VOL 3, NO 11
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Art of bore. / I’ve been thinking about art a lot lately. Mostly it has been in a separating-art-from-artist context, which is stupid idea that I think devalues both, but it leads to a lot of existential “What even is art?” ideas. My initial response to the suggestion people can’t really tell the difference between human- and AI-made art, and, in fact, kind of prefer the AI stuff, was “Jesus fucking Christ what the fuck has happened to people’s fucking brains.” Reading the actual “study” and its “results” and “conclusions” only forced me to jam a few more “fucks” in.
Max Read: ❝In fact, the dental-office “badness” of so much of the A.I. art is precisely why I don’t dispute Alexander’s assertion that people preferred it. Like any LLM output, A.I.-generated images are designed to please, not to provoke. I’ve argued before that these images are, by their nature, almost unavoidably kitsch–comforting, straightforward, accessible, flattering. And people love kitsch!❞
There’s that, but also the whole thing feels designed to trick people, which is infuriating enough, but it also shows a total lack of thinking about what art is, how art is made, and what art is for. There’s another version of this using poetry (further discussed in the Read link above) and fuck fucking fuck I don’t want to talk about it.
The discussion around AI bounces around between genuinely fascinating and wildly stupid, but I don’t think we can understand it in an artistic context because we’re constantly wrestling with our relationship with art, which is kind of the entire point of art. Or at least good art, which is a whole other discussion, but probably one you want to have before you start suggesting a computer can do it at all, never mind better.
As usual, I have no answers to suggest, just things to yell about. But I do keep coming back to this nugget.
I think there might really be something to this idea (though without the religious implications). There’s something people have that computers, at least for now and I think/hope forever, don’t. Shit is keeping me up at night.
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Confusions. / 🎨 The Museum Of Bad Art. (Video.) / 🤖 Oops we did it again. / And again. / (But while Pokemon Go might be suspect, Porygon was innocent.) / 🖥️ Microsoft is 50. (The article is fine if you want to read it, but I’m mostly posting it because “Microsoft is 50” kind of stunned me.) / The Bluesky firehose in 3D. / 🍿 Hundreds of Beavers. / 📻 World’s Radio. / 📚 Literature Clock. / 📺 Failed TV pilots. / IMG_0001. ❝Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.❞ / 🧑🍳 25 most influential cookbooks. / 🏔️ Find the Net Elevation of famous dead people. / 🎞️ Sugar cube advertising.
