Still remember the decoder podcast where the CEO was asked, would you remove an article that says “we should deport all brown people”, and he danced around how he wouldn’t get into specifics of moderation.

Just your standard ‘Free speech absoluteism’

Really it’s restraint to only offer it as a solution to tech problems, because install more linux is my solution to all problems.

It’s also only preventative, seems like this is more reversal.

Until you’re ready for your old man era, presumably.

PUT ON THE WIG DEGENERATE

It sucks because dating apps are a pretty trash experience all around, and definitely have some fundamental demographic issues, but god damn do the incels go wild whenever the conversation comes up.

Right after the r/chapotraphouse sub got banned, they moved to chapo.chat, but the community wasn’t really that tied with the chapo trap house podcast anymore, so they moved to hexbear.net.

That’s fair, even while typing it, the point felt shaky. I still think there are pieces of art that fail to have intentionality or design, but I would still call them art. I could carelessly scribble on a page to pass time in a meeting and I think that would still qualify as art, even if absent conscious meaning or design.

May point was more against the process than Pollock specifically because I think much of the high art world is shaped by folks in power over anything else. I agree that folks are too quick to dismiss his work, and I completely believe it is art. I don’t think it’s random, and looking at his work you can see intentionality. I think I bring it up more to show the broad spectrum of art. Similarly, I think it’s completely valid to sign a urinal and call it art. Even if you have no sway over the structure of the porcelain beyond picking what toilet you think works best. A curation I would argue is equally valid when selecting what pieces of AI work best fit what one is going for.

I will concede that the process of interacting with the generation machine to produce something is a creative one, I just don’t think it’s anywhere near what a lot of proponents claim it be.

I guess I don’t know what proponents claim the level of creativity is, but I also think that critics don’t realize the level of depth many of the folks that use AI go to for what people assume was a few tries at a prompt. I think this gets back to the original counter point above. Trying to make something similar to what folks show off, or trying to realize a vision with AI tools is harder than many realize. And I think without having worked with them too much, it can be easy to not see the intentionality that went into AI work, in the same way it can be easy to assume Pollock is random splatters. Now I will clarify again, I don’t hold it in that high of regard or say that it’s comparable to Pollock or any other painters really. More my point is to show that the specifics can be lost, particularly because AI does so much spectacle.

I’ve used Suno, and my lasting impression of it is that it was fun, sometimes really funny, and overall kind of soul sucking. As a musician, there were essentially no times that I felt anything produced there was mine. It was just novelty. Some of it sounded really cool, but none of it was an expression of me or what I was really looking for.

I think that it’s totally valid, and I don’t really think I take any ownership with AI work, I just enjoy it for what it is. Personally I use it as a DM in various ways, so maybe it doesn’t rub me as wrong because it is a smaller piece of everything else, rather than standalone art.

Sorry, I thought all that was going to be just two paragraphs.

I know the feeling lol

Yeah I largely agree, the fact that it is replacing humans is rough and really speaks to such a depressing view of art in our society. Even before AI, the commercialization of art was hugely detrimental, and really sucks the soul out of much of what it touches. The fact that AI attacks the starting footholds for artists to find any money at all in the industry is particularly upsetting.

All that being saying, I guess I would still push back a little bit on the idea that it can’t be art when generated in it’s entirety. I would argue that while yes it does have less intentionality, even at the most base level of a prompt and picking your favorite generation, is enough to qualify it as art. I may be a bit of an absolutist in this regard, but I justify it by pointing to things like splatter or fluid acrylic painting. Where the exact lines of intentionality is hard to draw. All of that to say I don’t think there is much value in drawing a strict line that excludes AI work from art just because the discrepancy between choice of the artist and the choices on show is so vast.

water the tree of liberty? 🥰

you can put the exact same prompt into the stable diffusion and not get the same image each time

My understanding is that if you have the exact same model, prompt, and everything else, if you use the same seed, you will get the exact same image output. That and that they called it a counter point, I took it to mean they were talking about the skill in the layers of different tools folks will use to get what they are hoping for. Because, a little to your further point, there are folks that get very into it and have like 30 different fine tuned loras or whatever to finesse every finer point of the image.

Images would not exist without the photographer choosing to make them.

At the risk of getting a little philosophically wanky about it, I guess I would argue the same for AI images. Like what exists is a nebulous connections of weights and nodes trained off stolen art that only connect in certain ways because of a given seed and prompt. Does a hypothetical random image of a muppets version of Kermit the frog as Darth Vader ‘exist’ without the high, half baked, prompt from someone using a free trial of midjourney?

Even without those elements though, those images would not exist without the effort, intention, and presence of the photographer.

I completely agree, and I think my point more was that with photography, you don’t “make” the landscape or architecture you’re capturing, but you make the image in the end.

Contrast that with AI art. The only intention you have is your prompt and choice of model. I would argue the fact that ai prompters need to “get close to” what they want their piece to say, rather than making the piece say what they want it to say, shows how starved for meaning the products are.

I will say, I respect photography more, and so much of what AI generates is soulless slop. I think that ultimately my push back is on the folks that argue that it can’t be art. And just as there is intentionality in choosing what photos you don’t take for photography, there is non-zero intentionality in generating 30 loose candidates, 50 fine tuned candidates, and 3 final images with stable diffusion.

Sorry if this comment is scattered, I’ve restarted my reply like three times trying to sort out what I even think lol.

I don’t think their point was just that it’s impossible to reproduce, more that there is skill, knowledge and choice put into getting close to the intended idea when working with AI output.

With that I think your point breaks down when you compare it with something like photography. Often you aren’t ‘making’ the images that you capture, but there is skill and artistry in the choices that capture the moment or picture you want. Obviously there is more control in photography, and I would disagree with anyone that uses AI and claims the same level of artistry of photography. But ultimately I think the lines around art are so blurry in general, it seems incorrect to me to do decidedly exclude AI generated images.

Considering the criticism of the system was more rooted in the reality of past and neo colonialism, do you have a defense of it beyond its critics are biased?

I mean it seems like you know my criticism of the nordic model, but hand wave it by saying we would simply make an off world without that bit. I’m not really convinced.

Have you considered politics rooted in reality rather than a star trek writer model?

It’s German

⬆ Jokes on you, I am liberal accelerationist

I got it on my android phone. Currently just a chronological stream off all posts. A lot is just resposts of tiktoks or other cribbed content. When it’s not taken from tiktok, I feel like it’s pretty mild random video of pets or landscapes.

One that jumped out to me was folks bashing the security of mastodon because things like DMs were visible to instance admins. Like yeah I guess it’s not great, but I trust my DMs with my instance admin more than fucking Musk…

Oh so they’re wrong. Okay