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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.
214 comments:
1 – 200 of 214 Newer› Newest»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.
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?
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
- Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
2. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
3. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.
4.The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
…thus begins Guy Debord’s book, Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967.
The Situationists identified the problem 50 years ago, and advocated for less mediation, and more situations. Fewer parasocial relationships, more social interaction. More everyday life, less elitism. More craft, less Art.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
…60 years ago, even.
And, obviously, being Marxists, they placed the resposibility for the unavoidable commodification of absolutely everything on capitalism. And therefore, like Marx and Christ and the Founding Fathers, they are responsible for the death of millions, and should be …cancelled!
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Your keyboard should be cancelled.
>>>>Yawn.
Listen, I'm as bored by you as you are. But it is the obvious question. Why not answer it? (I have a feeling you mostly work on the coding of the microcontrollers and microprocessors for the robots. And not the actual engineering of the robots as objects. Am I right?)
xopxe-- I tested some of your ideas by seeing how AI would handle them. For "transmitting the feeling of dispossession," AI came up with predictable stereotypes of people being evicted from their homes or people displaced from their communities under the watchful eyes of soldiers, or refugees from bombed out communities. In short, AI instantly came up with good, middle range, predictable treatments. The version I requested "in the style of Ronald Searle" was, I thought, quite good but the picture "in the style of Milton Glaser" was terrible.
For "art that makes you want to burn the whole thing down," AI provided images of fat, wealthy people laughing and eating from platters of gourmet food while thin homeless people begged for food. I'm guessing that's the kind of image where most illustrators would start (and many would end).
In short, the topics you describe resonate as depictions of our predicament, but 1.) it seems like AI will once again have us outmatched on the lower 80% of the images describing the predicament AI creates; and 2.) while depicting the predicament, these topics don't do much to forestall our future, or even give us consolation about what now seems inevitable.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "If a local gang loots your home, I'm not much interested in "artistic responses" to that theft. I'm more interested in police responses."
The police aren't coming, any more than the police came to restore the earth to its location in the universe, or to change our origin story to begin in Milton's Garden of Eden rather than through abiogenesis in a warm saline tidal pool. When Google was new, I was involved with one of the first federal litigations claiming that Google's business model violated trademark laws. The judge said, "technically you're right, this appears to infringe on the trademark but I'm not sure there's anything a court can do to give effective relief. If I issue an injunction to make the internet behave, how will I enforce it? I'd just look foolish." In other words, "the police ain't coming."
So my advice is that you stop waiting for the police, and use art to either grow past what AI can do or to find solace from the fact that one of our central claims to glory has been dashed.
98% with chimps; 60% with sea-cucumbers, for context. They have 100 sphincters. Which double as mouths.
>>>>>>sea-cucumbers.... sphincters....
Dude. That's the 3rd time I've read that same lame joke on this blog. Was it you every time?
If you want to come across as witty, either be actually original and clever or post your stupid dad jokes to forums where people don't have good memories.
~ FV
A ton of people do not like A.I. Will not read AI books, won't listen to AI music, boo at AI preachers on stages. There's definitely some people who are all in on it, but hardly everybody is going to adopt it for creative tasks.
As it is, it looks a lot of the build-out for the giant data centers is going to cease, with the vast majority of terabytes/ram going local and onsite for local businesses and individual users.
~ FV
« What? You JUST QUOTED HIM on this point as if you were intimately familiar with him. You complete internet fraud.»
…obviously doesn’t mean I’m familiar with or interested in your thoughts on the matter.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I sphinct you're right
The problem is not the machine, it's the task. The task of the internet, as the task of any machine today, is to extract economic value from people's human activity. Under capitalism you are not the owner of the result of your work, you only sell your work force. What is made with is determined by owners of the infrastructure. They'll decide in what your life force is spent on, and use the result as they see fit. And they make decisions with a single driving motivation: accumulation. And then everything is build to protect the owners of the infrastructure.
That's the order, and the police is here to guard it. That's why the police won't be coming after the AI business, but it will fall like a hammer on a teenager burning bootleg CDs of a live performance, or someone like Aaron Swartz. Just like if a person steals a diaper from a supermarket she or their children can get shot, but if a board of directors steals from thousands of workers nothing happens.
About the AI handling "revolution", the results is expected. Of course it will fail, because a) its purpose it's to fail a revolution, and then b) AI only averages the common sense existing revolutionary art, which means it is averaging failures. And again, capitalism is famous for phagocyting protest expressions. Once you get into that trap, you drown in a sea of meta, ref: Chemical Brother's clip for Out of Control.
That's why the idea of getting out sideways: you can not protest from inside. Not because it's hypocritical or whatever, just because it does not work. A reference can be Mexican muralists like Siqueiros or Orozco. They painted on walls. They were discussing universal themes like freedom, death and justice, but they spoke a specific language of a specific people, and were saying stuff that was specific to them. They had a discussion with people they could convince and get convinced by, because they understood the arguments. They were not observers, like a NYT cover could be. Of course they ultimately failed, but that is sort of the historical path: forward trough failing.
Bogna Konior’s «The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet» offers an interesting approach to the internet, AI (and aliens!).
From the description: Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filled with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation.
It might be productive to treat capitalism as an AI - this too, is an old idea.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
One of the most fun things about this blog is the unexpected paths these conversations take. Who would've guessed that this discussion would lead to a debate about Karl Marx?
I try to steer clear of political discussions here for practical reasons (they tend to expand to dominate the entire discussion, push out the art stuff I care about, and make people crazy). However, I think there are two points that should be added here in the name of objectivity, regardless of where a person resides on the political spectrum:
First, we shouldn't blame an idea for the misbehavior of people who invoke it. If Marx is responsible for the misbehavior of Stalin and Mao, then Jesus is responsible for the misbehavior of his "followers" who killed tens of millions in the name of Christianity. We shouldn't try to hang the crusades, the 30 Years War, the French wars of religion, the colonial slaughter of indigenous nonbelievers, etc. on the "prince of peace."
Second, the label of "communism" long ago lost its meaning in the illiterate US, and today is little more than a swear word employed by demagogues to manipulate uneducated people. As Donald Trump said in an interview, "All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist." Whether true or not, it's enough to set gullible and unthinking people foaming at the mouth.
Personally I think communism-- the historical economic theory of dialectical materialism leading to the "withering away of the state"-- is highly unpersuasive and I'd take arms any day against Stalinism or the khmer rouge variant. But I think the deliberate misuse of language should offend anyone interested in serious discussion about a range of economic alternatives.
Further, you don’t have to buy into the Hegelian stuff to see that Marx’ critique of capitalism remains productive.
«All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.»
The relevance of capitalist realism to the seemingly inevitability of AI disruption, as xopxe alludes to, is blindlingly obvious.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Trump's exact campaign quote was, "All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that is going to destroy our country."
Point being that the Democrat Party had become (and remains) an amorphous blob of various radical and destructive positions plus massive corruption. All hiding behind various captured news organizations, captured institutions, and NGOs. With overlaps and cooperation between otherwise distinct brands of radicalism and grift. Such that the mess of psychopathic political tendencies defies easy description.
Rather than getting lost in the weeds of defining them - which is where all the sophistic and manipulative verbal virtuosos on that side fare best - Trump correctly assessed that most normal people - despite all the media propaganda - could see generally what was happening in the country, so best be simple about it on the campaign trail. Given that it was not actually possible to label the shape-shifting and dishonest Democrat party in any singular accurate way.
~ FV
There are violent Chritian acts, violent acts by Buddhists, Muslims and Marxists, all committed in either the context of those as group identities or their beliefs.
Only in the last two of the four are there explicit justifications for violence and calls for it to advance or consolidate those systems.
This violence is implied throughout Marx's writings.
“Marx clearly enjoyed the horrors he depicted, and we shall find him enjoying in very much the same way the destruction of whole classes in the ‘Communist Manifesto.’ He was a man with a peculiar faculty for relishing disaster.”
Robert Payne, in Marx, 1968
There is an overt call to extreme violence in the address from Marx and Engels above (& there are others from him).
People can do 'whatabout...', but nothing in all human history compares to the correctly given figure above, of over 100,000,000;
https://archive.org/details/BlackBookOfCommunism
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674076082
'The relevance of capitalist realism to the seemingly inevitability of AI disruption, as xopxe alludes to, is blindlingly obvious.'
The trend of expropriation, mass surveilance, 'utopian' promise, false Commons, etc, has as much in common with Marxist collectivisation.
'The Socialist revolution depended on the predominance of large-scale enterprise in industry, commerce and banking, which would make possible the expropriation of the capitalists by workers organised into collectivities in the actual process of capitalist production.'
In the end, they treat the individual and the community the same way.
When two things create identical results, only fools believe the claims either gives to distinguish itself from the other.
The trend of expropriation, mass surveilance, 'utopian' promise, false Commons, etc, has as much in common with Marxist collectivisation.>/i>
You might as well claim that current conditions could just as well be the result of radical discordianism, gnosticism, yoga instructors or the mating habits of turtles. If you truly believe current conditions are a result of marxism, you might just be insane.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Hur-hur, dumbfuck.
Would a Marxist Utopia switch off AI ? How would it use it ? What would be its results ?
If only we had a people's republic somewhere to answer these questions...
Marxism thinks human values are sentimental fantasies, uber-capitalism thinks the question of their reality is an irrelevance. Even if capitalism begot a.i., it is Marxism's wet dream.
Conjugate the bit above that begins 'The Socialist revolution depended on the predominance of...' into an alternate timeline where a.i. had been present.
@FV After Trump you can't criticize anyone for corruption ever again. The Republicans gave up everything to lick the butt of the most corrupt president in history. For the next hundred years if you mention morality or decency or family values everyone will laugh in your face.
Being a Democrat is so fun. Deepthroating propaganda all day long. You must love it.
~ FV
Jesus preached love, grace, personal generosity, and family and against the 7 deadly sins.
Marx preached against the family, for violence and (in his blinding ignorance of how government, economics, and entrepreneurship works) a State of absolute power. He was clearly, by action, direction or implication, for the 7 deadly sins.
These are diametrically opposed teachings. And it's really funny to read the same smug intellectuals who obsess about words all day, who treat words as actions, and books as their gods on Earth, suddenly denying the power of words to influence the world.
Acedia was once the most feared of the sins until it was reduced down to Sloth. But Acedia is the stronger formulation. “A foul darkness” or bitter resentment, which robs the will to live and results in people who are happy to see others in pain and suffering. Nothing better exemplifies Marx and his legacy. It gathers the miserable, lazy and dark hearted like moths to a flame.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Hiding behind this overheated political rhetoric I think there's actually an important question related to the subject at hand. There are currently half a dozen big tech AI companies in a desperate competition to win the AI race. The more thoughtful and cautious that these companies are about the consequences of their inventions or the property rights they are using, the slower they become and the more likely they are to lose the race. The faster and more heedless they are, the more likely they will be to acquire Elon Musk level wealth. That wealth is currently the sole motivating factor steering the future of AI now (except for developers in China where military domination is the primary concern).
The outcome of this race will affect not just the future of art and the credit for what you create, but also the future of global warfare, the future of your privacy, the security of all your passwords and the records of all your assets.
So all of you disputatious commenters so eager to argue about capitalism and communism, do you think a capitalist profit motive is the best guide for the development of AI? Do you think lowly artists will ever get the overlords of AI to pay royalties for the intellectual property they've processed? And if the only alternative is oversight by a centralized government, how could that effectively ameliorate the dangers descrbed above?
There aren’t any bankers, Great Leaders, CEOs, tech bros or Capitalists running capitalism. No one is in charge. It is running itself, and the neither the goals nor outcomes of its workings are defined by what humans actually care about. Describing it merely as an economic system is insufficient - it is rather like a neural network. It is self-improving, growing and converging. It ate marxism many years ago. It ate art. It ate Jesus. It has no equal. The divine right of kings came to an end, but it remains easier now to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
ChatGPT isn’t the competing intelligence we have to worry about. The fourth humiliation is capitalism.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>>>"The fourth humiliation is capitalism. - - - Postmodern Anonymouse"
Wow. Congrats on finally admitting what we all already knew, you gaslighting creep. You made Jordan Peterson's exact point about the proliferation of hybrid postmodern-commies. Now if you'll only admit that you've never cracked an economics book, never run a business, resent successful people and entrepreneurs, and try desperately to seem intelligent while knowing what a bumbling fool you are in real life, that would be grand.
~ FV
Wholeheartedly agree with you, David. Aren't there enough political sites for those who want to discuss politics?
>>>>>>>>except for developers in China where military domination is the primary concern.
Simply not true. China is also using AI to insure its own citizens can never form a rebellion against their centralized iron rule. Facial recognition. Social credit scores. Media control. Blackmail. Censorship. Etc.
You know... all the stuff that Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden's controllers, and the Globalist Left love. It would be a good idea to prevent that kind of centralization of AI power and control with prickly authoritarian leftist technocrats. Which means keeping the current crop of illiberal "Democrats" out of office.
That answers but one issue with AI, I admit. But it's a good start.
~ FV
Postmodern Anonymouse-- well, if we aren't there now, we could be there soon. Are you sure you mean that capitalism is the fourth humiliation, and not fertile soil for the fourth humiliation?
Be that as it may, assuming you were correct about the situation, I'm still waiting for an answer to the title of this post: What remains after the fourth great humiliation? Have you got anything for me?
I think the most important art still will be created and performed on the local level, away from the totalizing powers of more global markets. Mothers singing to their toddlers, sisters drawing with their brothers, fathers building with their children, friends roleplaying together, forming plein air-groups and musical bands. The authenticity of such expressions does not really matter - they cannot be dislocated from the totalizing forces that define the world today. But as long as they happen face to face and beyond the immediate capture of commodification, some hope remains. Of course, once the local artist’s skill and popularity reaches a certain threshold, the Eye of the market will be upon him, immidiately subsuming and destroying him. So it goes.
«Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience», wrote Larry Law, and I think he (and the earlier Situationists) was on to somehing. Earlier still, Walter Benjamin as well was on to something in his thoughts on the aura of art. And, of course, later, Baudrillard.
But, there will always be passionate youth, burning with the need to create and to destroy without any real sense of time, always ready the face and enforce the new.
And there will always be men in their middest, interpreting the impending end of their own life as the imminent end the the world. The production of new gods and new meaning will continue, to the great displeasure of the old priests.
There are no actual, global Humiliations. Just an unending series of lesser, local ones. History does not unfold, things just happen. We are not in control.This was the lesson of the «masters of suspicion».
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Postmodern Anonymouse
'friends roleplaying together'
Ok, but please not this bit.
Hah. I was thinking cowboys and uh, native Americans?, cops and uh, socially maladjusted?, Dungeons and uh, well I guess Dragons is still OK, etc etc.
It's very simple, Magats! Nobody should be allowed to have an amount of money I don't like. And people shouldn't be allowed to invest their money! They should give it to me, so I have the money! I mean, it should be given to the State! And then me! I need that money to buy food to eat while I read books!
No, it's not stealing to take people's money! Especially if I say that the people who have money stole it in the first place! They didn't earn that! Now I can take their money free and clear because it's just stealing from thieves! Tee tee! Now its my money!
My favorite Economics textbook is Robin Hood! I just passed an IQ test!
Liberal Mindy
xe/xer
How DARE you, Mindy.
Robin Hood has been cancelled. It is clearly heteronormative pink-people propaganda and doesn't have the requisite ESG quota of Black Englishmen, Medieval Trannies, and nonbinary fat women yelling about the patriarchy. Make Robin Hood a Latinx lesbian, convert all the heraldry into rainbow flags, make all the arrows into dildoes, and get some sexy pre-pubescent children in there! Then we can talk. All folk tales must be woke tales!
We shall overcum!
Doctress Martina Luthera Queen
Postmodern Anonymouse-- It sounds like the safe refuge from AI that you're describing is similar to folk art, tribal art or outsider art. It has much to commend it-- In the past century such art has tended to be more sincere and heartfelt than the heavily promoted and manipulated international art market. Some of it is definitiely high quality. So perhaps the new folk art could lead to a some satisfying, purer aesthetic activity..
I hope you're right that "there will always be passionate youth, burning with the need to create," but if creation is seen as a losing battle against AI, and is no longer a way to get famous or attract girls, it's not clear to me that burning passion to create will be enough to lure youth away from video games.
Now wait! Trans people are caused by pornography addiction and mentally ill mothers. Meanwhile pornography, addiction and mental illness are all caused by capitalism. So if you destroy capitalism, you will destroy trans people, which is a hate crime.
No more TERFS!
Liberal Mindy
xe/xer
'Outsider Art' has been an art world niche since the early 90s, rising in tandem with 'pop surrealism' (which you've conspicuously never mentioned on this blog) and much other trendy faux-naive and folk-twee art and illustration post 2000. 'Raw Vision' Magazine dedicated to outsider art has been around since 1989. The "Outsider Art Fair' has taken place annually in NYC since 1993...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X4xVbNebdU
Call me jaded, but a 30+ year old hipster scene isn't going to save Western art.
Laurence John wrote: "a 30+ year old hipster scene isn't going to save Western art."
Well, I think the premise of this discussion is that it's quite possible western art can't be saved-- at least not in anything remotely resembling its current form, with its current status and dignity. We may be talking about a reboot in art, not this year but perhaps in the next 25.
Outsider art, like folk art, has been around for thousands of years, not 30+. It may have become a "market niche" in the last 30 or 40 years, but that doesn't concern me. For thousands of years people have decorated their personal space with folk art the way that the bower bird selects brightly colored and interesting objects to decorate its nest. "Outsiders" have created outsider art to soothe their troubled minds or to worship their gods. Are their pictures any good? Yes, I'd say some of them are extraordinarily beautiful and moving. ( https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/02/difference-between-tragedy-and-mere.html ), certainly more beautiful and moving than the pictures you'd see in most Manhattan art galleries today.
The scenario proposed by Postmodern anonymouse ( "art still will be created and performed on the local level, away from the totalizing powers of more global markets. Mothers singing to their toddlers, sisters drawing with their brothers, fathers building with their children, friends roleplaying together, forming plein air-groups and musical bands.") has some obvious flaws, not the least of which is that some artists will be better than others, attract local attention, which leads to regional attention, which leads us back to global attention and the process starts all over again. Parents may "sing to their toddlers" on a personal level, but what happens when groups like the Beatles emerge from the grass roots? Are they able to compete with new AI music prompted to be composed "in the style of the Beatles"? Can their songs even be heard in an environment where 10,000 mediocre clone songs can be effortlessly created every hour?
David: "Can their songs even be heard in an environment where 10,000 mediocre clone songs can be effortlessly created every hour?"
The more Beatles-ripped-off Ai-generated music fills the world, the more the public will hanker after the real thing.
When everyone can generate a personal music stream tailored just to their liking the end result has no value. I actually think that most people WANT to be wowed by the next genius of a specific medium. A software process feeding you more of what you already like is NOT a replacement for that. I think we have a hard-wired part of us that responds to human achievement, that wants to be amazed at the skill of an artist, and Ai is definitely not that.
Mr. Apatoff, people who have your level of blackpilling are a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're not helping the arts. You are, in fact, "talking down the market" by being such a doomer. You're depressing yourself and others. And no, you aren't "seeing things clearly." You're seeing things wholly through a particular lens. Laurence John understands the reality on the ground better than you do.
When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, everybody like you declared chess to be dead. AI is ten times better than Deep Blue, and yet chess has exploded in popularity, with AI functioning mostly as a kind of commentator on the action.
People haven't stopped being people just because new technology showed up. And they never will.
Anonymous-- You're certainly correct that Laurence John understands reality better than I.
On your other points, I'm not so sure. May I ask, have you ever used AI to fulfill professional artistic obligations? Notwithstanding the little AI picture I put at the top of this column to make a point, the last time I painted a paperback cover in oils it took me two days. The last time I created a paperback cover with AI it took me ten minutes (and did a better job).
But thanks very much for the implication that my little blog could affect the art market.
Anon, I'm afraid you've mistaken me for an optimist. My negative take on Ai does not mean that I think that Western art and culture is in a healthy state right now, or going through a trough before the cusp of a new golden age. Far from it. Just that I don’t think a clever mix of search engine and image generator is the answer to our current situation.
>>>>>>"the last time I painted a paperback cover in oils it took me two days"
2 days is quick! Cool! What was the paperback cover you painted? Was it a pro job or a self-published kind of thing?
~ FV
As it has already done in programming and certain areas of science, AI will not merely equal the greatest human artists, it will surpass them by a considerable margin.
I believe that within the decade, AI art will be objectively superior in every respect to even the greatest works of the human mind in any media. At that point, the only reason to look at/read/listen to/watch human-made art will be as a curious index of our mediocrity and hubris.
If you believe that then you've already mispurposed Read-Listen-Look and don't need to wait.
>>>>>AI art will be objectively superior in every respect to even the greatest works of the human mind in any media.
So a "better" movie than Godfather awaits us, but with no actors in it? And no director? No set designer? No lighting guy? No screenwriter?
~ FV
AI is a powerful catalyst for further devaluation of labor and accumulation of capital. The age of mechanical reproduction might be over. As traditional artists lost work to a generation of artists using digital tools, this generation will now lose work to digital tools. Jobs will be lost, new products and markets will be created. The commodity aspect of art will certainly be disrupted.
But art as a social activity and as a process of engaging with the world, need not be directly affected. There will still be reason to marvel at your child’s drawings. There will still be reason to fail meaningfully at capturing the sunlight dancing on the endlessriver in your stupid little sketcbook. There will still be reason to sing together in church or on stage. There will still be reason to look at an oil painting and realize that it visibly contains the story of its own making.
In time, AI might change everything. Contrary to an above poster’s remarks on chess, chess has changed, following Deep Blue’s win. Yes, it’s gotten more widely popular, but the Chess World Championship doesn’t really matter as much as it used to. The importance of openings has lessened, and the importance of beauty and elegance as well. Speed and entertainment are now key factors. And there’s no going back.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Every dubious thing you say is asserted with perfect authority. How enjoyable.
The Chess World Championship doesn't matter as much as it used to because now great chess matches among the top players are constantly happening and available to view online. Both in classical and blitz. Also, the greatest chess player in the world Magnus Carlsen relinquished his classical crown without incident. And Kasparov, the previous GOAT, is effectively retired. So any current championship match won't actually determine the greatest player in the world by any measure. And isn't some ultra-rare meeting of minds.
With Fischer-Spassky, a unique confluence of events conspired to make the match not only a rare national sporting interest, but also an international matter with respect to the Cold War paradigm. That echoed going forward until Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Which was the actual 4th Great Humiliation. Just afterward, home computers became ubiquitous, as did chess apps and online chess sites.
The idea that openings, beauty, and elegance is of less concern these days is patently wrong. Rhapsodizing in chess commentary is constant. Long games with commentary are constantly watched globally.
Fyi, chess was always primarily an entertainment/addiction. Blitz chess and chess bums have been around for a hundred plus years. Marcel Duchamp became a chess bum after giving up on his art jokes.
So a "better" movie than Godfather awaits us, but with no actors in it? And no director? No set designer? No lighting guy? No screenwriter?
Well, with an AI director, set designer, lighting guy, and screenwriter.
I wouldn’t say that’s “no” director. In the sense that the system would be a better director than any human, living or dead, there is a meaningful sense in which that film would be the most heavily directed film ever made.
This is in the same sense that a computer is the purest form of a Computer that there is.
>>>>>>>"there is a meaningful sense in which that film would be the most heavily directed film ever made."
So better Guy Ritchie, John Wick and John Woo movies? With soulless simulacra instead of actors? Great. Top cinema.
~ FV
Every dubious thing you say is asserted with perfect authority. How enjoyable.
I don’t agree with everything in your post, and I do believe AI has had a significant effect on the developement of the game, but overall - I think you’re probably right. I put too much value in the position of the classical world chess championship.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Nothing Copernicus showed has the slightest real consequence.
Agree wholeheartedly with this Kev, which is why I also don't go along with David's 'four humiliations of humanity' argument.
We shape our day by the sun rising and going down, not by how the earth orbits the sun. We don't drink H2O, we drink water.
chris bennett (and Kev Ferrara)-- so I guess you believe the earth is flat because that's the way it looks from your window. What you're saying is that truth "doesn't have the slightest consequence." Reality "doesn't have the slightest consequence." If I thought you sincerely meant that, rather than offering it as a diverting piece of sophistry, I'd be disappointed.
David, I'm talking about meaning, and that we carry out our lives through meaning. To someone who has never tasted sugar, informing them that the white granules they see in the bowl are molecules composed of 12 atoms of carbon, 22 atoms of hydrogen, and 11 atoms of oxygen will not have the slightest consequence as to their experience of it. Reality is 'tasted' through our experience.
So I say again; we drink water, not H20. The new day is seen as the rising of the sun, heard as the dawn chorus, not as the moving of the surface of the globe we are situated on rotating into the path of the sun's rays, or whatever the zoological, biological explanation for early morning birdsong is . And if you told me your experience of walking across a flat field feels like you are traversing a huge sphere of rock spinning at approximately 1,000 miles an hour at the equator... I'd be concerned for your sanity.
What Chris said.
so I guess you believe the earth is flat because that's the way it looks from your window. What you're saying is that truth "doesn't have the slightest consequence." Reality "doesn't have the slightest consequence."
Are we doing the Kathy Newman, "So what you're saying is..." bit? (One of my favorites)
You’re prompting me to argue points I consider remedial…
Some facts have consequences. Those that do not are usually completely out of any scale that matters, or far, far away, or trivial, or are merely conjectures. Theories don't change reality unless they turn out to offer something actionable. (Unless they’ve been installed through brainwashing or psychological programming. Clearly there are people that actively hallucinate what they are told to believe. I do not. Barring that kind of mind, cosmological ideologies of any stripe - whether scientific, religious, or mythic - change nothing.)
I doubt you walk around with the latest theories in physics governing how you drive your car to the office. If we find out we had gravity wrong at the theoretical level, will your briefcase fall off your desk any differently? If there are no consequence to a piece of knowledge, how does that fact alter your world? I don’t get it.
The fact of the roundness of the Earth, on the other hand, does have physical consequences to our behavior. For travelers, importers, exporters, explorers, warfighters, politicians, global business folk, birds, etc. The knowledge is useful. That makes it a non-trivial fact. And a inapt example of what Chris and I are talking about.
If I thought you sincerely meant that, rather than offering it as a diverting piece of sophistry, I'd be disappointed.
First you offer me advice, and now you threaten me with your disappointment. Unless you adopted me without my knowledge, you should probably redirect these kinds of remarks to your kids. :)
A bit of historical imaginative empathy is required. You have to imaginatively put yourself in the place of someone in the past who DID believe in one of the 'three great humiliation' scenarios (pre-humiliation) in order to understand their significance to those people in any way.
Obviously if you've grown up in an era in which they've all been debunked, then you'll just shrug and go 'what's the big deal' ?
Laurence, this irrelevant to what myself and Kev are saying in that the fundamental principles governing human experience and existential being-ness are necessarily prior to intellectual cognition and therefore immune from it. A map does not change the terrain it is a re-presentation of.
It's well known that humans physics intuition is broken: we naturally have the laws of motion wrong. For example, if we move something in a circular motion and let it go, we think it will keep moving in a circle; if we move something horizontally and let it go, we believe it will fall straight down,; and so on. We can live with this intuition all our life, or change it through study and experimentation.
Now, this is from an interview to.Konstain Bronzit, a russian animator:
The main cause of the crisis (global, not just ours) is the staggering overproduction of content. Technology has significantly accelerated the process of creating animation, and now there is so much of it that audiences simply can’t keep up with consuming everything. As a result, studios are cutting staff, revenue streams are shrinking, and so on. With the arrival of AI, the situation will only become more complicated. I’ve already said that things will get worse. Nothing is going to save the animation industry—and why should it?
So what should young people do? My simple advice: think about it less. If an aspiring creator is preoccupied with the future of the industry and whether their film will be in demand, then something is off with the creator themselves. A true director is focused solely on their film, on how to make something great. In those moments, the rest of the world should cease to exist for them. That is the only proper state for the creative process. If a creator enters a state of flow, there is a chance they will make something worthwhile—and one day the world will notice it.
Unfortunately, this too is an intellectual position - this too is a map.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Chris: "... which is why I also don't go along with David's 'four humiliations of humanity' argument"
If you accept that certain people - who believe that humans were created by a divine creator - will reject the idea of evolution by natural selection (for example), then I don't understand what your objection is to the initial 'four humiliations' hypothesis.
Laurence,
Projecting my imagination into history gives me different answers.
I think most people - now and throughout history - are just trying to pragmatically get through their day. So when we talk about what "the human race" believes, I think it has mostly believed that the sun rises in the morning, ya gotta eat during the day so get to it, and when the sun sets, find shelter. Anybody who had an ideology that overrode those facts on the ground, probably didn't make it. Whatever tribal modules of fancy were installed over the eons were surely helpful to immediate survival; the meaning of them being more their coercive power rather than their actual content.
I truly do not know how many members of "the human race" ever believed - in some all-in raving ego-invested way - that they were the center of all creation, that they were divine beings, and perfectly rational. Such that assertions to the contrary would cause paroxysms. I don't have Savanarolas in my family, and almost nobody has. Such screaming ideological fire-and-brimstone types tend to be people with extreme cases of anxiety and inner turmoil; malignant narcissists who project their fears outwards in an effort to control others and the world. Are those people really believed, or just obeyed so as to stay out of trouble (or ignored while pretending to obey?) The truth is most people just want some love, a job, a sandwich, and a break; a more pragmatic form of narcissism.
Narcissism is a key human ingredient, no doubt. A basic mammalian ingredient, one presumes, as well. Probably an ingredient of every living thing ever. After all, we all are (until further notice) wholly bound up in our one mortal coil, til death do us part. It takes a screwy brain to not take one's own side in an argument when all of experience is telling you that's the only way you're going to survive.
Once we get into big existential theory - that's fingerpainting - things get pretty malleable and squirrelly. We can certainly drown our egos - if depression and hopelessness is a deep part of our sensibility - by fixating on the idea that there's a unimaginably vast uncaring and blind cosmos surrounding and hurtling around us. Yet, given relativity, we can note there is no locked down ultimate standpoint for referencing locations and movements. So it is just as valid to say that we are in fact stationary and all of space is swirling around and past us as that we are hurtling through the cosmos.
@Lawrence.
Because the one thing you can say about the four is they are at best overstatements.
Goethe had ideas that saw humans as nature's pinnacle, believed in the divine, and that that in some way did include God. He also, with others (it wasn't entirely his own intuition) formulated a concept of human evolution from animal forms. Which had no impact on his belief in the transcendent.
Same with Freuds b.s. - did anyone really believe humans were wholly rational? And the rational principle still exists, otherwise noone could recognise it in themselves as counter to the irrational.
Ficino and others envisioned a universe of inhabited planets that mutiplied rather than stole the human pinnacle and the divine from the manifest universe.
There were other forms of belief -inside and outside of the parochial Christian part of it - not beholden to young-earth calculations based on the bible, so weren't impacted by Lyell's geology .
Anybody who uses these 'four' as proofs of meaninglessness had/have either already succumbed to it, even rejoiced in it, or their grounding was based on overliteralism, rigid fundamentalism, etc.
Nor, to be clear, is the opposite, normal (as in, it is how everybody normal lives) position - that there are such things as the rational principle, meaningfulness, etc., and that we exist in and move through them - dependent on a religious stance.
Bruno (though yes, he was burned) a better example than Ficino of those lines of thinking
'Settling Copernicus’s work into what he regarded as the correct framework, Bruno argued that there was no margin, limit, center, surface, or absolute up or down in the universe; it extended infinitely in all directions. The universe contained numberless stars or suns around which revolve worlds or planets, likely inhabited by other intelligent beings shaped by physical conditions of their worlds. The universe contained finite bodies whose motion or rest could only be determined by comparing one body with another, and it would appear generally the same to an observer on any heavenly body.'
The point is, though it was heretical, it was still spiritual, platonic, even Christian. No existential angst, like bad Lovecraft, at the infinite heavens.
I don't think the 'it's got jo soul' objection can be so readily dismissed.
Art essentially comes from an experience with the world, the a.i. comes from nothing.
Sure, it can become 'something' in the experience of the viewer, but then iit's either a mantic game (like reading figures in the clouds, but with the result determined) or a deceit. The a.i. painting is the same thing as the a.i. love-letter, and the psychological (or spiritual) impact on the person that ceases to distinguish them from the human-authored will be identical.
I can't see why, except for bad reasons of expedience, anyone would cut some of their own constant, living control from the making process and subcontract it to a machine. It'd be like a musician splicing his performances with a.i. music, and would feel like a self-con.
Laurence: If you accept that certain people - who believe that humans were created by a divine creator - will reject the idea of evolution by natural selection (for example), then I don't understand what your objection is to the initial 'four humiliations' hypothesis.
The problem lies with the materialist, physicalist indoctrination that has made widespread the belief that we are in effect no more than machines made of meat. Thus it follows that anyone holding such a belief will likely be in agreement with David's 'four humiliations' hypothesis. I of course do not hold with this because the materialist, physicalist account of reality and consciousness is insufficient at best and at worst, ridiculous. Hence I do not share David's view.
You've probably noticed that our culture has grown very, very thin. Hollywood (to take just one of scores of examples) is falling apart. We have deconstructed ourselves to the point where we do not know what stories to tell anymore, and AI slop is its apotheosis.
And contrary to David's view, I see the infestation, uptake if you prefer, of AI into our technologies along with the so-called culture it has shaped, as the final affordance for humans to re-member what we really are. A liberation in fact.
chris bennett and kev ferrara and xopxe-- chris and kev seem to be insisting that Copernicus is irrelevant to people who go out and greet le bel aujourd'hui with their five senses and never see (nor need to think about) the earth spinning on its axis. That's all well and good if you're Lord Byron or Shelley or Keats, prancing around writing lyric poetry. But obviously if you ever want to fly in an airplane or you care about what tomorrow's weather will do to your crops or you get lost in the woods and you need a GPS to augment your five senses, that doesn't apply.
I think xopxe's quote from Konstain Bronzit is the more true middle ground: "A true director is focused solely on their film, on how to make something great. In those moments, the rest of the world should cease to exist for them." There are times when it is important to ignore Copernicus and put that plane of reality out of your mind altogether. But as the old saying goes, "reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away."
Ordinarily I would just let this issue go by, but it concerns me that we have entered an anti-science, anti-rationalist era where a lot of people seem to think their personal emotions, tastes and superstitions supersede empirical science. We need a new Copernicus to persuade these people that the universe doesn't revolve around them.
"But obviously if you ever want to fly in an airplane or you care about what tomorrow's weather will do to your crops or you get lost in the woods and you need a GPS to augment your five senses, that doesn't apply.
I'm sorry to find out in your above reply to my abover reply that you didn't actually read my abover reply.
It concerns me that we have entered an era where a lot of people seem to think their presumptions about what is being expressed are a fair proxy for what is actually said. Possibly this is due to that most modern malady, the "siege mentality." Which breaks patience in favor of hasty presuppositions, and quick dismissals. No recipe for good faith discussion.
Ordinarily, I would just let this issue go by. But the line of rapidly stuffed straw men that rustles through these ramparts wearing a simulacra of my clothing concerns me. Whither an impatient, reactive public?
David, chris and kev seem to be insisting that Copernicus is irrelevant to people who go out and greet le bel aujourd'hui with their five senses and never see (nor need to think about) the earth spinning on its axis. That's all well and good if you're Lord Byron or Shelley or Keats, prancing around writing lyric poetry.
Kev's response above is exactly appropriate to this unfortunate lazy reading of what we are saying. It's not just Lord Byron or Shelly or Keats who experience life in this way, ask your postman, ask the guy fixing your plumbing, ask a nurse, ask the football player, ask the kid playing outside. As yourself.
A map or manual is an extremely useful tool, as is understanding thermodynamic equations when calculating flow turbulence characteristics from an aircraft's turbine. But this has nothing to do with our experience of travel. Do you think the football player kicks a ball thinking of applied mathematics, vector mechanics and ballistic telemetry?
We possess the propositional knowing that the earth is a spherical rock coated with a five mile halo of gas orbiting a star among billions in a galaxy that is among billions of galaxies. Yet for us the sky is 'up' and 'above you' and blue, and the stars 'come out' at night and the moon takes turns with the sun. I loathe the sniffy attitude that declares it is only the educated, poetic types who see things this way. We all do. Naturally.
It is the systematic suppression of our innate comprehension of the world by a doctrine that worships mechanistic power to the exclusion of all else that is suffocating our spirit. Its newest litany is AI. The tyranny of the cynics. Having understood them I have outgrown them and no longer listen to them. They ridicule and poke at what is good, true and beautiful because their life sucks. We only have to look around at what this attitude has done to us, our culture and sense of what we are, to know the truth of this.
David, chris and kev seem to be insisting that Copernicus is irrelevant to people who go out and greet le bel aujourd'hui with their five senses and never see (nor need to think about) the earth spinning on its axis. That's all well and good if you're Lord Byron or Shelley or Keats, prancing around writing lyric poetry.
Kev's response is exactly appropriate to this unfortunate lazy reading of what we are saying. It's not just Lord Byron or Shelly or Keats who experience life in this way, ask your postman, ask the guy fixing your plumbing, ask a nurse, ask the football player, ask the kid playing outside. Ask yourself.
A map or manual is an extremely useful tool, as is understanding thermodynamic equations when calculating flow turbulence characteristics from an aircraft's turbine. But this has nothing to do with our experience of travel. Do you think the football player kicks a ball thinking of applied mathematics, vector mechanics and ballistic telemetry?
We possess the propositional knowing that the earth is a spherical rock coated with a five mile halo of gas orbiting a star among billions in a galaxy that is among billions of galaxies. Yet for us the sky is 'up' and 'above you' and blue, and the stars 'come out' at night and the moon takes turns with the sun. I loathe the sniffy attitude that declares it is only the educated, poetic types who see things this way. We all do. Naturally.
It is the systematic suppression of our innate comprehension of the world by a doctrine that worships mechanistic power to the exclusion of all else that is suffocating our spirit. Its newest litany is AI. The tyranny of the cynics. Having understood them I have outgrown them and no longer listen to them. They ridicule and poke at what is good, true and beautiful because their life sucks. We only have to look around at what this attitude has done to us, our culture and sense of what we are, to know the truth of this.
You AI deniers are fooling yourselves. One in four young adults already think that chatbots are better partners for personal and romantic correspondence than human beings. Do you think they'll miss the "human touch" in pictures?
They'll miss the human touch in life.
It all boils down on either you are curious, or not. That's what will guide how you use what you know and perceive. And while "curiosity" is not one of Sins, it's still one of the main sources of cautionary tales humanity has produced. It's mostly frowned upon.
On the theoretical powers of "AI". What usually is called "AI" today is a particular set of technologies. Those technologies, by their construction, can not produce art. But that is a technological outcome of how they work, and not (necessarily) because of an immutable property of every possible technology. The fact that they can not produce art can not be used as an argument for the fact that such a system is not possible (nor possible). Perhaps some day we will build a contraption that comes with ideas of it's own and will want to share them, perhaps not. If such a thing was to exist, it's probably far in the future, its ideas will be embodied, and will be crazy weird. Perhaps to the point they would fail to communicate to humans.
Anyway, that purely theoretical, because what will be built is whatever maximizes profit for corporations, so pillaging of workforce it is.
Whatever made you think I was 'denying' AI? You're swallowing the same Kool-Aid that brainwashed people during the pandemic into believing the institutional mantra that anyone questioning the efficacy of the lockdowns were anti-vaxers who were denying 'the science'.
Also, the point I'm making is far boarder than 'the human touch in pictures'. And your claim that one in four young people think that chatbots are better partners does nothing to disprove my point. On the contrary, it proves it.
Not clear what your rationale is for saying "Those technologies, by their construction, can not produce art”
Obviously, the ‘Ai will produce greater art than humans’ types, such as Richard above, disagree.
'...fooling yourselves. One in four young adults already think that chatbots are better partners...'
Exactly. I, for one, wish you and your computer girlfriend a long and happy life together.
chris bennett and kev ferrara ("Kev's response is exactly appropriate to this unfortunate lazy reading of what we are saying. It's not just Lord Byron or Shelly or Keats who experience life in this way, ask your postman, ask the guy fixing your plumbing, ask a nurse, ask the football player, ask the kid playing outside.... I loathe the sniffy attitude that declares it is only the educated, poetic types who see things this way. We all do. Naturally." )
My reference to the lyric poets was not intended as a slight, it was intended as a compliment. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt that it's not just the uneducated and superstitious who attempt to close their eyes to the reality revealed by science.
This has unfortunately become a vexatious issue in the US in recent years. Fundamentalists and other assorted science deniers have dug in against modern medicine, geological facts, climate science, etc. Some people look up at the heavens at night and see stars in familiar configurations resembling a fish (pisces) or a bull (taurus) so they become astrologers rather than astronomers like Copernicus. My reference to Shelley or Keats was just my way of saying, "I assume you didn't drop out of the 5th grade in Alabama" and that you're not mentally ill like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sorry if that came across as "sniffy."
I think that some of the ideas you and Kev offer are noble in a 19th century anthropocentric philosophical way, but they underestimate the extent to which scientific discoveries have already changed the landscape. I think there's no longer a bright line between machines on one side and human perceptions and values (or what we've called "qualia" in a previous discussion) on the other. Technology has been nibbling away at that distinction for a century and it seems that the situation is about to get a lot more extreme.
Film makers can already monitor the brain activity of test audiences to determine whether they prefer a red shirt or a blue shirt on the hero. They can measure how long a kiss should last for maximum audience enjoyment and digitally refine the product just as they auto tune our singing voices. These powers seem to have a discernible impact on human aesthetic reactions. More pointedly, the use of microscopic nanobots in our bodies and even our brains to enhance functions, stimulate intelligence, organically connect us to the web, etc. may not be that far off.
I'm not saying that the future of biotechnology and neuroscience is necessarily a good thing, but on the other hand, a merger of the organic and the technological may be the only chance the human race has to keep up with AI, which otherwise seems destined to outmatch us in all respects.
"Can not produce" in the sense that their output is generated through a process we would not considered artistic. The current breed of AI systems based on LLMs (transformer/generative/attention networks) generate their output as a stream of tokens, and have no concept of "piece" nor can represent it internally. They are one-pass, where the output is generated as it goes and they have no mechanism to observe this output nor conceptualize it. There is a hard split between the model (the network's parameters) and the input (the prompt), which implies that the only place where the outcome of the process is kept is in the generated output.
If you envision the artistic process as a communication effort, where there's an internal message/feeling/idea from the artist, a set of means, and an effort to convey the message using the means as to convey the message to the receiver, usually through being empathic with the receiver, that's not what LLMs do. Modern AI is more like an artisan that "thinks with it's hands": it's trained to generate an output that follows a set of laws, laws that are opaque and are just implied in the examples it's feed on. If you can imagine a copywriter or a potter who has "zero artistic drive" in their job, that's sort-of how an LLM feels.
Again, that's a property of these particular technologies. This says nothing about whether it is possible or not (there's no obvious reason why it would not, but some hard conceptual question are on the way).
There used to be a time when calculators were called "artificial brains". Then we thought that if a computer beats a human at chess, that computer would be intelligent. Or fool a human in a conversation. Each time we solved that problem and found out we did it without being forced to implement intelligence. They where hard problems until we solved them, and then found out the solution was actually simple. So the goalposts are continuously receding.
'Technology has been nibbling away at that distinction for a century...'
It really hasn't, and if you think it has you don't understand either the distinction or science.
You said this last time, and gave neuron science as the arena where 'the distinction was blurred'.
What has happened in that arena is a *refining*, delineation, of those physical edges that are involved with 'qualia', - experience. 'Qualia', as was stated then, cannot be measured, it can only be experienced - it quite literally can only be investigated *as* quality-experience from within itself. If you are not investigating it ""as quality-experience, then you are invrstigating something else. As, again, was said last time - it is only the physical causes, events and results associated with experiences of 'qualia' that can be studied by scientists. These can of course be studied in relation to qualia, and always have been. But they do not in any way blur or melt from the one to the other, there is no intermediate phase.
You're free of course to call it all an illusion caused by matter in an illusion of mind, But it is really flabbergasting that you don't get the difference.
'Modern AI is more like an artisan that "thinks with it's hands" '
It doesn't think, nor is like an artisan, in any more than a metaphoric-shorthand sense. I don't know whether that's how you meant it - but when these kinds of comparisons are used it leads people to think of them as having a deeper metaphoric relation signalling different instances of a single phenomenon. Which they certainly are not.
I mean as a metaphor of the production process, not the person. An artisan is capable of doing anything an human does, just sometimes decides not to, or is precluded from. Just like an industrial robot can do the work of a Charly Chaplin working at a factory.
Agreed xopxe.
I used to say that digital art is the first reproduction of an artwork that doesn't actually exist. Then I realized there was a problem with what I call digital lubricity. A hyper-slick artificiality - a lack of evidence of physical consequence - to all the relations that shows that there was no presence involved in the making.
AI images aren't even that. They're lacking consciousness and "spirit" entirely.
Climate Alarmism is losing its grip for a good reason.
Those that have been trauma-bonded by propaganda news networks to that narrative can only freak out about Muh Science! It's the Oil Companies paying the other side! Its Putin! Rather than face the fact that they're dupes. (Al Gore's pseudo-science movie gave him the clout to run a global oil scheme that made him a billionaire. What has it done for you? Did you think Al Gore, the son of corrupt oil man who got a C in his college atmospheric science class, was a scientist?)
But even if the duped NeoLib realizes that they've been propagandized, Murray Gell-Man Amnesia will kick in once again. And they will be properly hoaxed the next time out.
As Thomas Sowell put it, "Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”
'An artisan is capable of doing anything an human does, [....] the production process, not the person'
Oh right, I see, I thought you meant artisan in the pre- capital-A 'artist' sense
The main thing to watch with the climate-stuff (leaving aside disputes about the evidence) is how it is being used by goverhments and industry to distract from the enormous energy consumption increases by digital technology with dubious 'green energy' claims.
We have governments simultaneously taxing households for carbon while, in at least one european country, the energy consumption of the 130 data centres there is over 20% of the national total, far more than the sum of all personal domestic use, in less than a decade.
Like popstars with private jets lecturing on climate ×1,000
That's an extreme example, but others are heading in that direction.
Google were set to wipe what they called 'dead data' a few years ago - obsolete accounts, sites, etc. But then it was determined that it was a mining resource to train/run a.i.
David stop worrying about deepfakes and AI. The danger is more from MAGA and QAnon assholes who will never be convinced about science because their universe rotates around bullshit conspiracy theories.
I'm not saying that the future of biotechnology and neuroscience is necessarily a good thing, but on the other hand, a merger of the organic and the technological may be the only chance the human race has to keep up with AI, which otherwise seems destined to outmatch us in all respects.
First off David, thank you for replying to my slightly salty 'sniffy' inference so graciously and for taking the trouble to more fully explain your point to which I was referring to. My apologies for misinterpreting your meaning.
As to what I've quoted above from you: I wonder what you mean by the human race's need to 'keep up' with AI. You and I know that a mechanical digger is better at excavating a trench than either of us using a spade (maybe you refer to that as shovel in the US) and that using a spade is better than using our bare hands, yet neither of us (I hope!) feels the need to become permanently encased in a mech-suit. Likewise we use a calculator to number-crunch tedious arithmetic tasks without feeling in any way inadequate. AI, actually LLMs are no different. And even if you believe they can become sentient (as the cargo cult boosters in the thrall of the CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI claim), why would you wish to treat yourself like meat-Lego and rebuild your body and brain in it's image? Just look at what's happening to the psyches of young women using heavy plastic surgery to get a whiff of the gypsy warning being whispered to us with all that.
As I've said before, a thing, an identity, is definitionally defined by its limits. So as long as the technologies we use are either an extension of our reach (an axe, a mechanical digger, a calculator an AI agentic agent jigged to a code harness) or a corrective to realign our body to the normative (spectacles, hip replacements, cancer surgery) then we remain, in essence, what we are, human. Maybe you think it's a good thing to become inhuman?
Nicely put 'Anonymous', and not just because I'm in agreement with you! A shame you don't go by a moniker so that I can single out your comments in future.
What do you know about science, ladyboy? You've been an angry and pretentious psycho your entire life. You aren't a scholar. You can barely spell. Go back to staring at the tv and dreaming of wearing a cocktail dress on the red carpet.
Chris, I'm confused by the idea that things are "defined by their limits."
I would say a thing is defined conceptually by the suite of what is essential to its nature, particularly that which makes it distinct and unique (substance, structure, anatomy, affordances, functions, dynamics, aesthetics, etc.) synthesized. This synthesized suite of essentials forms an inherently bounded conceptual unity; self-limiting the definition.
If we are speaking of an actual existent thing, it is this plus whatever other uniquely distinguishing incidentals are there in addition to the conceptual definition's essentials. Essentials plus incidentals.
Secondly, as far as I can tell, every technology is an extension of ourselves. Shorn of our humanity, of course. In that sense technology is as much an abstraction of aspects of ourselves as it is an extension.
chris bennett wrote: "I wonder what you mean by the human race's need to 'keep up' with AI."
Henry Adams, the great 19th century historian and scholar, wrote an important autobiography called "The Education of Henry Adams." Toward the end of his book, he peered into the future and wrote a profound chapter entitled "The Virgin and the Dynamo" about the coming clash between spiritual values and mechanization. At that time mechanization was still at a formative stage but Adams already saw enough to conclude, "Man has mounted science and is now run away with."
I'd agree with him. When I said we should try to "keep up with AI," I only meant that we should try to stay astride science a little while longer. You're right, we should not aspire to do math as fast as a calculator or move earth as well as a mechanical digger. My concern is rather that AI now moves, thinks, and evolves faster than we can, and that we are unable to scrutinize its methodologies, understand the flaws and biases in its algorithms, restrain it or make it behave. If there are ways to augment our natural human abilities, stimulate certain brain functions, make it easier to monitor digital activity by translating electronic meanings more naturally, in a way that would help us to harness AI (and perhaps postpone the day when we are outsmarted and destroyed by AI weapons) then I am interested in exploring what that reality looks like. That's what I meant by "keep up with AI."
'You're right, we should not aspire to do math as fast as a calculator or move earth as well as a mechanical digger.'
=
'ways to augment our natural human abilities, stimulate certain brain functions, make it easier to monitor digital activity by translating electronic meanings more naturally, in a way that would help us to harness AI'
Where's the difference? This is still the 'becoming inhuman' Chris described.
There's an odd reluctance to relinquish the dubious pillars bookending your arguments, (as too with your post with regard to the so-called 'great humilations'), you either ignore the weaknesses in them that have been pointed out, or mis-paraphrase the criticisms to rebut them. It has an air of an argument where the aim is of effect through performance.
'AI now moves, thinks, and evolves faster than we can'
A.i. doesn't think, it performs some of the same tasks as thinking.
Anonymous-- I've largely given up trying to engage with multiple "anonymouses" because responding to five or six indistinguishable commenters becomes too complicated. So again I'd encourage anonymous commenters to leave some kind of identifier, like the zodiac killer's mark.
To the most recent anonymous who wrote, "Where's the difference? This is still the 'becoming inhuman.'": I suppose that depends on what you mean by "inhuman." If technologically augmenting our natural human abilities makes us "inhuman," then I gather you don't approve of eyeglasses, cochlear implants, pacemakers or pharmaceuticals that have doubled our natural human lifespan.
When scientists discuss genetic engineering that might enable us to colonize other planets (for example, growing bones that could withstand greater gravity or lungs that could breathe a wider range of atmospheres) you would prefer to terminate that discussion as "inhuman" and relegate yourself (and humanity) to a dying planet?
When you ask a scientist if something is "unnatural," they'll generally tell you that "nature is as nature does." If a phenomenon seems to break the laws of nature as we understand then, that means it's time to rewrite the laws because we obviously got them wrong. In the same vein, the Spanish philosopher Ortega wrote that humans have no nature, they only have a history. He meant that we can't say that it's human nature to be bad or good because there are always contrary examples, so all we can do is look at what we've done .
Finally, in response to another Anonymous, who has pointed out that I'm mistaken because a third anonymous previously pointed out that I'm mistaken. ("As, again, was said last time - it is only the physical causes, events and results associated with experiences of 'qualia' that can be studied by scientists. ... it is really flabbergasting that you don't get the difference.") : you wouldn't believe the kinds of "things that have been said" around these precincts, but the fact that they've been said -- sometimes repeatedly-- is not necessarily convincing to me.
'When scientists discuss genetic engineering that might enable us to colonize other planets (for example, growing bones that could withstand greater gravity or lungs that could breathe a wider range of atmospheres) you would prefer to terminate that discussion as "inhuman" and relegate yourself (and humanity) to a dying planet?'
Now you just sound silly. Were you in the queue for Google-Glasses?
'19th century anthropocentric philosophical way, but they underestimate the extent to which scientific discoveries have already changed the landscape. I think there's no longer a bright line between machines on one side and human perceptions and values (or what we've called "qualia" in a previous discussion) on the other. Technology has been nibbling away at that distinction'
Qualia/values don't 'flip' into quanta in the minutiae of study of their associated phenomena.
What anonymouse ('..am legion..'), says isn't important. It's that every scientist and philosopher, whether they are on the physicalist or idealist side, agrees on the difference.
(no 'e' meant on end of anonymous)
Anon: "I can't see why, except for bad reasons of expedience, anyone would cut some of their own constant, living control from the making process and subcontract it to a machine."
Digi-seduction; the machine can produce a technically slicker and more complex result (or even just a certain digital 'look' that is trendy) than they have the technical skill to produce without digital machine aid.
There's an artist currently ( see vonwolfe_ on Instagram) who is generating Ai hyper-real smoothly-painted-looking images using 'Comfyui' (a multi-node based Ai software) then, presumably because he has no originals to sell, is transferring chosen images to canvas and copying the images in oil. Obviously, the Ai can generate an endless amount of images and variations very quickly, so he's a kind of human slave to his Ai master, with an ever increasing backlog of images to render into paint. He writes "future medium: oil on canvas" next to the Ai images he posts. The twist is that the Ai images look better than his hand painted copies.
Kev, I don't disagree with any of that, so I'll try to clarify what I mean by things being defined by their limits, because I see this as encompassing what you are saying.
Take the example of two blades of grass. Although they share the 'suite of essentials' that define them as 'grass' rather than ' daffodils' they are individually distinct by nature of the difference in where they are situated in space. The conditions thereof are the individual constraints on each blade causing them to grow into a shape, curve or length different from each other.
Let's go up a few notches and take the case of two football players who are theoretically perfect twins playing for the same team. One limit that would distinguish them is that they cannot simultaneously occupy the exact same spot on the pitch, they are ever limited and made distinct by where they are at any given time, let alone their individual life experiences that will unconsciously constrain the patten of their thoughts in relation to the match.
To look at it another way. Ice is constrained by certain limits of temperature. Change that limit a certain way and it will change phase and be identified as water, change the temperature limit to something else and it becomes vapour.
It is impossible to imagine a thing without any limits at all (Which is why we have a problem conceptualising God).
This is clunky reasoning I know, but it would take pages and pages to lay this out in a way that got somewhere near the subtlety required to fully develop this line of thought. But you are a very smart fellow, I hope you see what I'm getting at. :)
Anonymous wrote: "Now you just sound silly. Were you in the queue for Google-Glasses?"
Not so silly. 100 years ago, if you showed up anywhere in the US with a functioning cell phone, they'd think you had super powers from another planet.
As for me, I've spent years working with Fortune 100 high tech companies, as well as some of the top research universities in the country. I serve on committees for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. If you're interested, I can send a link to an extensive report I worked on last year dealing with federal oversight of scientific research grants. I try not to be silly.
Indeed. It has felt like you were proselytising for the futurists' spin-wing of the tech industry in several of your recent references to this stuff here.
And none of your activities gives the least bit of credibilty to the silly guided evolution stuff you described. I'd really hoped for your sake you meant it only as a rhetorical flourish.
Biologically space-breathing humans remain silly. As silly as Aquaman and terrestrial goldfish.
The ex-terrestrial man is as silly as the de-bodied brain, and for the same reasons.
David, I know your reply was to Anonymous, but it looks like you did not fully take in my earlier comment to you when you write:
If technologically augmenting our natural human abilities makes us "inhuman," then I gather you don't approve of eyeglasses, cochlear implants, pacemakers or pharmaceuticals that have doubled our natural human lifespan.
These are technologies designed realign the body to its normative human condition. They are supplements that restore, not transform it. Standard eyeglasses do not give us access to anything beyond the electromatic spectrum experienced by healthy human eyes. You do, however have a point when it comes to how these technologies extend natural lifespan, and there is a hazy line that is crossed the further we go with this. It's the old logic extrapolation problem: 'if it's OK to keep grandpa alive until 100 then why not 130? Why not 500? Why not forever?
The thing is, logic plays only a tiny part in how life and meaning are comprehended by the healthy mind. Unfortunately our culture's machine mentality has been brainwashing us into believing its the only game in town.
For a modest fee, I can elaborate on all this for the Nat. Academy of Sciences , those Fortune 100 , ... et al.
It'll save them both money and face.
(unless the snake-oilin' is deliberate).
Chris,
I think you are using “defining” in the sense of “forming.” Referencing, I think, one aspect of Process Philosophy.
The problem with your limitation formulation is, if a thing is only defined by its limitations, then its initial state would need to be presumed as omnipotent. Which is to say, for any given thing, every generative possibility has been limited but that which leads to what it ultimately became.
Maybe down at the basic nature of reality - or in the imagination - there is infinite potential of that magnitude. But one need not reference everything that a dog is not, or everything its anatomy cannot do… in order to define what a dog is. In fact, that method would make definition impossible and useless. Same goes, of course, for defining what is human.
Anyway, if every technology is but an extension-abstraction of some human aspect, the only thing governing technology’s humanity is human morality, ethics, and taste.
Kev,
I think you are using “defining” in the sense of “forming.” Referencing, I think, one aspect of Process Philosophy.
Yes, this is true, the word 'forming'. is a better description of the matter than 'defining'. Which is why you might be misunderstanding me (or me misunderstanding you perhaps). My fault, I concede.
I have not been talking therefore about propositional modes of definition at all, but conditions of constraint that are the formation of identities.
...if a thing is only defined by its limitations, then its initial state would need to be presumed as omnipotent... Maybe down at the basic nature of reality - or in the imagination - there is infinite potential of that magnitude.
Yes, this accords with my position in that at genesis there is 'oneness' or unity which lays itself out into multiplicity by way of limitations or constraints. I think it was Jordan Peterson who rhetorically asked 'what is the one thing that God lacks? And then answered it with 'limitation'. In other words, limitations are the constrains around multiplicities that bind them to the one, or unity.
Anyway, if every technology is but an extension-abstraction of some human aspect, the only thing governing technology’s humanity is human morality, ethics, and taste.
Wholeheartedly agree with that. This would be why it is essential that the deluded idea of transhumanism, which gives carte blanche to tech, is firmly kept out of the way.
I have not been talking therefore about propositional modes of definition at all, but conditions of constraint that are the formation of identities.
So real objects, not statements about them. Doesn't a monkey exist as a monkey by virtue of having been gestated by a mother monkey with monkey DNA; her term taking it from a potential monkey to an actual monkey? Isn't this positive creation?
Doesn't the DNA-->mRNA--->Ribosome process produce proteins in a positive/active fashion? Or do you only consider protein-coding a process that does not produce every other protein but those found in a monkey? Do you invert all possible creation into the negative/limiting form?
In other words, limitations are the constrains around multiplicities that bind them to the one, or unity.
I'm struggling to understand. The oneness/God is infinitely generative. That which is generated becomes (? anything, everything and nothing ?) unless it becomes "multiplicity" (recognizable stuff). Which happens only with the constraining action of "limitations." These limitations bind multiplicity back to the oneness/God, even though they are the very thing that God lacks? This seems contradictory. Where do the limitations come from in this scenario? Why do monkeys have different limitations that lead to their forming than penguins?
Doesn't a monkey exist as a monkey by virtue of having been gestated by a mother monkey with monkey DNA..
Yes. But the constraint conditions forming that particular infant monkey's gestation would be that monkey's mother.
These limitations bind multiplicity back to the oneness/God, even though they are the very thing that God lacks? This seems contradictory.
Jordan's question was rhetorical. If the omnipotent essence lacks something it can bring it into being. So to incarnate itself it brings about limits. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", that's to say; out of the void was brought forth unity and multiplicity. And this I would say is the first limit brought into existence; unity cannot become multiplicity and multiplicity cannot become unity. The relationship between them is in some sense how they constrain each other and thereby define each other.
Chris,
The question here is when does the use of technology cross over into the monstrous? Or even the Uncanny Valley?
You've agreed that it is obviously a matter of aesthetics... which in the wider sense brings in morals, ethics, values, taste, disgust sensitivity, etc. And that, in some sense, all technology is an extension-abstraction of something human, shorn of humanity.
For my part, I've long said the best technology will always be invisible or transparent. Wherever it actually appears, it (to some extent) clogs up the world, especially if it lacks aesthetic value. Invisible/transparent technology doesn't have a chance to feel unnatural.
Technology becomes invisible when you stop noticing it. The printing press is technology, as engraving, oil paints, or pianos and pipe organs.
Technology becomes invisible when you stop noticing it.
That which is ignored does not go unnoticed. Nothing can be put out of mind, because it remains an open loop. And open loops accumulate. Clutter is a loss of value, because all space has value. And clutter is not only ugly, but is the cause of ugliness locally. Eventually disappearing space takes a psychological toll. Fill every inch of wall space with signage and ads, and you'll long for a blank stretch that doesn't command you to pay attention.
Art materials need to be organized and edited to be useful. They can even be beautiful. An automobile or piano becomes an addition to life when it is given a strong aesthetic component. And such rare items are then given pride of place. Same with a great painting. (But put too many paintings on the same wall, and they begin to crowd each other; the ugliness of clutter devaluing the beauty of the work.)
Aesthetics matter. Balance matters.
Kev,
Well, one aspect of the monster is that it is a hybrid, a mixture of other identities, examples of which are the dragon, the hydra, the gorgon. It is also a liminal being, something that inhabits the edges of the world, like the Kraken, the vampire, the crocodile. It also wants to eat you, consume you, or take you into itself.
So, when a technology behaves like this it can undoubtably be considered as monstrous. From this standpoint I think it's pretty easy to recognise what aspects of AI are dangerous to us. Chip implants, the chatbot interlocutor or its extensive use of LLMs in education are obvious instances of this. Which means they should be kept a very close eye on, and if we're unable to bar them from the human domain, then every effort should be taken to tame them.
God help us if any of these things became invisible or transparent!! We're already seeing this with the addictive algorithms of Moloch eating our children...
I agree that the paradigmatic monster is misshapen, misbegotten, predatory, and without moral values. Often mesmerizing as well, which we can extend to addictive. Quite often it also has designs on immortality - or was created with immortality or the defeat of death in mind. Or to implement some other mad, grandiose plan. (Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, Mr. Hyde, Terminator, Darth Vader, Bob Ross, etc.)
God help us if any of these things became invisible or transparent!! We're already seeing this with the addictive algorithms of Moloch eating our children...
I should have specified that I meant useful/beneficial technologies are optimally invisible, transparent or crafted into items of life-enhancing beauty.
I agree that insidious technologies - like manipulative algorithms, deep fakes, or the various automated scams - should be plain as day by law. Or banned by law. Any wanton hijacking of hormones and neurotransmitters with no nutritive value - for personal or corporate gain - is evil. From the drug pushers to the fear-merchants and hate-mongers to the pornographers and propagandists to the junk food manufacturers, and on and on. Eventually, I suppose, AI will be used to simulate your beloved dead relatives to sell you potato chips.
"The Spanish philosopher Ortega wrote that humans have no nature, they only have a history. He meant that we can't say that it's human nature to be bad or good because there are always contrary examples, so all we can do is look at what we've done."
It is surely true that humans are far more experimental and innovative than any other creature we know of. But if humans didn't have a nature we wouldn't see the same human patterns repeating over and over again. (Or at least rhyming.) And there would be no wisdom to pass on between the generations.
A friend recently sent this discussion to me. It's very interesting, sorry to join late.
I can tell your disbelieving readers haven't studied the field of neuroaesthetics, and especially the field of computational neuroaesthetics. It's not there yet, but productive investigations in these fields are being conducted at universities in the UK and the US. Check out the writings of professor Semir Zeki who is a professor of neuroaesthetics at University College London.
Readers who say that quanta and qualia can never talk to each other somehow aren't bothered by the comparable gap between mind and reality. True reality is unknowable in the same way that qualia is supposedly immeasurable and yet no reader here is ready to quit the search. Prof. Zeki's theory of perception is that colors and other aesthetic phenomena don't exist independently of the way our brains perceive them and that reality derives from the brain creating synthetic concepts such as "red" and "beauty" from sensory data. Neuroscience can identify sites on the brain that are activated by love or aesthetic experiences. What we're able to do with this information remains to be seen, but it's certain that AI will play a role in that process. Hiding under the bedsheets won't do your readers any good.
As you want us to leave markers, call me Giordano Bruno.
"Prof. Zeki's theory of perception is that colors and other aesthetic phenomena don't exist independently of the way our brains perceive them and that reality derives from the brain creating synthetic concepts such as "red" and "beauty" from sensory data"
Presumably a variety of alien species subjected to the same external stimuli would see 'reality' differently to us, but also in ways uniquely limited by their particular sense organs. Arguably, the only being that would be able to see reality as it objectively is, would be the creator of the universe, if there is such a being. I don't believe there is, therefore I accept that we are only capable of seeing a somewhat limited, human-centric version of reality. One in which 'red' and 'beauty' happen to have significance for us.
Similarly, Donald Hoffman has done many youtube podcasts claiming that our senses are akin to a 'dashboard' showing us only a very limited 'simulation' of true reality. Others claim that supposedly solid objects such as chairs, tables and walls are not solid at all because, if you could zoom down to the size of an atom, you could go inside the object and see that it is mainly empty space.
I would say that if you can't pass your hand through it, if it's strong enough to support your weight and build a house out of, then 'solid' is a perfectly good name for it at our human scale.
Yes but we have no way of proving that your human-centric version of reality is the same as mine. Is your red my green? Only the creator of the universe can close the gap between mind and reality but we continue to live based on what seems solid. The gap between quanta and qualia is no wider.
Bruno
Well aware of them, close to a dozen such studies alone that I've seen, there are no doubt tonnes more. Some interesting stuff linking process philosophy, biology and mathematics too, which broadens it considerably.
https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ and others. Some stuff posits platonic pattern as basis
Without misrepresenting them, they point at least in the direction of vaguely idealist positions.
All of the physicalist positions boil down to 'the correspondence of a physical event to an experience subsumes the experience as epiphenomenon to the causes.' Study of the correlations is of enormous interest, but this type of conclusion has the same weight as 'qualia can be explained by photons + chemistry from outer phenomena', just in the opposite direction. Study of the measurable part of events creates an abstraction - a model - of the phenomena which is of a wholly different mode to qualitative experience. No matter how small you break down particles, no matterhow detailed an understanding of neurological patterns. No matter how much 'red' is broken down and shown not to be a single discrete thing but a series of layers of vibrations, conjoined with brain events - the experience remains an inner experience. A whole of phenomenon+qualia experience, an ontological unity. And it is irrational to think that this, the natural state of existence, is a secondary condition which can be disregarded. If you step outside it to investigate it, you are no longer looking at it and are attending to something else, however closely associated. Qualia can only be invrstigated by qualia-faculties. But as our qualia faculties can lead to insights about the physical (eg, Wolgang Pauli, David Bohm, early evolution thinkers), study of the physical can set a direction for travel.
There is obviously an entire interralatedness of physical phenomenon and neurological events that should be taken as whole events. There seem to be real relationships between the varying physical characteristics and the qualia they induce, notwithstanding subjectuve variations in experience (my vs your green, synaesthesia, etc..).
This suggests that the qualia experience is not inner, ie, personal, alone, but exists in an ecosystem ultimately a single phenomenonal state with matter, monistic.
That an individual locus event of this varies does nothing to alter its reality, just suggests degrees of and differences in engagement (eg, individually, or per species, etc).
There’s no reason for humans to have developed and evolutionarily conserved our sense of experience unless it benefitted us immeasurably.
Left to their own devices out in the world mentally disabled people fail to thrive and soon die, true fools get crushed, the blind become prey. We must presume then that our survival depends on an integral sense of our physical reality, which entails some baseline of accurate perception, conception, processing, etc. If we weren’t in contact with true reality how could we possibly be succeeding in it? Utility demonstrates an engagement with the true.
To imagine then that we healthy folk are perceiving reality in some random, fantastical or erroneous way is a rather extraordinary claim which requires fittingly extraordinary proof.
I find it helps to turn to Dreyfus, and his four assumptions of artificial intelligence research when considering the AI hype machine. Like the French nerds, but specifically in regard to AI, this American identified the state and vector of things back in the 70s.
Where I see the most potential in LLMs is in how their seemingly amazing capabilities with language production make clear that language production is not, in itself, a measure of intelligence.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I find it helps to turn to Dreyfus, and his four assumptions of artificial intelligence research when considering the AI hype machine. Like the French nerds, but specifically in regard to AI, this American identified the state and vector of things back in the 70s.
Aside from the fact that Dreyfus was against the myopia of the Linguistic Turn while The Postmodernists were fueled by and mired in it; actually, AI researches adopted Dreyfus' arguments, and let go of their purely rules-based system. If it wasn't for Dreyfus, the LLMs wouldn't be as effective as they are today.
It is Searle and Harnad who best understood the problem of information-theoretic reductionism and the depth of the semantic problem; basic symbol grounding, ultimately all sign groundings, semiosis, the problem of the role of mind, etc. One of the many reasons C.S. Peirce has become so interesting in the last half-century is because he was attacking these problems in 1900 in far greater depth and subtlety than probably any modern computer scientist, even developing pioneering thoughts on biosemiotics.
These are interesting waters.
Dreyfus and Peirce occupy unstable(?) positions in relation to the postmodern. I think my mind turn to Dreyfus when considering AI primarily because of the phenomenological connection. As for Peirce, his semiotics has some overlap with Derrida, if I half-remember correctly? At any rate, I don’t know enough about the history of AI to correlate the two approaches. But, yeah, interesting.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Evolution is famous for leaving weird traits in because the are just not harmful enough to tilt the balance. Huge colorful plumage and weird mating dances can go ballistic if unchecked by predators.
Our "integral sense of physical reality" is broken all over the place, as simple experiments with rolling marbles and books full of optical illusions attest. Our most dramatic blind spot of reality is our obliviousness of conditional probabilities. Check Bayes' theorem and self flagelate for every time you miss-evaluated the probability of something happening because you saw it happening.
Because evolution distilled it does not means it is aligned with reality. Evolution gave us a hiper-aggressively inductive brain, that assumes patterns at the drop of a hat. Why? Because assuming that fruit was poisonous because your monkey buddy got ill after eating one increased your chances of survival, whether statistically that was correct to assume or not. Just as we assumed that it rains every time we yell at the clouds because we noticed it happened once. It's the same mechanism most quackery works: people most of the time just recovers by themselves, as we die only once, but we assume the recovery is always because of that one thing we did.
You could describe our brains evolution as the refinement of a danger-avoidance machine. The first level was pain, then animals evolved fear, and finally the sense of danger, which depend on memory, self-image, and an inductive mechanism. Everything else is scaffolding and consequence. Is it successful? The evolutionary jury is out. We are in time to self destruct in a nuclear apocalypse because of a panic attack, or collapse our environment out of our hoarding instincts. Then we would have gone the way of the cheetah.
I used to believe we were "in contact with true reality" but stopped when I saw how many crazy MAGAs believe whatever bullshit Trump makes up for them to believe. Their eyes, ears and brains tell them something different from normal people.
Largely agree, but the breaks are the exceptions that prove the rule, or we wouldn't function. As cracks they're important, maybe, for throwing a light on some of the workings. Mike Levin (some interesting talks online in the usual places) has some interesting angles on, eg, teleology in biology, & other stuff, as a counterweight, not a contradiction, to what you describe. Most likely multiple different things going on.
the breaks are the exceptions that prove the rule, or we wouldn't function.
Exceptions proof rules (test them) they don't prove them as in confirm them. A popular misconception. Please pass on this correction to others as you go through life.
I don't know how solipsists expect any organism might survive without substantially contacting significant reality through the senses (such as they have*) and their extensions. This is the way of complete disbelief in a shared reality; a complete collapse in meaning, and then why are we even talking and what are we even talking about? (*Are starfish getting incorrect chemical signaling through their feet? Do bats misinterpret the sound waves that bounce back at them from objects?)
To entertain the artless, joyless, pleasure-less, beauty-less notion that we are simply a “danger-avoidance machine” still entails our accurate observation of as many possible dangers as our anatomical lineage might allow. But since we don’t and can’t know all of what is going to be dangerous, it must be that we must first be a creature that simply accurately observes.
We even have built-in backup plans for our perceptual limitations. If we can’t see around a corner, maybe we can hear or smell around it. If it is night, our eyesight adjusts and we listen more acutely. If we lose an eye, we still have other depth cues. We have fewer blue sensors in our eyes than green or red; which seems like a limitation. But this actually allows us to see the world clearer, rather than all veiled in a blue film of refracting light. That we can’t sense carbon monoxide or gamma rays isn’t an error and is hardly a limitation, because of the absolute rarity of such dangerous phenomena in our lives. And yet we have still developed ways of seeing these unseeables. Then conceptual stopgaps: If we have a guess we can check it. Very simple. (Do we think that checking a guess is some kind of modern invention?) And so on. Humans make thousands of semi-conscious inductions per day that go unnoticed because they succeed. And many millions of correct perceptions, which are also inductions technically speaking.
The problem of fallacious interpretations of experience is a different question than being evolved to have incorrect experience/deluded sensorium. (Which is different than having an incomplete sense of reality, which all life must.) To argue against the primary integrity our senses using edge cases like optical illusions, is silly. 99.9% of the time our sensorium is doing an excellent job. That there are anomalies; errors and edge cases will catch our attention, but hardly qualifies as our sensorium being "broken all over the place.” It is more accurate to say there are a few cracks.
Talking to solipsists one feels compelled to ask very basic questions. Like; do you really disbelieve your hands?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/exception-that-proves-the-rule
Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis
‘exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted’
‘exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted’
A rule is prescribed. It is not a generalization, nor a normal distribution. We are not speaking of exceptions within a limited, bounded, rules-based system here. Please look up the original purpose and meaning of that phrase. Anomalies and contradictions never validate generalizations.
Sharing this lesson is doubtless dear to you, but it's only your reading of my sentence it applies to.
There was a flawed inferral drawn from: 'Our "integral sense of physical reality" is broken all over the place',
i.e., the breaks do not themselves confer an inherent disjuncture between all our sense of reality and that reality. As they are 'breaks'. As he said. So his further case that patterns perceived don't allign with reality on the basis of there being anomalies, as you said, is redundant.
The allignment is the rule. Misalignment is the exception.
(No glasses, ignore the spelling)
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