The social lives of generative adversarial networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a genre of deep learning model of significant practical and theoretical interest for their facility in producing photorealistic 'fake' images which are plausibly similar, but not identical, to a corpus of training data. But from the perspective of a sociologist, the distinctive architecture of GANs is highly suggestive. First, a convolutional neural network for classification, on its own, is (at present) popularly considered to be an 'AI'; and a generative neural network is a kind of inversion of such a classification network (i.e. a layered transformation from a vector of numbers to an image, as opposed to a transformation from an image to a vector of numbers). If, then, in the training of GANs, these two 'AIs' interact with each other in a dyadic fashion, shouldn't we consider that form of learning... social? This observation can lead to some surprising associations as we compare and contrast GANs with the theories of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of the so-called habitus is one which is simultaneously cognitive and social: a productive perception in which classification practices and practical action cannot be fully disentangled.