2:23]

It is well known that monoculture leads to infertile land. Turns out, as is often the case, nature actually knows what it’s doing pretty well. If you grow a whole bunch of the same plant, in the same place, with the same dietary needs, those elements get leeched from the soil. Permaculture and forest gardening are getting increased interest from growers as more people cotton onto this.

Growing a range of plant species, and keeping a range of animals in the vicinity, these are essentially a kind of biomimicry. An attempt to artificially recreate natural ecosystems – a finely tuned balance of prey and predator, of organisms that have evolved to compete, outgrow, and achieve a state of equilibrium that monoculture always upsets.

Ducks are known to be an incredibly effective anti-slug solution.

Dominance of one organism is an inherently unstable position, because a great concentration of that organism leads to competition over similar resources that, because they are all used in a specific way, start to dwindle.

A high concentration of a single organism also presents an attack vector for parasites and disease.

Species of cordyceps fungus evolve to specifically attack single species on insect.

Digital Monoculture

When the internet was first gaining traction, cross-linking was a very important method of discovering new sources of information. Blogs, RSS feeds, and search engines were the only tools for finding content on the internet unless someone sent a link directly to you.

Today there are a handful of websites that most people go to regularly to catch up on news, entertain themselves. Facebook and twitter being amongst the most popular. These websites have started to supplant more organic ways of browsing the web. Rather than letting you find material that interests you via the sheer Brownian motion of your web browsing session, a computer program (that even its’ creators barely understand) tries to profile your interests. Based on this profile it attempts to feed you material that, rather than being tailored to please you (though this may be a side affect), is most likely to monetise your time using their platform.

Algorithms can manipulate users just as much as users can shape algorithms.

The other side effect of this curation of what users see is the creation of closed ideology echo chambers; online spaces of ideological homogeneity. The equivalent of shouting into a room and having your own opinion shouted right back. These spaces can encourage extreme views, with little analysis of those views, when used without caution.

We are being digitally herded into camps of thought, massaged into rubbing up against one another in just the right way to create profit for someone. But the side effect of that is a dearth of cross pollination of ideas. A uniformity of identities and a drawing of hard lines of battle that two opposing sides can line up along.

It encourages a kind of us and them mentality that is easy to get sucked up into, and engaging with only seems to make the problem worse. It feels like a situation that could easily be used against us. I can think of one particularly bitter argument about a pressing but incredibly abstract concept that people barely understood tear that has drawn such a division. I wonder how that time could have been better spent.

And suddenly we’ve been put in a position where we are forced, nationally, to look at ourselves and the society around us with a much more critical eye. We’re being forced to ask who the really indispensable people are, we’re relying on specific groups of people to hold the structures we’ve built around us together whilst everyone camps out in their houses.

The end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

Yes, this has been a long run up to discussing the COVID-19 pandemic.

I sit and type code into my computer part of the day, and another part of the day I sit and type these words.

Each day we collectively convince ourselves that things will return to normal. I work a full eight hours – and more – to secure the income I will absolutely, most definitely need when the wheels of the machine start turning again. If they do start turning again. Times are uncertain, the disease we’re so earnestly guarding against has few symptoms to distinguish itself from a seasonal cold, people are fighting to stay afloat, fighting to pay rent, fighting for paper to wipe their arses with. And in the midst of this it appears that there is little obvious plan to deal with the situation because the wheels have to keep turning. People are losing jobs, unable to afford rent and food, and when they get sick, hospitals are running out of vital equipment. People are dying too.

However the vast hole the state has appeared to have left for the people to fend for themselves within has started to sprout mini aid networks. People who never talked before are banding together, helping one another, and building their own support networks where the state failed. People are self organising into working groups, creating projects to share resources and information amongst themselves. They are talking more directly to one another than they have been allowed to do so in years, because suddenly the relationship we have with our neighbors could become an invaluable lifeline at a moments’ notice.

People are buying seeds, and taking more interest in subsistence farming.

The homeless are being assigned temporary housing.

The air is almost completely clear of traffic, motor travel is being kept to a minimum.

We are being forced to consider how self-sufficient we can possibly become, and in doing so we’re having to teach each other new skills. Diversifying the roles we play in each other’s lives.

Biodiversity

When the pandemic clears we will be forced to consider what a return to ‘normality’ means. The individual debt that has accrued starts to be sought. People will have to ask how fair it is that, when civilisation was brought close to a standstill, those who were put in the most precarious positions have to reimburse the most secure.

For me the question is, will people use this pause to ask how reasonable this situation is? When we have all violently been forced to look directly at one another, and how we treat one another, will we ask why?

We are far from equal, even under the pandemic. The rich have larger homes, are able to weather the storms. Some of the poor(er) work some of the most important jobs to keep things ticking over. Shipping food and goods, running our local grocers, stocking our shelves, delivering our food. Maybe this is enough to bring people into contact with a new idea.

In a time when we’re algorithmically encouraged to argue ourselves into more and more extreme extreme versions of opposite sides of an argument, can this be used as an opportunity to look at one another as people?

Maybe, maybe not.

If we could ‘return to normal’ tomorrow, would we choose to?

I think this is the perfect time to take a step back and try something new. Maybe the ideas will flow better now I’ve got these ones on a page.

Categories
Deep Dive

Legend-Tripping, Bloody Murder and Art

Video frame from 11B-X-1371 showing the first pigpen symbol.

Mystery is inherently seductive. Especially when it can be connected to murder, terrorism, and conspiracy. Being a time of year for ‘spooky stories’, I’d like to share with you the story of how I became embroiled in the very center of one such mystery. To do this you’ll need to be acquainted with two terms.

Cryptography:

The art of attempting to make a message unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient

Steganography:

The art of hiding a message from those who don’t know where look for it.

That out of the way, let’s start at the beginning.

October the 12th, 2015.

John-Erik Krahbichler publishes an article on a relatively unknown technology blog ‘Gadgetzz.com’ titled ‘This Creepy Puzzle Arrived In Our Mail’. Said puzzle consisted of a DVD marked with nothing more than a random sequence of letters and numbers. The content contained this video:

Due the strange nature of the video, the article quickly gains the attention of other tech blogs and denizens of the internet. Before long someone has the idea to run the audio from the video through a spectrograph analyser — a way of viewing sound as an image rather than a wave. The resultant image contained the phrase “YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD”, “WE ARE THE ANTIVIRUS”, and many photos of the bodies of tortured or dead women. An unsettling, gory collage in grainy monotone bleeding one horror into the next. A mouth appears to gasp for breath, trapped beneath a plastic sheet.

This was my entry into the phenomenon known as 11B-X-1371.

If your assumption is the same as mine was, at about this point it looks like it could be the work of a murderer — some kind of Zodiac Killer for the YouTube generation. And this was exactly how it was understood by myself, and others.

Video frame from 11B-X-1371 showing the first pigpen symbol.

A community on Reddit was already busily trying to solve various hidden messages found in the video. I was overcome with a sense of urgency to somehow help — seeing all the bodies in the spectrograph I scanned the video for anything I could contribute to, when I noticed a strange square dial at 1:26. Something that, with an enthusiast’s’ eye looked to be a pigpen cipher.

To give you a real idea of what it’s like to work on deciphering an encrypted message I’m going to have to get a little technical, but bear with me please.

A brief cryptography lesson

A pigpen cipher is a form of monoalphabetic substitution cipher — meaning that each letter of the encoded message (the ciphertext) will always map to the same letter in the original message (the plaintext). For instance, replacing all the instances of ‘T’ with ‘U’, and all the instances of ‘F’ with ‘A’. This differs from a polyalphabetic cipher, which uses a number of substitutions for the same letter to make the code more difficult too break. In the case of the pigpen the substitution, rather than a letter of the alphabet, a geometric shape is used instead.

Also known as the masonic or tic-tac-toe cipher, it gets its name from the grid that is drawn to create the association between the letters and symbols (or key):

Diagram illustrating a traditional pigpen cipher

If all the possible shapes on the dial are drawn, something not entirely dissimilar to a pigpen key can be produced:

All possible symbols based on the pattern shown in the video, above are the symbols shown on the dial in sequence. Some symbols were left shown for twice as long as others and are therefore duplicated.

Although the grid generated bears obvious similarity to a pigpen cipher, the biggest problem with this one is that it contains spaces for 24 letters, yet there are 26 in the English language.

Legend tripping

By this time other messages had already been decrypted, all in English. One message in morse code read “KILL THE PRESIDENT”, another contained the GPS coordinates of the White House. Combined with the phrase “We are the antivirus”, some members of the community were easily lead down the path of conspiracy. One online article even posited that the video indicated a threat of “Christian Bio-Terrorism” in the US and France before 2024.

I had also become a regular contributor to the reddit thread by myself, and a regular on the ##11b-X-1371 IRC channel (a kind of hackers’ instant messaging service). The community we had fostered was in danger of becoming a digital space for a kind of legend tripping; a practice usually engaged in by teenagers that essentially revolves around encouraging superstition. In one extreme case in London, stories about a vampire in Highgate Cemetery started by teenagers were taken up by the media, which helped whip young people into a frenzy, culminating in a mass vampire hunt in 1970, disturbing bodies and desecrating graves.

A version of the video was also discovered uploaded to a channel called “Parker Wright”. A matching Twitter profile had also been opened that claimed to be Parker Warner Wright, creator of the video. He had posted images of a brown leather mask that resembled that of a plague doctor, that looked identical to the one featured in the video. This led to impersonators logging on to try and claim authorship of the video for a moment of glory, and the opportunity for grandstanding.

It quickly became obvious that we would need to do our best to quash unreasoned speculation in our community as people flooded into the channel to make arcane and paranoid suggestions – connecting the video to numerous doom-laden ideas.

Breaking into the pigpen

Over Birdman’s shoulder can be seen a ‘|/’ shape from the cipher, with an ‘A’ in the top left corner. This was assumed to be a hint.

A shape sprayed on the wall behind the cloaked figure, who we referred to as ‘Birdman’, indicated a key for a potential solution. Using this information I began work.

My attempts at a solution

Having no space for two letters of the alphabet, I hit a brick wall here. Many suggestions were made as to why there were missing characters — like the Tudor or Polish alphabets excluding certain letters. Polish language could in fact have had some significance since the location of the video was identified as the Jewish Zofiówka sanitorium in Poland, that came to a tragic end during the Nazi occupation of the area during WWII.

However despite my best efforts; I simply couldn’t convince myself of a logical mapping of symbols to letters that led to anything meaningful. Combined with the workload of my day job as a web developer I started to give up, and allowed the community to take up where I left off.

If only I had persisted; the answer was staring me in the face.

The Roman alphabet has 23 characters, missing the ‘J’, ‘U’ and ‘W’ of the modern alphabet. Using the grid above produces the following message:

‘AD OPPVGNARE HOMINES’

Taking into account that in Classical Latin the symbol ‘V’ was used as a ‘U’ as well produces:

‘AD OPPUGNARE HOMINES’
‘To target men’.

This was just one of many hidden messages, all of which required involved, group efforts to decrypt.

An enigma

Most of the hidden messages had been solved by now, however one proved to be particularly tricky. A ciphertext arranged into four-character columns that was identified as output from the notorious Enigma machine — the machine that protected Nazi information up until a coordinated Polish and British codebreaking operation was undertaken. This culminated with the Ultra project at Bletchley Park, which is thought to have shortened WWII by two to four years.

This was further evidenced by a ‘G’ that appeared at first to be the pupil of an eye painted on the wall behind Birdman, but in fact turned out to be a reference to the Enigma logo.

Comparison of spray paint to the enigma logo

We set about guessing at the settings from the machine, using hints from the video itself. But no matter what we tried, including brute force guesses using automated software, we couldn’t produce anything readable. The process went on for weeks, but we still had no luck.

The search for the creator of 11B-X-1371

By this time I started to get the impression that we were simply treading water. None of the hidden messages seemed to lead to an obvious next step; no message, bar a vaguely menacing anti-establishment tone, seemed to convey any further intent. We weren’t finding any indication of a next victim, or a link to some secondary puzzle. To say I was confused as to what the video was meant to represent would be an understatement.

But all of us were about to be thrown through a loop.

It turned out that all the hidden images in the spectrograph were sourced from films and gore artworks, barring one historic murder photo of the corpse of Mary Sullivan, purportedly the work of the Boston Strangler and proof of his identity as Albert DeSalvo.

Could the video be some kind of Alternate Reality Game? These multi-levelled interactive stories are usually used to market films, television shows, games and even, perplexingly, a ski resort.

One member of the Reddit community suggested that the video’s publication was synchronous with production for the on screen adaption of Dan Brown’s Inferno, which was originally slated for release on December 18, 2015, and could be viral marketing for it.

“A man named Bertrand Zobrist makes a creepy video dressed entirely in the traditional plague doctor mask and suit. He says he’s like death and is the cure”

-careersxmichael, Reddit

Whilst it was a promising theory, it seemed highly unlikely a large marketing firm would use such extreme images for publicity, which could easily have a negative effect on any marketing effort.

A far more believable idea was — considering the discoverer of the video ran a fairly unknown tech blog — that Johny Krahbichler might have made the video himself. A marketing agency might balk at the idea of using such disturbing imagery, but an individual looking to get attention might do.

Johny himself logged onto the channel at some point to insist he was not involved in the production of the video in any way. Unable to further substantiate or disprove this idea we returned our attentions to the encrypted messages.

Eventually a user called “ParkerWWright” logged onto the IRC channel.

Parker Warner Wright

ParkerWWright wasn’t the first on IRC claiming to be the Birdman, but he certainly went to more effort than anyone else had to prove his identity. He posted photos of a customised leather glove with an embedded blinking light like that in the video, in addition to some simple arduino code used to produce the morse code it created. Whilst not conclusive evidence, a determined copycat could have made something similar fairly easily, it gave us pause for thought. He also posted photos of a brown leather mask on Twitter that looked identical to the one in the video, but we weren’t quite ready to accept it as undeniable proof that he was the creator of the video.

We were at an impasse, and if any headway were to be made the community needed the creator of the video to make a move.

One morning I logged into IRC and found a new message had been decrypted:

“COMPLACENT ARE THE WEAK STAND AND FIGHT WITH US TAKE DOWN THE BLACK BEAST KILL HIS DISEASE OR FALL WITH THE REST”

ParkerWWright had handed crucial Enigma settings over to a member of the community, revealing the final message and proving the veracity of his claim of being creator of the video.

We had found the Birdman. He claimed to be an artist. He had set up a Facebook page for himself and a Twitter account. After a while even a website followed.

No lives were ever at risk. The meaning of the hours I’d contributed to the project began to evaporate as I grappled to come to terms with the significance of the video in a new light. I lost interest. I got back to my day job.

The 11B videos as Art

That was a year ago now, a second video — 11B-3-1369 — has been released since then. ‘Parker Warner Wright’ (a pseudonym to be sure) did an interview on YouTube. I even added him as a ‘friend’ on Facebook.

Wright seems to see himself as a kind of “teacher of humanity”; a term he makes a nod to in the interview. He professes his work to have its significance in forcing the viewer to look beyond the surface. He is keen to stress an emphasis on not accepting the popular narrative at face value, and letting go of “wilful ignorance”. As a hidden message in his second video implies quite crudely and directly:

“THEY MAKE EVERYTHING SO BELIEVABLE SO YOU SUCK IT LIKE A WHORE”

There is a repeating motif through all the works I have seen so far; sophisticated production techniques, intricate multi-layered puzzles, all to hide messages that lack a certain level of depth. Corruption, war, poverty, inequality, lying politicians – these aren’t new concepts, we aren’t the first generation to experience pain. “Wake up!” Wright seems to scream, but to what?

“A new order is on the rise. You will join, or you will fall. The virus has spread too far; it must be stopped. We will dike it at it’s root. 13 and 50, will burn.”

Militaristic language, a vague implication of revolution…These words ring familiar somehow:

“Rise up and take the power back, it’s time that
The fat cats had a heart attack, you know that
Their time is coming to an end
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend”

–Uprising by the band MUSE

There is a real danger, at least when taking it at face value, that there is actually little meaning to be distilled from the phenomenon of 11B-X-1371. At some level, the artistic merit seems to lie very superficially on this piece. Bluster and spectacle hiding little meaning. And if a ragtag group of hackers and conspiracy theorists huddling together in the darker recesses of the internet are the intended audience, they almost certainly are already ‘waking up’ themselves, making Wright a self-appointed preacher to the converted.

For a long time I thought that this was all there was. A brick wall, hours of time wasted to help someone gaze into their own navel. What started as an internal drive to contribute to something that might save lives and potentially catch a serial killer was reduced to someone’s performance art. I’d been duped, and I was annoyed to see someone potentially squander the chance to say something truly meaningful to a large, captive audience.

But of course, a piece of art is not just a mass of words. And just because an art piece contains words doesn’t necessarily mean that those words encompass and summarise its meaning. Something I find particularly fascinating to consider is; who is the piece aimed at? Who is the intended observer? I had previously suggested that I myself might be the intended audience, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am that this is the case.

Propagation of untruth is a recurring theme for this entire story. When the video was first revealed, I was one of many who contributed to the working theory that there was a killer on the loose. Even now, almost every article you read on the piece will ignore any meaning in the piece, or even the idea of it being art in favour of a clickbaity title and the promise of a cheap scare. Words like “Mystery”, “Creepy” and “Murder” crop up regularly. Even I opened this article by going into detail about dead bodies, because it’s a hook. I think that was a clever move for Parker Wright, and I suspect that without it he would not have accrued the audience he built for himself.

The idea of ‘meaning’ or a ‘message’ is not so straightforward when it comes to art. Some artists don’t claim to give any meaning to their work, or say that they let their audience ascribe meaning to their work.

The presence of a work in public space, and the decision of the artist to put it there.

These two factors bely intent. Something you make to show someone else is done so with intent, and arguably for that reason it conveys a message.

Whether or not clarity of this message is the duty of the artist is up for debate, though personally I tend to judge art on its ability to communicate something. And as much as I scoffed earlier at the idea of “looking deeper” being a non-message, something superficial, there may be something to it. I think in actual fact the ecosystem of articles, response videos, impersonators, conspiracy theorists illustrates this quite accurately.

I think to judge Parker’s art as “just his videos” is to ignore the fact that 11B has become greater than the sum of its parts. Which makes this article part of his work – and if you’ve read this far, then perhaps you have become a part of his work too.

“The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself”

-Nietzsche

Special thanks go to Singularity, Cyphere, and everyone on the ##11BX1371 IRC channel, for taking part in this journey with me, and for helping with research for this article. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Images © Parker Warner Wright. All rights reserved.

Cipher grids CC-BY-SA Matthew Gaffen

Photograph of the Enigma machine CC-BY-SA Tim Gage