Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
I would prefer to simply write a longer post on the issue rather than boiling it down to a few bullet points which, due to their brevity, would necessarily be as mysterious as the original claim itself, and demand yet further elaboration. But I only have time for one or two long posts per day, and FC is currently monopolizing my time. I may write a toplevel post on this issue in the near future.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
how would you define the center of the "artist's temperament"?
I would define it in terms of two central interrelated traits. I will try to be clear and direct, with specific examples:
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The artist is someone who regularly experiences complex and exotic states of the soul. Not all emotions are created equal; some are more refined and subtle than others. Suppose we compare "sadness" with "melancholy". A child can be sad, there's nothing special about it; the child sees a baby duck fall down and hurt itself, he feels bad for it, he is sad. It's a simple stimulus-response relationship. With something like melancholy on the other hand, as compared with simple sadness, the list of initial requirements is longer. It requires one to have a certain amount of temporal history, as well as a certain self-reflexivity. Reflecting on lost opportunities, thinking about what could have been, gazing wistfully into the distance - it is sad, yes, but the inflection is different. It can start to mix with positive overtones as well - the sheer pleasure of reflecting on one's own life narrative and taking a bird's eye view of it. The artist ascends the scale of refinement to increasingly unusual and uncommon experiences, experiences and emotions that may be so rare they don't even have a name yet.
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The artist is someone who perceives (in the widest possible sense of "perceives") features of people, objects, events, and phenomena that are ignored or unnoticed by non-artists. There is nothing artistic (in the sense of, exemplifying the artist's temperament) about appreciating the beauty in a sunset, because everyone already knows that sunsets are beautiful. It's well-trodden territory. The artist sees beauty in things that other people don't (yet) recognize as beautiful; or he sees ugliness where other people don't (yet), or he perceives entirely new properties that have yet to be named. Ideally we would like his observations to be veridical in some sense, and not just the idiosyncratic hallucinations of a madman; the ultimate test for this is whether his works are persuasive. The greatest mark of success of a work of art is if it makes people say "yes, I had never noticed that before; I had never noticed that such and such was so beautiful, or so ugly - but now I do". And, finally, the observations that the artist first pressed into physical form eventually pass over into common sense - everyone simply knows that such and such is beautiful, or ugly, or whatever, it's just always been obvious.
To be clear, this is a description of a temperament, a set of psychological traits. You can have a person who makes art but doesn't possess this temperament, and you can have a person who possesses this temperament but doesn't make art. The two are independent.
I do think that these traits are correlated with what one might call the stereotype of the "tortured Romantic soul" - a certain moodiness, a certain angst, a certain emotional volatility. But it's not a one-to-one causal relationship. There can be people who instantiate the traits I described but don't fit the stereotype.
What I don't get is where you're getting the makings of an "A" perspective from with regards to art, other than sheer assertion.
I don't think I can really go further on this until you answer the clarifying questions I posed with regards to your views on the "A" view itself and how it stands with God. Crucially, I need to understand: are the thoughts I have expressed here just entirely foreign to you, or are they thoughts that are familiar to you, and it's just that you don't understand how anyone could have these thoughts about art in particular?
I believe you have described yourself as a non-utilitarian in the past. Where does utilitarianism end for you? Where do you draw the line and say "no, this right here, this is beyond the reach of any rational cost-benefit analysis, and I won't hear another word about it"? Because that's how I feel about art. You presumably have something similar in your own experience, so you can use that as an analogy for understanding my experience. Does that make sense?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang.
It absolutely is. I mean that in all sincerity.
Chapter 8 of Kristeva's Powers of Horror may help stimulate some initial thoughts in this direction.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
I think a shoe factory is closer to digital art (like, Photoshop, the free limitless copying and distribution enabled by the internet, and all that those things enable) than it is to AI art. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's closer.
Comparing the differences in attitudes that artists have towards digital art and AI art is instructive. You'll find a few ultra-trads who think it's "cheating", but most people basically learned to live with it, even though it did bring about changes in how art is done and lead to job downsizing in some cases. Similarly with a shoe factory, at least there's still at least one person who actually had to design the shoe in the first place. AI art is a different class of existential threat from digital or the camera because it's the first technology that cuts humans out of the loop entirely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
Do you feel the same way about how most clothes needed to be produced by a tailor, but now they're mass produced for orders of magnitude less money?
What about how bread used to be produced by bakers, but now you can get bread in the store, once again for orders of magnitude less?
There certainly is something lost in both cases, yes.
I would prefer it if people formed more relationships with other individuals, rather than with anonymous corporations. That's not the world we live in and we're never going to go back to that world. But, if I were God, that's how I would set things up.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
Do you really think that a person's private motivations for being in favour of/opposed to X are identical to their publicly stated motivations more often than not? At every point on the political spectrum?
Well, it gets very complicated. People can be unaware of their own motivations, they can believe one thing for multiple different reasons, they can tell half-truths, they can believe something one day and not believe it the next.
I would just say that, as a general methodological principle, one should start by trying to find where the authentic principled disagreements are, rather than immediately jumping to cynical conclusions.
If AI visual art was banned but AI voice acting was seen as fair game, it's only a matter of time before lots of people start noticing that this seems kind of arbitrary and unfair.
Sure. But this isn't a psychologically realistic model of AI detractors. I assure you that the people who feel passionately about AI visual art feel equally passionately about voice acting.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
Animals can presumably feel pain, but cannot create art
That's a good point.
I did specify though that there was more to it than just consciousness:
[...] and that it created the piece with intent and drew from its conscious experiences as inspiration.
So the bare fact of consciousness alone is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for me to find value in a work.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
does the crusade go after Pirate Bay
Yes? Generally (there are always exceptions and nuances) I'm a pretty strong defender of intellectual property rights. I've never been very friendly to TPB.
boorus
Not as bad, but I do think it's really shitty when people take all the private pics from a small artist's patreon and repost them on boorus.
If it's the potential to produce slop, do Blender Kids, refried meme generators, and gposers need be next on the list?
Nah, they're fine.
If it's the economic threat or worker solidarity, do we roll back the sewing machine or the CNC mill?
If I had lived 200 years ago I probably would have been a luddite.
If it's the spirit of art as form of communication, do we beat down the Kinkaides and Rothkos?
What do you have against Rothko? He's at least inoffensive.
For Kinkaide, I think I would direct you to my reply to FC. What is there in Kinkaide that remains unread? I would prefer to ask that question, instead of just dismissing him.
If it's the unearned reward that aigen produces, can we hunt down Duchamp and Basquiat and force them to actually put some effort into it?
Both were great artists. The effort exerted was sufficient.
If it's about people pretending, badly, to think, can we start bludgeoning bureaucrats?
He who is without sin...
(I'm not without sin, to be clear.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
Have you ever felt pain? If yes, then you know what it means to have a conscious experience. It's that, and the other things like that (sensations more generally, the way things look, the way things sound, and the like).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
I'm not sure how you justify the "probably" in the last sentence.
It was a joke.
Fundamentally, this would be called "curation" rather than "illustration,"
I agree that this is a valid point. It's not enough to outweigh the negatives for me, but I agree that that is at least something you can say in defense of AI.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
But even before AI, art is our creation, is it not? Where within art are the vast unknowns that could loom over us?
I could supply a list of concrete examples, drawing from works in the canons of painting and literature, and discuss certain persistent interpretive difficulties with those works. You might then be persuaded to agree "ah yes, there is something unknown about that work", or you might not. I could discuss the intimate relationship that art bears to subjective experience; how the mere fact of our subjectivity is itself quite awe-inspiring and miraculous, how we are very far from being transparent to ourselves, how we are very far from understanding why we do what we do or why we feel what we feel, or even what we feel when we feel. How many mysteries there are in what is ostensibly most intimate. But I think all that would be somewhat beside the point, because my intuition here is that the disagreement is one of fundamental attunement; it can't be resolved by any finite list of examples or arguments.
In an interview, Derrida (who was a Jew) was asked if it was time to eject Heidegger (who was a literal member of the Nazi party, and, depending on who you ask and which documents you place the most evidentiary weight on, a somewhat enthusiastic and unrepentant one) from the philosophical canon. After all, hadn't his politics discredited even the ostensibly "apolitical" portions of his philosophical work? Wasn't it time to simply leave him behind as an embarrassing accident in the dustbin of history? Derrida's response was, "No. Of course not. There is still so much that remains unread in Heidegger." (He, of course, could not have meant this literally - Heidegger was his greatest philosophical influence, and Derrida had read all of his works cover to cover multiple times, and lectured on them extensively.)
Does that mean anything to you? When you look at... anything - a person, a work, a system, a phenomenon - are you struck by the impression that there is so much that remains unread? Do you want to believe that there is so much that remains unread?
We make images for our own pleasure. We find that some images please us more than others. We discover rules and techniques that optimize the pleasure generated by the images; these rules and techniques clearly derive from our own psychology and history and nature, but they seem both discoverable and explicable, and can and have been reduced to engineering.
Simply wrong! Just, not even correct at all! And by that I mean, yes, what you have described here is indeed a process that can actually take place; the process is physically realizable. But the process thus described has little in common with what I think art could be, or should be. And if you think that this is all that art is good for, then it's unclear why you would go into art instead of the pharmaceutical industry.
What part of this does not fit within the "B" perspective? What realities of art does it neglect, which could form an argument for "A"?
Let me respond with some clarifying questions first.
Suppose that there were no God; even if you think this is absolutely inconceivable, try to grant it as a hypothetical. What would become of the "A" view then? Would it still make sense, in any context, or no? If there were no God, would reality shrink to the point that we actually could master it all in a rational, calculated way?
Are there certain attitudes - wonder, awe - which, when applied to mortals and their deeds, can easily be construed as a category error at best and blasphemy at worst?
Basically, I would like to determine the extent to which the light of the Almighty makes everything else seem dull in comparison.
With regards to philosophy and epistemology, I would argue that "A" is better, because it better fits observable reality and the historical record, while "B" appears to me to consistently generate notable disasters; a straightforward argument from prudence.
Another clarifying question. Would you say that you support the "A" view because:
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There are certain enigmas which deserve respect; one must learn not to exceed one's station; we are all strangers dwelling in a strange land, and like all guests we must be gracious to our hosts; or
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It is a contingent, empirical truth that there are a number of facts about reality which remain unknown, and therefore, on a rational cost-benefit analysis, we should refrain from hasty action. But in principle, if we could learn enough true facts, we may not need to be as prudent.
But commercial and popular art of the sort we are discussing here is inherently frivolous
I've been speaking about art as a totality - all of it, across time and space, not just one kind or type. And furthermore I disagree that commercial art is "frivolous". There is no single fact about a work's provenance, medium, or content that can identify it as "frivolous" - that is always a determination that must be made on an individual basis. End of Evangelion for example is an exemplary film, plainly a creative triumph of the first order, despite it being a thoroughly "commercial" work and having a mass theatrical release.
but I also can observe that much of what people claim to value as "art" is in fact pretention covering for laziness or naked greed.
If I tell you that I highly value Duchamp's The Large Glass, more than the large majority of representational works that would traditionally be considered "technically correct", would you believe that I'm being sincere? Or is this just pretension and laziness? I encourage you to be honest; I won't take it as a violation of charity if you say that I'm lying, or deluded.
I have known too many artists to believe that the pursuit of or mere association with art confers any special virtues beyond those innate to discipline and skill, or indeed any significant insight into philosophy or truth.
I never said it did.
Beauty and Truth are not synonyms
I never said they were.
Again, I am an artist by trade and by temperament.
No, I don't think you are. Trade yes, temperament no.
From what I've been able to glean from your posts on this forum, I don't think I've seen much that would indicate to me an "artist's temperament". You seem to have a good head on your shoulders: sturdy, even-tempered, concerned with practical matters, not prone to strong emotional disturbances in either direction. Concrete rather than idealistic. Perhaps your self-image is entirely different, but this is how you come off in your posts.
Of course there may be certain domains where you recognize that no finite method of analysis is up to the task any longer; where you have no choice but to abase yourself before something greater and "lose your head" for a moment. But this by itself does not make one an artist. The mystic is undoubtedly sincere in the feeling of oceanic vastness he experiences when he communes with the Divine, but the mystic is not an artist. In fact the two types are fundamentally opposed; the artist is this-worldly in a way that the mystic cannot be.
I don't want to give the impression that I know exactly what an artist must be, or that there's only one way to be an artist. Undoubtedly, multiple types of people can be artists. Artists can have substantial political and philosophical disagreements with each other, and neither of them is less of a "real artist" for it. But nonetheless, if the phrase "artist's temperament" is going to mean anything at all, then it must be something determinate, to the exclusion of what it is not; and I don't really see how it applies to you.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
We will have cheap pleasing images for our books, advertisement, and maybe even in art museums
Yeah, this does help clarify the disagreement more. I don't think that more "cheap pleasing images" is a necessary thing, or even a good thing. I think we already had quite enough as it is. There was already a supply glut, we didn't need more. And for me the negative of knowing that say, a book cover might be AI, outweighs any positives that might come from the technical quality of the image itself. I'd gladly trade quality for the guarantee that every image was produced by a human (I tend to have a very eccentric notion of what counts as a "pleasing" image anyway).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?
I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.
...But then, why would you expect others to respect your own appeals to freedom, when you've concluded that no one actually cares about Freedom as such as a terminal value?
I may still fall back on appeals to freedom at times out of laziness or force of habit, but I've been gradually trying to work it out of my vocabulary for a while now. If the best argument you have in favor of something is "well, you could just not tell me to not do it", then that is a little lame. With regards to sexuality, for example, I believe that a libertine sexual ethos is part of a system of spiritual values that can be given its own positive defense on its own independent merits.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
The only way some behavior is evidence that some belief in a principle is sincere is if that behavior is costly to the person
So what do you think would be an appropriately costly test for the anti-AI-art position?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
And second, art specifically has a certain level of mysticism around it, to the point that even atheist materialists will talk about human-manually-made art (or novel or film or song) having a "soul" or a "piece of the artist" within it
That hasn't been a tenable position for quite some time. Duchamp took a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917. Probably, he did not simultaneously impart a piece of his soul into it.
You are getting at something important though. I'd be a lot more interested in AI art if I had a reasonable degree of confidence that the AI was conscious, and that it created the piece with intent and drew from its conscious experiences as inspiration. I'd actually be very interested to learn about what it's like to be an entity who has the entire internet memorized! What does it experience, what does it feel. I have nothing against that at all, even if it does put humans out of work. Losing the Darwinian competition to another conscious, feeling subject is not so bad. Losing the Darwinian competition to a hoard of mindless replicators is horrific and should be avoided at all costs.
The AI art we have right now seems to me to be more akin to waves on the beach just so happening to etch very detailed pictures into the sand by random chance; this to me is lacking the principle features that make art interesting (communication between conscious subjects; wondering at what kind of subjectivity could have lead to the present work).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists?
No. That's not it.
I'm not, typically, a moralist. I hate cancel culture; I hate people who act like they can judge others. I roll my eyes equally at leftists who work themselves into knots over sexism and racism, and trads who gnash their teeth at the withering away of the values of yesteryear. Whatever happened, I ask, to freedom? Isn't anyone going to stand up for freedom? Freedom, the most protean of all ideals, against the dreary weave of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots: the freedom to dare and dream, the freedom to be true to what is one's ownmost, no matter how idiosyncratic, no matter how questionable or uncanny.
But freedom has a limit; it is, after all, only one ideal among many, one concept among many, no matter how charming of a concept it may be. I can't actually bring myself to get upset if someone gets canceled over AI art. That's how high the stakes are for me - my other "principles" turn to dust in the face of this reality. This makes me a hypocrite; but so what? If I contradict myself, then very well, I contradict myself. Some instincts are too powerful to be ignored.
I think most people have a limit like this - the limit beyond which talk of "freedom" reveals itself to be a hollow game, a luxury to be reserved for more genteel times, a mirage that dissipates when it is confronted with something of genuine weight and seriousness. AI art is that limit for me; other people will have their own, and I will try not to judge them for it, even when I find their beliefs to be incomprehensible. For the individuals who truly have (or at least claim to have) no limit, no possible limit to freedom, we might rightly view them with suspicion. Attempting to subsist on a spiritual diet consisting of nothing but the NAP alone is the veganism of the soul; it is lacking a certain red-blooded vitality, there is something missing. There can be no great love without great hatred.
I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
The fact that you are so perplexed by the response is, indeed, part of the frustration.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
It's not.
The best way to understand people on the other side of a culture war issue is to start from the assumption that they really do genuinely believe what they say they believe.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Sure, that would upset anyone. But there are also many non-artists who don't like AI art. Also, people who have objections to AI painting also tend to have objections to AI music and AI voice acting, even if those areas don't overlap with their personal skill set. Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
In the West, most of the abusive people are women
Can you clarify what you mean by this? The overwhelming majority of violent criminals (including rapists) are men. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in violent political unrest (e.g. the CHAZ in Seattle) are men.
When it comes to say, the architects of corporate wokeness, or deep state NWO bureaucrats, there are more women among their ranks, but also still plenty of men.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
30d ago
because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people
Given the very large number of liberals who exist in modern Western countries, maybe they’re not as “abnormal” as you think they are? Your idea of what constitutes “normal” has to be open to revision in the face of new empirical evidence. Perhaps you need to take seriously the idea that these patterns of behavior were always a latent potential in humanity, rather than an aberration that has been imposed by force from the outside?
I’ve written a lot here before about what a wakeup Covid was for me, regarding facts about human nature - it’s a convenient example to return to. I didn’t want to believe that total mass capitulation to any and all restrictions to stave off a flu was “normal” for most people. But I was forced to admit, through the weight of sheer statistics, that they were the normal ones, and I was the abnormal one.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I don't know the answer to your question, but I did visit their website and I noticed that one of their menu options is labeled "Birth to Grade 12 Education", which strikes me as some creepy NWO-style language ("the education of a diverse global citizen begins at birth").
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I believe within a state there’s one set closing time, but different states can have different closing times.
We also have the rule here that if you’re in line before the closing time, they won’t kick you out.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Well voting always happens on weekdays in America for one. Polling places usually stay open until around 8pm, but that still might be cutting it close depending on your work schedule, and unless you're a white collar professional you might have difficulty getting time off from work to go vote. In terms of actual physical access to polling places, most people will have at least one relatively close by, but some people might have to travel longer.
Or you can just do a mail-in.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
the message is 'if you don't sign up to vote (for kamala) then you will be socially rejected', but its sugarcoated with 'you have the power to do this to high status men' so it doesn't cause anxiety in the message's recipients.
You might be right. That could have been the explicit idea behind the ad. But if so, it's deeply distressing that a candidate (and/or their campaign team) who would come up with an ad like that has a legitimate chance at becoming President, and it's also distressing that people who would be receptive to an ad like that are a large enough percentage of the electorate that their opinion matters.
This just feels like the absolute worst kind of petty high school drama bullshit. All pretense of engaging in actual object-level politics has been dropped. Only overt status games remain.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics.
Leftists disqualifying potential romantic partners for not being sufficiently leftist is absolutely a thing.
I think everyone who has read a novel or watched a movie is familiar with the experience of information you learn later coloring your perception of what came before. Like, you're watching a movie, and in the beginning there are a lot of tantalizing clues about how the story might develop, and you're interested to see where it goes; but then the big twist at the end sucks, it doesn't stick the landing. So you end up concluding that the movie as a whole was bad and not worth the time. "Yeah, it was cool in the beginning, but it didn't go anywhere". Your knowledge of what the complete work looks like invalidates the excitement you felt in the beginning.
Or, to take a more extreme example: suppose you have a neighbor who you have had nothing but pleasant and friendly interactions with for years, and then one day you learn that he's actually been a serial killer this whole time, committing murders unbeknownst to you. You would immediately change your judgement of him and start thinking that he's a terrible person, regardless of how outwardly friendly he had been to you up until that point. Certainly, your previous pleasant interactions with him were real and are still real; the past isn't literally rewritten. It's just that the prior information you had about him is no longer relevant in your overall evaluation of his moral status, due to the overwhelming significance of the new information you've acquired.
Hopefully these analogies illustrate how it is conceivable that learning that a work was actually created by AI could shift your overall evaluation of it, even if you previously had a very positive evaluation based on your direct experience of the work. I agree with @DTulpa's assessment here: if I learned that my favorite album was actually AI, I wouldn't be able to look at it the same way again.
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