For me art is about communication and connection. I'm often looking to understand what an artist says to me. More often than not, I like art is interesting to me on an emotional level, rather than rational or entertainment value level. I feel like I'm connecting with the artist.
Consider A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie. This album deeply affects me when I listen to it. It's a visceral experience - I'm a husband and this album conveys grief and loss a husband experienced when his wife died. It reflects the personal experience of Phil Elverum. Don't get me wrong, AI could have written the same album, it probably will make an equally or more emotionally impactful album in my lifetime, but an AI haven't experienced what Phil Elverum has experienced. To me, the value of this album is not in a crystalized commodity of musical album, that AI could produce. The value resides in the personal message from Phil to everyone who has experienced loss. Each part, the lyrics, the music of this album was tortured out of him by himself. His work has some kind of unquantifiable emotional value. A statistical model can approximate these feelings and produce an average representation of grief, but a masterful artist expresses those emotions directly. AI doesn't "understand" the assignment in the same way a human does.
As another example, let's take Rothko. His pieces are banal at the first glance. Plain color on a big canvas? I mean, I could do this myself, unironically. But, regardless of how hard it was to make his various Untitleds, I still care about Rothko's intentions - like when he tried to make rich people depressed while they eat in Four Seasons restaurant.
After visiting the location of his future artwork, Rothko stated that he hoped to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."
Rothko stated that “He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall."
The stated intent is funny to me, it's absurd. He miserably failed in his endeavor to make rich people depressed - they just ignored the murals, to Rothko's dismay. But those murals represent something tangible. A prompter can try to approximate the intent, but I'm not interested in a statistical approximation of what makes rich people depressed, I'm interested in what Rothko thought could make rich people depressed because it tells me something about Rothko. It's interesting to me how he approached depression, what he viewed as depressing, why did he view it like that. AI art won't tell me something about the prompter because by its nature, it's a statistical representation of what the average output to a given prompt looks like.
There's lots of art that's soulless, lots of art that exists solely to make money - and that's great! A lot of projects by good artists are financed by doing the dirty money-making work: the gaming example of it would be Josh Sawyer conceiving Pentiment in 1990s, but only being able to make it in 2022 as an ostensibly pet project. I like Josh Sawyer's other projects, but Pentiment is great in part because it's was a pet project that he cared a lot about. There's nothing like Pentiment because it's the result Josh Sawyer's passion. Lots of artists work in the advertisement industry to make ends meet and make art that they care about in their free time.
I'm afraid that if AI art makes life more difficult for the Taylor Swifts and the Marvels and the Corporate Memphisers and Ubisofts of the art sphere (the purely money focused business endeavors that result in entertainment art), artists that I care about will suffer by an extension as the field becomes less lucrative for everybody.
TL;DR:
- There's entertainment-value-only art and thoughtful art. I don't claim that the latter is better than the former, or vice versa. I just happen to like thoughtful art more.
- When I'm interacting with thoughtful art, I'm looking for the artist's intent and for the feelings that authors try to convey through their art.
- Putting your feelings through generative AI is a statistical approximation of your feelings, rather than a more valuable to me direct representation of those feelings. I'm trying to connect with the author through the art and I think that this connection can't be established through an AI lens.
- Author's intent can't be purely conveyed through AI art.
- The part of the art industry that AI aims to colonize subsidizes the art that I care about.
I still think there are uses for AI art. If it could replace Marvel or Corporate Memphis designers or any decorative-only, illustration art, furry porn, I wouldn't shed a tear for what we've lost. But, if it happens to also choke the part of the art industry I care about, the advent of AI is unacceptable to me.
teleoplexy
16d ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process.
It's very easy for me to believe that some Americans are to some extent pro-Hamas. It's even easier for me to believe that the Americans who ended up volunteering in Gaza are pro-Hamas.
What's the Motte's perspective on why Trump's "fake" (contingent) electors scheme not a great deal? Truthfully, I'm not very familiar with the US electoral system, so I'd be grateful for any and all corrections.
As far as I understand, this is not the first time when an alternative slate of electors was submit - 1960's Hawaii election seems to be another example and it became a precedent of when it's permissible to submit an alternate slate. From what I'm seeing, though, the differences between this example and Trump's scheme are
- The election hasn't been certified yet in Hawaii, while it has been certified in all of the states for which alternate elector slates were submitted.
- There was legitimate uncertainty who won - famously, the difference in Hawaii was 110 votes, while Trump's lawsuits were predicated on widespread fraud during the election. Apparently, Eastman knew that those lawsuits are dead in the water. In this case, I'm not entirely sure what's the steelman case for Pence not certifying the election, and what was the purpose of the alternate slates (other than to overturn the election, that is)
teleoplexy
29d ago
Canadian elections are almost all culture war nowadays, though...
teleoplexy
29d ago
Congrats! First one for me too, honestly didn't expect it.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Sidetracking a bit - I’m really impressed by ublock origin efforts to fight Youtube ads. And they don’t take donations to boot. A group of indie devs really managed to put up a good fight against Google’s anti-blocker department.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.
They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:
“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.
“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”
The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said: “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”
Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?
“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”
“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”
So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.
“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”
The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.
The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:
So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.
The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.
When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.
Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.
All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.
And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:
It is sad this is the most recommended comment, which is simply refuted in the second sentence of the article.
Racism abound.
Quote from the article:
While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.
Another comment:
Same old rightwing playbook. Deny, obfuscate and rely on sophistry to prove that nothing is real unless they agree with it.
There are so many known and proven ways, in which First Nations were harmed. I can't imagine my child being taken away from me to be reeducated in some way in general, let alone experimented on. Taking away children from their parents causes a visceral reaction in me. I can't imagine the pain and which downstream effects this would cause to a community.
Setting all of the compassion I feel on the personal level aside, why do we need to invent new ways for the indigenous people to be oppressed? Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point? Why do liberals seem to be content with this state of affairs?
It all comes down to this, and it's a very cynical and bitter conclusion: it's profitable to lie. Would, for example, this documentary* be made? Would the feds give $27 million to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation? Would provinces pledge more money for searches? (god knows which unreliable methods would this money be spent on in the future. Divination? Remote viewing? Not out of the question apparently).
And the same tired tactics are used to browbeat the skeptics into "believing science", again. Who cares that for now ground scanning radar found exactly 0 buried kids? It doesn't matter, Catholics killed kids. It's plain and simple, champ. Just be more centered. Do better. Be less racist. Catholic churches on fire be damned. What's one church against maybe existing child remains?
Chief Nepinak from the CBC article above:
“I think the vocal majority in the room, in the community engagements, wanted certainty. They wanted to find the truth. They wanted people held accountable,” Nepinak said. “And to that end, you know, we prioritized that, that voice.”
Apparently, it's easy to exhume, even if the act of doing so violates religious beliefs. And now Pine Creek First Nation knows for certain: no unmarked graves where the ground scanning radar found the anomalies. Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, on the other hand, would prefer to not know.
* This documentary is stunningly scare on content. Julian Brave NoiseCat shows us a lot of tears over the dead children, lying in those unmarked graves. A lot of interpersonal trauma. People hurting other people - there's a scene where he confronts his absentee father about spending the childhood without him. They find a survivor of residential schools who recounts a story about putting a newborn baby, who was the result of an indigenous girl being raped by a priest, in an incinerator. Of course there's no evidence outside of this single account. The whole RAPE BABY INCINERATION is mentioned in passing. One of the main characters is an activist woman, who's trying to uncover the whole truth about the residential schools for 50 years and the only thing that she now clings to is... unmarked graves. Widespread evidence of abuse is so widespread, one person can apparently dig for 50 years and come up with nothing.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Toronto is a Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia
Heavy disagree, honestly. Lived in Moscow and Toronto. Toronto is possibly nothing like Russia
The reason why term "Cultural Marxism" is perceived as a conspiracy from the perspective of orthodox Marxists, isn't because "Cultural Marxism"/Wokeism doesn't exist. It's a conspiracy because calling the phenomenon in question "Cultural Marxism" muddies the waters for orthodox Marxists. Plain and simply - it makes their lives harder. Because of this new term they have to go around and say: "We actually disagree with wokies! They are not real Marxists! There are no [orthodox] Marxists that I know of that call themselves Cultural Marxists. We are also against Wokeism". And because of this inconvenience, the insistence on the lineage when they reject it, they deem this a conspiracy by the CIA against orthodox Marxism (every failure of Marxism and roadbump it experiences in its way is a CIA conspiracy, to be clear).
teleoplexy
1mo ago
My comment was written in order to refute this statement directly:
middle managers try to show the plebs who exactly is running the show
But yes, the end result is pruning the workforce, which might have or might not have been the end goal, but there's no corroboration of this being intentional. We can try to infer and I agree that it's likely.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Inside scoop: the RTO enforcement came from Andy Jassy directly. There were no discussions with middle managers. The AWS management in fact, put up some group resistance during 3-days-per-week policy announcement. I remember seeing email chains, discussions, calls for data-driven decisions, even a lot of dissent coming from org directors. This was done hush-hush, without collaborating with the very public employee movement.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.
I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.
What changed your mind? Life experiences? Books (if there are any, I'd appreciate if you could list them)? Something else?
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Could you please elaborate on realizations that you find most important? I'm curious about God and communism, for example!
teleoplexy
1mo ago
I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political
Could you give a couple of examples?
The one I can think of: regulating social media and news outlets is the political solution to a cultural problem.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Sidetracking the thread a little bit, but given that OpenAI and its competitors hit a brick wall in progress recently, what keeps you optimistic about ASI? Admittedly I'm not following the field very closely, but are there any interesting breakthroughs that I've missed that you think get us closer?
teleoplexy
1mo ago
"Normies" as defined by "not rationalist/everybody else" isn't obvious to me. In general, the word is used differently in different contexts and for me the default meaning is "a normal person who isn't too online". This is useless for the context of trying to convince people to accept that communism is bad because everybody is online.
I appreciate the comments everybody else left here. That said, most of them miss the forest for the trees. The question itself is incorrect. It's a nice thought exercise, but all of those arguments come up again and again in communist vs. capitalist debates and they don't make a dent.
The reason why those arguments don't work is that you can never (or at least very rarely) logic away ideas that were created by feelings. The reason why the question itself is incorrect is that "normies" do not exist.
Feels over reals
Imagine that you are feeling bad for one reason or another. It might be a mental health issue; it might be some kind of physical health issue; it might be some kind of issue at work; it might be some kind of personal issue that deeply affects you emotionally. When you spend time on algorithmic social media, you are constantly exposed to fringe ideas (like communism). Content creators and regular posters might post something that you empathize with - a meme, a video, a TikTok, a "my boss bad" post, whatever, it doesn't matter. This post registers on an emotional level: "Actually, it's the world that is bad and unfair, and it's not just my personal issue. We live in a society where everyone experiences this". You see that a lot of people are feeling the same way as you did. The thoughts that might go through one's head are:
- It's not that I'm depressed; it's our society that is fundamentally depressing. (The greatest example of this thinking is Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. The author famously refused to try medication for his depression and killed himself)
- It's not that my particular job is bad; all bosses are bad.
- It's not that my health issue made me feel vulnerable and unsafe; it's that our society doesn't care about vulnerable people in a proper way.
After that, the algorithm picks up that you liked this particular fringe idea and feeds you more. Then, you fall into a pipeline, where you are served more content. Maybe you join an online community that posts memes about communism. Gradually, by way of memes, you get inoculated against all of the arguments that people have provided here. Normies start reading effortposts. Normies start reading Marxist/anarchist economics books, which retroactively provide a twisted logic to the emotions they are experiencing. At this point, they have both moral and logical arguments to delude themselves with. One can't logically argue against someone who fell into a fringe ideology pipeline - they have all of the answers they need.
The logical arguments everybody makes here do not make any emotional impact. Try to imagine yourself: which one is a more appealing pattern of thinking for a depressed person, for example?
- I'm feeling bad, but it's normal because society is structured in a way that makes me feel bad.
- I'm feeling bad, but if I try hard enough to improve my life, I'll feel better.
The former is easy. The latter is hard. Thus, it's simpler to continue taking the path of least resistance: more festering in online communities and commiserating, more of trying to find how a magical imaginary society would work that wouldn't make people feel bad in the way that I feel bad. None of those things require hard work to fix your life.
This is why Jordan Peterson resonates with young men so well. His arguments first make sense on an emotional level. Hearing him describe societal challenges young men experience is validating for young men, who then proceed to take his advice on how to fix their lives. The same way, hearing communists describe societal challenges is also validating, but instead of providing actionable advice, the communists rope you into a cult that worships the destruction of society as we know it.
I haven't ever seen libertarians or conservatives or even liberals address the societal challenges in the same way as communists address them: on a feels level. On an emotional level. Instead, we get Pinker, for example, who says that everything is actually good, or at least, much better than it was before. Pinker makes a logical argument directed at someone experiencing an emotional state. Maybe some people can be logic'd out of the emotional state, but it seems like it's not very effective.
Normies do not exist
Memes are ubiquitous. Everybody is online. Spending time on social media is the norm nowadays. The majority of the social media landscape is dominated by algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic feeds have become the default way to kill time for many. Social media algorithms play a crucial role in radicalization: they gradually expose users to more extreme content and potentially push them towards fringe ideas. This process of algorithmic radicalization doesn't discriminate – it affects people across the spectrum, not just a select few. So, the idea of a "normie" assumes a stable, average individual untouched by internet culture. In reality, this kind of individual doesn't exist, and everyone is influenced by online discourse to some degree.
The discourse itself has changed: 4chan's cultural norms have migrated to the internet at large. Hasan Piker is the largest streamer on Twitch. Among progressives, how many do we think are communists who maintain a kayfabe like Hasan? Yesterday's fringe is today's mainstream.
So who are the "normies"? Regular people spending time on the mainstream internet? Just regular people in your life? If that is so, they are already online and probably regularly spend time in a space that promotes a fringe ideology that is appealing on an emotional level, be it MAGA, Blue MAGA, progressivism, trans ideology, or communism. Take this socialist substack series (which is now, unfortunately, paywalled) and see for yourself where 19-year-olds learn their communist ideas. One of the interviewees' answer is Instagram, and I was shocked that even a "normie" platform like Instagram has full-blown socialist, communist, and anarchist communities.
Ignoring all of the above is ignoring the social reality: our logical arguments will be drowned out by the sea of emotion that your average normie is exposed to from a very early age.
If logic doesn't work, what does? Just spitballing ideas, so no concrete suggestions:
- Create a community that answers emotional needs, but leads down the pipeline that teaches critical thinking and rationalism. The downside is that the memes are antithetical to what rationalism is, to an extent.
- Use relatable narratives. Change "My boss sucks, so we need to destroy the society as it exists" to "My boss sucks, and here's how to improve the situation"
- Community should emphasize personal responsibility, but in a positive and supportive way, which is seemingly what "normies" want.
E:
- Defining categories of who we are targeting might also help. "Normies" is abstract. For example, teaching kids the values of being self-sufficient and how current system encourages the best in human nature is much more doable
teleoplexy
1mo ago
They actually took a stance against doing that. Vlad is CEO and responding to arguments in that thread.
Most relevant:
The very basic question of what do you police (or don't) next is not answerable. For example 'how to kill an animal?', 'how to rob a bank?', 'how to hack a computer?' - although objectively less impactful than the original example, would eventually draw attention from sufficently large groups of people who will passionately call us out on not doing something about these queries on the same moral grounds. And again this never ends, you end up being in the business of pleasing everyone. Good luck with that.
Thus the best option for us is to simply refuse to make the first precedent no matter what the pressure is and stick to search being search. Perhaps one day Kagi may become your 'assistent' with personalised biases, but for now it is just a search engine.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
If you haven't tried Balatro yet, you should give it a shot
teleoplexy
2mo ago
I'd venture to say that it's a simplistic lens to view the current election, considering the history of Russia. The process of depoliticization has its roots in Stalin's purges, the threat of Gulags silencing any political dissent, the culture of snitching and secrecy. Russian people retreated from the sphere of politics into their own lives because their lives depended on it. The parallels do not seem convincing to me, and I'm not sure if there are any.
I'm not entirely sure what your comment is meant to highlight.
The comment I responded to says that Russian liberals failed because Russian people "don't buy it".
I said that Russians don't follow/believe liberals because they are depoliticized to a point where the majority of people don't believe any politician at all, not just liberal politicians.
The depoliticization aspect is unique to Russia. American society is deeply political. Both states are cultivated by propaganda.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
The lack of success by the Russian liberals should be attributed to the general depoliticization in the Russian society. It’s not that the Russians just don’t care about politics, the apathy comes from being disconnected with their country and the world in general. Why watch the news if you can’t tell what the truth is? “What’s truth anyway?” is a common way to think. If there’s no way of telling there truth from lies, there’s no meaningful way to act.
This mental state is not only dominant, but also deliberately cultivated in Russia by its government.
Yeah, not being a party member certainly was a career barrier, but it’s not the case that you had to become a true believer if you became a party member. In fact, in the book author describes a guy who became a party member just so that he had more leverage to do really important things in his profession (sorry I’m fuzzy on details, read it a while ago) and privately even condemned the party. That’s also the case for the people in my life.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
What separated us from the Soviets during the Cold War was you didn't have to be an activist to do things like medicine.
I highly recommend reading “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” by Alexey Yurchak. You can fully ignore Yurchak’s own postmodernist ranting, but at the same time he collected a fascinating account of what it was like to live in post WWII Soviet Union. In short, it’s a myth that you had to be an activist or even a believer. Regular people despised both true believers and open critics of Soviet Union. This sentiment is even more true for the STEM professions.
I'm not against these tools. I think those are actually pretty cool and useful. However, whatever Adobe does with Photoshop and the examples you give are to me the motte. When it's used as a tool, I have no qualms with it. When it makes artist's life easier without compromising the artistic vision it's amazing, it's the best outcome. The bailey in the argument against AI art is twofold:
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