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| Done with Chat GPT in 2 minutes |
- The discovery by Copernicus that earth isn't the center of the universe, "only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness." Astronomy destroyed our illusion of a safe and stable home at the hub of the universe and left us in an unbounded, decentralized universe where even basic directions such as "up and down" no longer had absolute meaning. It was the beginning of centuries of warfare between science and religions.
- The discovery that humans evolved from primitive primates rather than originating in a divinely appointed spot at the top of creation. The discovery that our fossil trail led not from the Garden of Eden but from a frightened cynodont hiding in the mud rattled faith in humanity's special protected status. The cultural battles from this humiliation continue to rage today in legal, educational and scientific circles.
- The discovery that humans aren't intrinsically rational beings but instead are heavily influenced by the irrational activity of our subconscious minds. Psychological sciences shed new light on human nature, transforming our notions of free will, motivation, guilt, identity, responsibility and more. Based on these discoveries, laws have been rewritten. Educational practices have changed. Novels, plays and later movies were written around the new understandings.
Years ago I asked on this blog whether AI might become the source of our fourth great humiliation, resulting in comparable social and cultural upheaval.
It's not too soon to conclude that the answer is "yes." Our status as creators has long been viewed as central to the glory of being human. If art becomes a fast, cheap and effortless commodity created by machine, it would be another great blow to human dignity and worth.
So the question for discussion is: what's a suitable artistic response to this fourth humiliation?
During the lifetime of Copernicus, artists used allegorical representations of high concepts to deal with big issues. For example, today's artists might look to Mattias Gerung's 1544 The Baptism of the Antichrist:
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| From left to right: NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta AI |
Wry humor is always a good bet, even on the gallows. Here is how the prophetic Carter Goodrich welcomed in the new millennium:
Then there's the juvenile response: a "Fuck AI" tee shirt. I doubt any long term satisfaction can come from this approach.
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One of the most interesting creative struggles about the battle between man and machine is Phil Hale's series of paintings of Johnny Badhair. Hale painted more than eighty paintings of a ballet between a solitary, half dressed figure and a machine in front of a universal blue sky. Hale's machines were a sinister metallic conglomeration of sprockets, blades and cables-- an excellent visual representation of John Henry's steam drill, or of AI.
Each new painting in this series became a fresh experiment with an uncertain outcome. The paintings are powerful, even savage, and yet at the same time they are riddled with ambiguity; sometimes it seems one combatant has won, but that lasts only as long as the next painting. It's never too clear what they're battling for or who the victor will be.
I wrote an essay for Hale's 2016 book, Let's Kill Johnny Badhair, in which I quote from Peter Viereck's prescient 1947 poem, Prince Tank:
During the fourth and fifth world wars, the tanksWill still obey, still seem to serve their humans...The sixth war they will serve more sullenly--And suddenly will know their day has come.The birthday of the Prince of all the tanks.And then will humans all be jitterbugs,Migrate like locusts from their dance-hall doors,And sing with insect-voices metal shrill:"Our god is born!" and roll to him like grapesTill all their frenzy begs his metal treads:"Love us to death, love us to death" the dayCreation's final goal, Prince Tank, is born.
These are all possible artistic responses to the fourth humiliation. None of them so far will be enough to, in the words of Flaubert, "move the stars to pity" us for our situation. We won't get off that easily. But at least it's a place to start thinking.
64 comments:
The T-shirt is a meta-joke: the hand with extra fingers alludes to the typical error early models produced. So the joke is that the the image is actually AI generated.
The first two of Freud's humiliations weren't for "the human race". European Christians more like it. Even then, Christians would not blink an eye at the idea that there are hidden forces inside pushing us to do stuff without us noticing.
I do not think AI will be a great humiliation, we came to be used to machines outdoing us at stuff. And we believed in i-ching and astrology, so a device providing answers without us understanding why won't break us.
Everything will be drowned in the practical consequences, as the values and meaning of concepts are violently re-negotiated.
Freud was wrong. The Medievals didn't see the world as the center of the universe, they saw it as the bottom. The dreck, the gross, falls down, the pure floats up. Center of the Earth? Hell. And far above the earth? Heaven, the vault of stars, the Quintessence. Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme in the 14th century thought it was strange that earth was immobile while heaven rotated around it. Surely heaven would be still, and the earth move on its axis? They had to abandon the interesting idea as a rotating earth conjured many physics problems that they didn't have the theories to deal with, but this was a step away from the static geocentricism, once you start thinking of the earth moving on its axis, it's a step in the right direction.
Copernicus was worried that by making the earth into a planet, he might be seen as elevating it, not demoting it. He had to make it clear that under his cosmology, earth would not be promoted above its station.
Not the first time freud would be catastrophically wrong about something.
And as for AI, well, let's see what happens when all those loans have to be paid back.
xopxe-- Yes, I got the "meta-joke" about the multiple fingers on the tee shirt, although I wasn't quite clear whether the joke was on AI because it does (or did) such a crappy job with hands, or the joke was on people who despised AI but were addicted to using it like everyone else. I think the second version is funnier, but both seem hostile to AI to me.
As for the great humiliation, it's already here, and it metastasized while we were sleeping. I know authors who worked long and hard writing books that made them proud, only to discover that half a dozen AI books popped up on Amazon with similar plots and misleadingly similar titles. They were created by the push of a button by people in lawless countries to siphon off sales. Here's a heartbreaking story of some poor guy on Instagram who announced the release of his book in September, only to find that someone took his description, converted it into a 230 page book in a matter of minutes using AI and posted it on Google books long before the real book could come out: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZLGHSOTyb9/ . I know well established illustrators who have lost important business because an art director can tell Midjourney, "create an illustration in the style of [Artist X] " and get an image that, while not quite perfect, is good enough for 75% of their readership and is free. It robs the artist of the fee and simultaneously degrades their artistic reputation because of the flood of mediocre approximations of their work now appearing on the market. When the pay is gone, you'd be surprised how fast humiliation follows.
Finally, I must disagree with you that Freud's humiliations were for European Christians. The great benefits and accompanying drawbacks of science may have started with European Christians in the 14th century but then spread around the entire world. Copernicus' discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe is true for everybody, not just European Christians. Evolution is true for everybody, not just European Christians. The lessons of psychology are true for everyone, not just European Christians. If they weren't true, the rest of the world would not have been so quick to embrace western science and technology.
I love this post. Deep stuff.
dermot wrote: "The Medievals didn't see the world as the center of the universe, they saw it as the bottom. The dreck, the gross, falls down, the pure floats up. Center of the Earth? Hell. And far above the earth? Heaven..."
I think you're conflating two different systems. Yes, on a spiritual level, heaven and the afterlife are superior to life in the material world. However, that has nothing to do with the firm medieval belief that the earth was the center of the physical universe. Check out the history of "geocentrism" on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentrism) or look it up anywhere else (including ChatGPT which will tell you "Ancient and medieval societies accepted that the Sun, planets, and stars revolved around Earth. The geocentric model was reinforced by religion, philosophy, and everyday observation.")
Not only was Freud correct about the common belief that the earth was the center of the universe, but more to the point, there's no question that Copernicus (and then Kepler and then Galileo) delivered a great culture shock. Philosophers were unnerved by the implications of the discovery. Pascal wrote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” In 1633 the Church placed Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life. It wasn't until 1992 (359 years later) that the church apologized and admitted Galileo was right.
I really like the comic 'Zombie vs Robots' by Ashley Wood and Chris Ryall, which makes it quite clear, in my opinion, that the ultimate problem is humanity and our inherent stupidity. Perhaps the best response would be to remain silent, because given what we've seen, we might awaken Prince Tank prematurely...
The belief, seen in different iterations right across the world, seems to have been far more a case of a locus receiving influence from the heavenly bodies in all directions. The strict physical earth-as-centre seems to be to due to construing or literalising models of this in certain ways.
Freud, as others have pointed out was full of shit as usual. The unconscious was always known about, and understood better (despite the boogeymen) prior to Freud.
His tripartite deconstructivist thesis is unconvincing, something to bolster his own peculiarities.
The impact of ai as your examples show is in mechanisation, little different really to some piece of plastic from a mould taking the place of something carefully crafted with thinking and hands. Here the threat is economic and serious, true.
But the main danger isn't that it replaces human creativity, it's that we don't see the difference between something that is an expression of the human and something that is essentially nothing. Bad drawings are more than 'impressive' ai excreta, in the same way as a few lines of story from a six year old are more than the ai novels. This isn't just sentimentality, it's the reality of the inner. To think otherwise is really missing not just what is human, but what is real. It doesn't lie in the spectacle of human achievement, that on its own is just vanity. A.i. might automate language but it can only do this because of the comprehensiveness of language as we have made it can be made to 'run' in a manner that very closely mirrors a human performing language - it cannot automate the thought that begot language or the thought that fills it..
It doesn't automate expression, feeling, understanding - it automates product
(Great creations, of course, have this value running through them at all levels, and this is apparent to anyone who allows their sensitivity to this difference to operate - it's not an elite posession; so are never just mere spectacle.)
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Bill
I know someone who works for, well actually I shouldn't say whom they work for, but they're required to use AI often and daily and they claim to spend more time checking the near instant but faulty results that it would be to just do it themselves.
It's gotten much better at being believable, but perhaps all the worse because of this for still being incorrect.
That first AI image has so much gone wrong in it, but it's still functional for purpose. Is this the true despair? Being conquered by a mediocre "AI' slave rather than a true and perfect AI God?
If you make gallery art gallery and - assuming your gallery requires physical originals (not prints) to sell - then your career seems safe.
I think that - whatever niche place illustration continues to occupy - it will fend off the AI encroachment quite well, at least in print, where there seems to be opposition to printing anything (such as magazine covers and editorial illustrations) that is AI generated. Less so in the commercial fields of concept art, storyboarding, pre-viz etc. which are already taking a significant hit.
As someone who has worked in storyboarding for TV ads my whole working life (with a detour into animation) I can tell you that 2024 was a bad year, 2025 was even worse, and this year (so far) it feels like my job has been erased. I hear similar from people I know in the advertising-related fields of animation, motion graphics, commercial photography and film / video production.
In cinema, I think AI will become another tool in the digital post-production work-flow and will displace a lot of CGI artists for special effects and background / digital-matte type work.
sorry ....^ my post (wasn't signed in)
Bill wrote: "Freud, as others have pointed out was full of shit as usual."
Whoa, there seem to be a lot of Freud haters in the crowd. I'm guessing the commenters who so casually assert that Freud was "catastrophically wrong" or "full of shit as usual" have read few-- or none-- of his sixty books. But in the 20th century one could hardly call oneself an intellectual if one had not read Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents," "Totem and Taboo" or "The Future of an Illusion." I'm also guessing that today's hostility may be premised largely on Freud's unfashionable sexual statements or his reputation for impatience with acolytes and competitors.
In my view, Freud was as close as we get to Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon, the founder of psychohistory-- a great mind who mapped an important new discipline, leaving it to generations of followers around the world to make their careers by correcting obvious errors and punctuation in the master's work.
Freud was a great mind who wrestled with significant issues of philosophy, religion and science. His influence is often compared to that of Darwin or Marx (who were also not error-free.). But I agree with Walter Kaufmann that "the most important point of all" about Freud is that he transformed modern ethics by establishing that the mentally troubled, the depressed and the hysterical are not evil or possessed by the devil. His science showed the world that the difference between normal and abnormal, or between respectable and criminal, is more complex than we once thought, and a reason for empathy.
>>>>>>>>His influence is often compared to that of Darwin or Marx (who were also not error-free.)
Marx made errors? What? What errors do you think Marx made? I presumed the 100 million deaths and all the economic collapse and social tyranny at the hands of Marxists was what you liked about his work.
~ FV
'Full of shit' - The wonky assertion that gnashing of teeth and nihilism were the inevitable, or even the general response to those three things. They had devastating impact only on absurdly rigid lines of thought.
.".. in the 20th century one could hardly call oneself an intellectual if one had not read Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents," "
I doubt that one was the one most read.
"Calling oneself an intellectual" was for moronic socialites. And mostly *was* read by these for nucleating sexual aberrances everywhere. He wasn't held highly enough elsewhere to be a requisite of 'intellectualism' so generally as you're saying.
For those who liked their self-conscious 'intellectual' poses with a kink in, sure.
And a few years later they found new literature they could skim for the juicy bits while still posing as liberal and intelligent with Kinsey. A man who inserted pencils and pipe cleaners into his urethra.
Bill
@ FV
- that's only because they didn't do the ol' socialism properly. Gotcha.
Paul Ricœur referred to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as «The masters of suspicion». Obviously key figures in the history of Western culture, but to many here, I think they just kind of blend together into a trinity or triumvirate of hell - the great Satan come to earth as the OG marxist-postmodern-feminist triumvirate.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
'Copernicus' discovery ... is true for everybody, not just European Christians'
But were they all that impacted or doscomfited by it ?
Even in Christendom, for believers their relationship to the spiritual above/belows wouldn't have been especially impacted by orreries or the like.
Do you think eg, Buddhists, were at all bothered by evolution?
There's more insightful psychology in some of their texts than anything in Freud, too, for that matter.
Bill
dis > dos . 😡
Far too petty and unimpressive to merit the title of Great Dark Lord.
Sounds like you're making your own puppet villains have these projections.
David:
I see another reading of the joke: it's the AI giving us the finger. Then "Fuck AI" could be resignified also, I suppose.
What you describe by the humiliation of people by having their work ransacked is what I categorized as "practical consequence" and violent renegotiation of values. It's parallel to what happened to clog-maker artisans when Gota started churning out shoes, or when power looms made fabrics dirt cheap. And for the economy, words and pictures are just like shoes and nails: someone produces them, someone consumes them, someone fixes a price. As a marxist Humpty Dumpty would say, "the question is, who's the owner of the means of production - that's all".
But that negotiation of value and meaning will also be made inwards by the creators and public. If I think that the value of my pipe organ music is in that it can sound very loud (it sort of was), when people come up with amplifiers I'll have to rethink what the pipe organ is actually good at. If my artistic/writing style can be mechanically reproduced in such a way as to fool the public, perhaps it's actually less impressive than I thought it was. Perhaps the value is somewhere else? Or perhaps "AI art" does not fool anyone and everybody see this is slop. But then perhaps the slop is actually what the public wanted or needed? As I said, it will be violent, but I'm sure there still will be a place for art, because we will still want to communicate amongst us. But "ideas", "genre" and "style" will be cheap, just as "faithfulness" and "realism" already are.
Regarding heliocentrism and evolution, the people Galileo and Darwin humiliated were the ones that believed in the infallibility of the Bible and/or the church. Even in Europe theories as potentially "traumatic" were usually discussed by scientist (say Tycho Brahe and Lamarck). As you correctly put out, both Evolution and Heliocentrism are embraced universally because they are true. But I haven't seen proved they were traumatic for the "human race". They were for catholics, that's sure, but that's it. Did the persians or chinese or indians or japanese find them traumatic? I don't know. And I purposefully left Freud out because it can be safely be dismissed as a theory if you are so inclined. You can think it's insulting and the believers are dumb, and nothing really changes.
I repeated Bill's argument here, sorry.
Philopedia.org (developed by the CIA to harvest the IPs of dyslexic sex offenders) credits Marx, Freud, Ricœur with influencing the Frankfurt school. Which is a little unfair, even on Groucho, Chico & Harpo. But does explain the trumpet blowing as 'key figures in western culture' for those still handicapped by all the 'patriachy...capitalism....repressive family-structures.....' blah.
Marc Kingsland wrote: "Being conquered by a mediocre "AI' slave rather than a true and perfect AI God?"
I think you make an important and subtle distinction. Many people argue that AI is a long way from producing a Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but AI doesn't need to produce a true and perfect art god; all it needs to be is "good enough" for people to accept it. If AI can paint a hundred pictures in a minute, virtually free, most audiences won't care that those pictures are not quite as perfect as the best hand made images. And if audiences don't care, publishers won't care either. Then the game is over, except for a small, expensive elitist audience.
The entire history of hand made art soon becomes just a natural resource, like mineral deposits or dinosaur bones, belonging to no one and free to be exploited by AI. As AI trains and then creates new images on the backs of historical artists, it can also overcome some of its quality deficiencies by using algorithms to tailor the new images to suit specific audience tastes.
It's difficult to see how traditional art recovers from that until the day nuclear winter takes the grid down.
Postmodern anonymouse-- Thank you for introducing me to the "masters of suspicion," a term with which I wasn't previously familiar. I didn't realize until it led me to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that suspicion in this instance is supposed to be a positive thing because it causes us to go beyond face value and read texts with skepticism to search out hidden meanings.
I didn't look much further because I refuse on principle to read more than 25 words in any text that includes the word "hermeneutics." So perhaps you can do me a favor and tell me how Ricœur and friends can tell when suspicion has passed the point of diminishing returns-- for example with paranoid theories about "election fraud"-- and does more harm than good.
I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ricœur’s particular thinking on «suspicion», but I’m certainly of the opinion that Trump and Musk et al are prime manifestations of postmodernity, and that the vulgar skepticism of their flock can easily be traced back to a general skepticism towards stability of self and society.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Er, it's only the postmodernists who are 'skeptical towards stability of self and society'
(Because they are skeptical of 'self' and 'society'.)
'all it needs to be is good enough" for people to accept it.
....a hundred pictures in a minute, virtually free, most audiences won't care that those pictures are not quite as perfect as the best hand made images. .... publishers won't care either. Then the game is over, except for a small, expensive elitist audience.'
None of this is new and predates a.i.
A somewhat helpful way of thinking modern AI is as a very effective lossy-compression algorithm, like JPEG. If you take a image and compress it very aggressively with photoshop, you'll get a set of color blotches roughly where they are in the original, plus a lot of artifacts. So you loss stuff that was in the original (information loss) and gain noise (again information loss). No new information is produced, just carefully discarded. How it does that? It says a picture is a field of more or less smoothly changing colors. Then it will keep only the smoothest changing part of it, and discard everything that changes too fast. A nitid border will be approximated as a set of smoothly changing colors, and that's where jpeg artifacts come from. That's fourier transforms. Here's where the parallelism with modern AI comes: in a way, a jpeg saves space because it forces the consecutive pixel colors to be close by, so you need less information to predict what the next pixel will be.
Modern neural networks follow the same philosophy, but the "prediction engine" is much more powerful (and computationally expensive). It will detect weird patterns in the input data that helps it to predict the following token. The more patterns there are in the input, the more compact and effective the prediction is. A pattern in this context is something much more powerful than image texture, we usually don't know what the pattern it found is. We only know it's there because we see it used to compress data. The more regular, more repeated, more formulaic stuff contains less information, thus is best compressed. It's easier to visualize it working on text, as weird as the concepts of lossy compression of natural language is. An LLMM latches on the idioms, turns of phrases, common structures, etc, to produce an average text that is shaped as the human language. That just looks like art.
But just idling, I think we usually miss something. Perhaps the AI will show us that a book or image has no artistic value in it by itself, it has it in relation with the artistic event where someone read that book or saw that picture. Art is creating a piece that effectively communicates with its public, in a place and time. Perhaps the humiliation we deserve is to stop seeing artistic objects as having intrinsic quality or value, outside the human process of human communicating.
>>>>>>>>>I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ricœur’s particular thinking on «suspicion»,
What? You JUST QUOTED HIM on this point as if you were intimately familiar with him. You complete internet fraud.
~ FV
But of course Marxist Humpty Dumpty is right and all it matters is that capital found a way to ransack and pillage all of the humanity's production, living and dead, and is planning on monopolizing it through the economies of scale.
@FV
You're thinking about Lenin and Stalin, not Marx. According to Marx, Russia was the last place on earth the revolution should've taken place. Lenin saw an opportunity and fliped Marxism on its head. Then Stalin ran off with it in a totally different direction. Don't blame Marx for that.
I never quoted Ricoeur and never read anything by him. You need a sedative.
I was quoting Postmodern Anonymous. YOU might need a sedative.
~ FV
FV-- I see. My apologies, you're right. There are just too many "anonymouses" flying around here, and your comment came in right behind my response saying I wasn't familiar with Ricoeur..
Don't blame Marx???
Marx’s ideas on violence use, pitting classes against one another, centralization of power, anointed elites, crushing the traditional family unit, etc. directly appeal and give cover to psychopathic tyrants in waiting (plus thugs, unhappy little bookish men, and degenerates). His work led to the immiseration of god knows how many people. The mass nightmares he has caused are nowhere near balanced by the few things he got right in the abstract. Without Marx, there is no Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pot, Che, Ho, Castro, etc. He was Lenin's rallying symbol and Lenin formed his commie cult around Marx's name and ideas. Not coincidentally, in his personal life Marx was an archetypal lazy, ignorant, parasitic, resentful, immoral monster.
~ FV
No problem, I understand.
~ FV
>>>>>>>>>"Perhaps the humiliation we deserve is to stop seeing artistic objects as having intrinsic quality or value, outside the human process of human communicating."
At a basic human level, you exhibit shamefully little appreciation for craftsmanship or craftsmen. I'd guess you aren't one.
~ FV
I am a craftsman. My work is valued because it depends on expertise that takes time to develop, and allows me to provide these difficult to obtain things.
If/when these things get easy to obtain, my work will get cheapened.
I feel relatively safe, but so did the clog maker.
There are no «the postmodernists». But the gist of what you are parroting can at least partially be traced back to the thinking of these three «masters of suspicion». The current AI-triggered crisis of identity was already familiar to readers ofnthe French Nerds, who built much of their work (also in oposition to) these three, among others.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Aren't you the coder from Uruguay? Coding requires crafting, but it is not a physical craft in the sense of an artwork or chair or something. What do you physically craft that takes days of planning and effort? And which is personal to you? Have you ever designed and built something physical? Do you have a workshop?
~ FV
>>>>>>There are no «the postmodernists».
The Postmodernists would beg to differ with you, I'm sure.
~ FV
"According to Marx, Russia was the last place on earth the revolution should've taken place"
The vast majority of people who lived under communist regimes across europe will tell you it had no place in their countries either.
Communism successfully diverted social and workers-rights movements into itself, there are video interviews with communist activists discussing how even in the 1970s and 80s in the UK they were instructed to enter and redirect unions, civil rights groups and so on but strictly warned not to introduce communist theory openly or explain their intentions but to subvert and steer in the desired directions of the party.
The environmental movements in europe that later became the green party were taken over by communist fugures. They spent much of the 80s trying to legalise paedophila https://newrepublic.com/article/120379/german-green-party-pedophilia-scandal. Its leader Jürgen Trittin eulogised the leftist terrorist Dieter Kunzelman who had bombed the 1969 jewish commemoration of kristallnacht in Germany.
Heard of the various secret police bodies ? 'The Romanian Securitate engaged in widespread surveillance, intimidation, torture, and assassination to prop up Romania's communist regime and suppress political dissent.'
Yugoslavia - https://victimsofcommunism.org/uncovering-titos-hidden-crimes/
The Stasi ? https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stasi
You don't have to buy into this website's politics to read this, it's all true: https://fee.org/articles/10-terrifying-facts-about-the-east-german-secret-police/
Head anywhere in eastern europe and you will see some of the most beautiful towns and cities on earth....with scars of the ugliest dehumanising housing and factories from their communist eras cutting through and layered over them. In a lot of respects there's a similarity there to the worst scars of corporatism/capitalism.
That's evidence, though, of the real 'horseshoe-theory',
anything that denies the primacy of human worth, and all that goes with it --
which encompasses ethic, virtue, cultures - respecting and protecting all their regional topocosms and their uniqueness - love for nature and the world, obeying its cues and harmonising with it, individual and local sovereignty,....
-- will create identical results.
Nobody wants to be an economic unit, nobody wants to be collectivised.
“Executions are a test—anyone unable to kill an ideological enemy can hardly be considered a true communist.”
I'm an engineer who works in embedded systems, my favorite work being educational robotics. Then yes to all questions, except planning takes more like weeks or months.
The "educational robots" you work on "personal" to you? Do they have intrinsic quality or value?
~ FV
"Good enough" is an acceptance of mediocrity. Now that a top-tier director like Martin Scorsese is promoting Black Forest Labs and praising its AI storyboarding tool, many others will inevitably fall in line. As a film historian, you would think he'd be more concerned about the effect AI will have on artists.
In 2017, the film Loving Vincent was released. It brought many of Vincent van Gogh's masterpieces to life through animation, with every frame hand-painted on canvas by a large team of artists. The project took four years to complete. Now YouTube is chock-full of AI-generated videos imitating the styles of famous artists in a matter of minutes.
The examples David described, along with Laurence John's story, really drive home the impact.
Most of his recent work has been tosh....maybe he's lost the plot
I remember well when we really began losing work to illustrators that worked fully digitally. The efficiency of undos, digital «inking» and automated gradients could not be competed against in the long run. Petty of me, but I must admit I have zero sympathy for the digital artists now being unmade by the evolved tools that made them.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I've never seen digital inking or automated gradients that looked better than those produced by moderately accomplished traditional artists. And it's hard to see the 'undo' arrow as more than a minor convenience. Can't conceive of any of these as confering any advantage of significance unless in simple graphics where minor speed increases can cumulatively push production.
Just about the first major IP event at the dawn of the internet was the theft of the entire Bitstream type library. Which was placed online and stolen ten thousand times.
That's the Rosebud and Rosetta Stone of everything we see now. The internet was not created with care, ethics, or morals. The online world immediately "socialized" other people's work, and taught people to be narcissistic consumers of stolen property. Facilitated by massive Silicon Valley companies hoovering up stolen content and giving it free to users and getting addicted users to provide content for free in turn, also usually stolen. Google was an extension of that, YouTube is the hyper-extension of that. And now A.I. is the ultimate theft machine. What is safe from it?
Certain A.I.s, as recently reported, can now infiltrate anything connected to the internet and exfiltrate data/IP.
There is no way forward in digital/online art or music. Perfect scalability and no protections for artists means the value of everything goes down to zero. A total failure of law and governance. Back to reality.
I've never seen digital inking or automated gradients that looked better than those produced by moderately accomplished traditional artists. And it's hard to see the 'undo' arrow as more than a minor convenience. Can't conceive of any of these as confering any advantage of significance unless in simple graphics where minor speed increases can cumulatively push production.
The market disagreed and continues to do so.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>>>we really began losing work to illustrators that worked fully digitally.
"We". I thought you said you didn't have talent.
~ FV
Kev Ferrara-- I think the process you describe was accomplished in waves, and the first wave-- scraping the whole web-- was camouflaged as a boon to humanity: "this will help you find things, learn things, meet like-minded friends!" It took a few years to figure out that the internet was not always connecting you to the best person or the right answer, it was connecting you to the loudest voice, the algorithmically privileged, or-- most of all-- the people who paid extortion money to Google. By then the data were gone and it was too late to close the barn door. A "failure of law and governance"? Sure, but also a failure of human character.
In the second wave, social media taught us, "ahem, it turns out you have to pay to get your stolen data back, but it's still good for you because you can build an audience." This blog post really focuses on the third wave, which eradicates authorship, destroys your connection to, or your use of your creations, distributes the resulting atomized pink slime to everyone who once thought, "gee, I'd like to be an illustrator" or "gee I'd like to write a novel." It enables them to painlessly produce something that, in the words of commenters above, is "good enough." Who among us can persuade an audience with atrophied creative muscles and reduced cognitive function, that the art is not good enough?
That's why I suggest that AI qualifies as a 4th epic humiliation in a league with the first three, and I ask for views on a worthy artistic response.
@FV Where did you learn about Marx? He wasn't lazy, he was a workaholic. He wasn't ignorant, he was a scholar of economics and history. He didn't ask for violence, he said that historically people with wealth and power used violence to keep it and people without wealth and power used violence to get it. He also said that a democracy could work things out without violence.
No expert, but saw an interesting BBC piece portraying as living off his wife, total scrounger, etc. Another piece on a Melvyn Bragg radio programme all the historian panel agreed that the economics came from Engels. Most of Marx's money did.
"Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction." (Marx and Engels - Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League)
When implemented = “Executions are a test—anyone unable to kill an ideological enemy can hardly be considered a true communist.”
(Or any number of examples present in every single implementation of Marx)
Ideas:
- make art that transmits the feeling of dispossession
- don't make art whose appreciation depends on how difficult it is to make
- make revolutionary art that makes you want to burn the whole thing down
- make art that puts the artist on the same side with the spectator
- it's not humans vs machines, it's humans vs market forces/thieves
- don't make art on mediums where you pay rent to a capitalist
- do theater?
- if it can be recorded, stored, and transmitted it will be pillaged and monetized
- the art is not in the form, language, or style, which can be easily faked. What's left is the message.
I can think of more.
@FV “Executions are a test—anyone unable to kill an ideological enemy can hardly be considered a true communist.” This was a low level bureaucrat in Yugoslavia many years after Marx died. Don't try to hang that on Marx.
Yawn.
What do you wanna hear, fan boy? None of the 100 million dead bodies were Marx's fault! None of the death camps, purges, or forced starvation. None of the ruined economies, none of the lying, scheming, delusions, madness, violence, and suffering was his fault! None of the struggle sessions, or torturing, none of the destroyed statues and buildings, none of the zealous indoctrinated children turning in their parents for want of communist belief was Marx's fault! None of the black market economies, none of the secret police, none of the personal theft of countries' resources by elites!
Marx is a saint, through and through!! An economic genius!
Feel better now, fan boy? Your God has been totally exonerated and raised up to genius sainthood. Just where you want him. Now all praise Karl Marx. Amen.
~ FV
Marxism is amazingly unique. The world's first violent revolutionary ideology that led to a hundred million deaths by accident. An immaculate misconception!
@xopxe
It's not just the behemoths that have usurped the market. It *is* the mechanisation of 'making' that's, I would say, the bigger problem.
You can have theft and abuse of the rules the market pretends/is supposed to play by (according to anyone's stance on 'market')
But you're still left with either (a) a person who is talking to an ai for want of meaningful human communion, or (b) people who through use of this over time become so utterly desensitised that at first they will be unable to distinguish the difference, and eventually will lose the capacity to experience the meaningful communion, between people or with the world.
The same thing will happen in 'making'/art. Thoughts becomming ai-like will run parallel to the processes we are discussing here wiith regard to human creative-communicative processes.
I think people need to centre themselves and what they do in what you call, in your last suggestion, 'the message' (which isn't of course just didactics)
Bill
"Don't try to hang that on Marx."
Do you want a list of the bloody results of every application of what Marx called for in the address quoted above?
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