site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous. I'm starting to feel (almost) as if it's outside the overton window to admit to using or liking AI art. Like I said, it's not ubiquitous, but maybe it's getting there. Pretty much any thread I ever see that features AI art (outside of specialty groups devoted to AI interest) has many vocal detractors accusing AI art of being trash and stealing from real artists.

While my mind is not fully made up on the issue of whether AI art is "good", if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.

More than anything, I'm kinda surprised there's this strong sentiment, and willingness to call out AI art and its proponents as being some sort of evil in the world. 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? I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.

Most people don't object to advertising cookies either, yet here we are.

My objection to AI creative work generally is that AI is not an individual with particular tastes and intentions. It's a conglomerative average. Even if you're running the end process on your GPU using prompts you created, the training was done in a data center the size of a small town over the course of billions of billions of operations over more training data than it would be possible for one person to view in a lifetime. Conceptually it would be like taking all the artists New York City and glomming them together into one giant flesh blob monster that you then chain up in a basement attached to a printer that churns out derivative work. That's how it feels to me, aesthetically. The end product may look fine, but it isn't intentional the way art made by an individual is intentional. The details are chosen by averaging training data details, not because they matter.

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.

Have you actually ever downloaded a model and tried making ai art beyond the basic stuff you get on the like chat gpt?

I think a lot of people don't actually understand that there is actually a lot of real decision an expression able to be done with ai art. I've downloaded A1111 and a few models, loras and tools. Typically to make anything interesting takes generating hundreds of images off of base prompts, often including technique like giving the model a wire frame for subject body positioning as well as painting the image to have different prompts populate different parts of the image. Then once I make a good base image I'll use inpainting to have it redraw some sections using a number of nobs and dials with new crafted prompts. Sometimes I'll even take an image into M$ paint and do some crude drawings because it can get stuck on colors.

It's certainly less time consuming and difficult that personally taking pen/pencil/brush to paper but I think a lot of people are under the impression that AI art generation is actually just entering a really specific prompt and are missing out on a genuine advancement putting creative tools in the hands of people who no longer need to spend hundreds or thousands of hours practicing things not really directly related to creativity.

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:

  • It is currently most commonly used to generate slop using a single prompt. It is already a huge problem, to a point where indie search engines add an option to filter it out. The OP is asking why is there outrage against the AI, and the reason for it are not the tools that you and I agree are impressive. The problem lies in the lazy one-prompt slop, which I had in mind when writing the post.
  • The future promise of the technology is generating full blown songs, pictures, videos just by using a prompt and without compromising on quality. This future, once again, is not an ideal outcome for me because even if the future GenAI doesn't compromise on quality, the one-promptness of it will still compromise the vision.

As an armature artist, or hobbyist might be more accurate. AI art is vaguely depressing, I feel like my life is worse because it exists. That said, it is hard for me to call it 'evil' and I don't get overly upset about it. I used to have fun drawing everyone's characters in my D&D group. Now somebody produces AI art of all the characters and major events, within an hour of session wrap, so I don't bother to draw them anymore. I am sure the group enjoys them, they look nice, and it is not like random D&D art ever had a lot of meaning or artistic value in the first place. The group is almost certainly better off, even if I feel kinda shitty about it. Ultimately I never felt comfortable calling myself an 'artist', I have some technical ability but I never put much thought or 'soul' into my work, I thought of it more like illustration, viewed myself as more of a craftsman. Like so many craftsman before me, my craft has been automated and I have been made redundant. Life is suffering.

This is the good and the bad of AI art all wrapped up in one short post.

The Good: Low stakes things like rpg character art is now free to get quickly and at a pretty decent level of quality. Most people would never have paid for this and their having access to it is good. Even those who did pay for it before now get it cheaper, and with the ability to refine the prompts are more likely to get exactly what they want.

The Bad: Some people were paying for this, and it cuts the legs out from under those artists. I'd have more sympathy, but tons of people have gotten screwed by technological change or cheaper markets and this is special pleading. But at the same time, this is also the kind of thing people do when they are just getting into art. The first step to being good at something is being bad at it, and easy replacements which are superior to the Bad At It stage seem likely to demoralize/discourage people from working through this step cause why bother.

I also think this is why normies who are not artists and have only to gain from this change are still so rabidly anti-AI. Cause art is fun, and rewarding, and gives us a sense of accomplishment and helpfulness to the group even if its just a picture of our characters storming the castle. We always imagined the robots as mine labor, or housemaids, etc. because we wanted them to do the drudgery so we could all do art. Not have them take over all the art and leave us to do the manual labor.

Artists are engaged in special pleading, and they didn't care other people's ox got gored. But the reason people empathize more with them is that no one dreams of being a factory worker so who cares if the robots take those jobs. But if the robots take all the artist, novelist, musician, and philosopher jobs then what is there left for the post scarcity world except sitting on your ass watching netflix like those jerks in Wall-E?

To be very uncharitable, the same people that go into hysterics about AI artwork would be the ones celebrating en masse if AI suddenly took over all long-haul truckers jobs.

I think we're seeing a very odd case of twisted future shock, where the expectation that AI would suddenly come in an usher a gay communist utopia has proven to not be the case. Instead, we're seeing AI used as tools meant to augment skills and intelligence, rather than physical work, and the same people that thought their creative skills protected them from being replaced have discovered that their creative skills are easily replaceable.

I don't really have an issue with AI artwork, myself. I think it's neat.

I am not an artist, so I don't really care about how much AI art will destroy their livelihood, but I dislike it for the same reason I dislike autotune or social media photo filters.

Everyone uses autotune and filters, and the best examples are "transparent". But obvious usage of autotune, photo filters and AI art simply floods my attention with noise. Just as I don't want every company to have an anthem sang by a warbling voice that used to be Sarah from HR's before autotuning, I don't want every blogpost to have an AI-generated hero image.

Before AI web designers used effect as clouds of tags or parallax. Garbage

making more of garbage was common trend even before AI, it's just a bit more of it Microsoft had animated cartoonish characters in 90x, when PCs had 8-16 megabytes of RAM (at least you could turn them off).

Agree with this entirely. AI is going to lead to a new inundation of total slop. My positive-to-neutral attitude shifted to slight hostility (though still feeling that a lot of the complaining is pure entitlement) when I saw printouts of shitty AI art at a county fair that some teenager cobbled together in a presentation. I would have respected childish crayon drawings more.

This makes me think of Clip Art and Comic Sans, and that Brian Eno quote about the desire to replicate the flaws of old media as soon as newer media eliminates them.

Seconded. When I click on some intellectual dark web would be radical, and his blog is interspersed with images of him drawn up as a cartoon hero, I close it. When I go on Twitter and a thread features a million irrelevant ai generated images, I click away.

I saw a tweet the other day which was pleading with big companies not to use AI art, because by doing so they're indirectly signalling cheapness: it sends the message that the company is so underresourced that they can't afford to hire graphic designers etc., and have to resort to using Stable Diffusion instead. It reminded me of this article which argued that companies spending extravagant sums on advertising campaigns is a hallmark of the confidence they have in their product or service: "we're so sure that you'll love this that we'll put our money where our mouths are to put it in front of you".

On the one hand, this argument is unassailably true. On the other hand, it strikes me as an awfully exclusive position to hold for a person who presumably considers themselves socialist or at least left-leaning. "If you didn't spend at least $100k on your ad campaign, don't even bother - we don't want broke boys here."

Years ago I had a similar debate with a musician, who pointed out that a lot of metal and punk records from the 80s and 90s have a very raw, scuzzy DIY feel because the band couldn't afford anything better. Nowadays many modern punk and metal bands are purists about recording to tape and will spend a small fortune trying to replicate that "raw", "organic" sound that records from the 80s and 90s have. But this guy pointed out that the modern inheritor of the raw 80s approach to recording your demo (at least as far as being DIY and budget-conscious goes) is to plug your guitar into a Scarlett 2i2 and program the drums with Superior Drummer.

An analogy I'll keep returning to is that when The Abyss came out in 1989, it was submitted to the Oscars for consideration under the best visual effects category, but did not receive a nomination - because the Academy decided that using CGI was cheating. 5-10 years from now, every film that gets nominated for best visual effects will use generative AI in some capacity and people will be wondering what all the fuss was about.

I see AI art as just another tool.

It's extremely similar to the backlash against Digital Art about 25 years ago. Any art created using Photoshop was low status, debate as to whether it counted as "real art" if you didn't use a pencil/paintbrush/whatever, and produce no physical artefact. But nowadays it would be bizarre to consider all digital art as "not real". Give it a few years and it'll all blow over. Actually I did encounter someone who considered electronic music to be "not real music" within the last year, which was pretty weird, so there will be some holdouts I guess. Maybe in the short term we'll see resurgence in demand for non-digital art, at least until someone hooks up AI to a CNC machine with a paintbrush.

Any art created using Photoshop was low status

I'm not a great art connaisseur, but it seems to me this is still the case? If I go to my local museum almost all work on display is created from real materials, and that includes modern and contemporary art.

You might say that musea favor physical art in general (you don't need to go outside to view digital art, after all), but they do still exhibit photos and even film snippets (e.g. on a projection screen), but these are invariably recorded in the real physical world, not purely digital creations. And especially with photos, photoshopping them seems to detract from their artistic value, not add to it.

There is also stuff like Damien Hirst's spot paintings most of which are just colored circles painted on a white canvas. You could almost auto-generate them. Hirst doesn't even paint them himself; he has nameless employees that do it for him. So the artistic merit of these paintings seems to be in the idea. Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?

I can only conclude that digital art still very much doesn't “count”, and I expect that AI-generated “art” (which in its current form is not very original) will remain similarly low-status.

Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?

I would agree with you except one thing... What about NFTs?

I once visited (unintentionally) exhibition of art generated with a computer, some pictures even had a source code

Have you seen Scott's AI art Turing test?

This is expected. AI art encroaches on a profession that tends to be solidly blue, similar to journalism, so there is an overlap between journalists and artists attacking IA art as either theft or being inferior. Some on the right oppose AI art for more asthetic reasons, but much of the criticism does seem from the left.

Why would it being inferior produce such moralistic outrage?

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.

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.

Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?

I'm an artist. The AI is pretty clearly doing what I do. Any argument I see for objecting to AI art applies equally well to artists generally. To the extent that AI art infringes on copyright, we all infringe in exactly the same way when we learn to draw by copying other peoples' work. AI is very likely going to put me out of a job. But why should this be objectionable? My job is a job. The AI won't take away my ability to draw or paint or model. To the extent that it reduces the value of my drawing and painting and modelling to zero in an economic sense, why is this a bad thing, when it wasn't a bad thing to invent lace machines or lathes or jackhammers or whatever other labor-saving machines we might care to name? It won't stop me from making the art I actually care to make, and while the idea of having to change careers is quite scary, I certainly won't be in this boat alone, and I imagine that we have a reasonable collective chance of muddling through.

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.

...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? You roll out the Shall Nots for something as trivial as AI generated art, but don't want people to roll them out for sexual ethics or homogeneity of values?

I think part of it is future shock at how fast this became an issue. Six years ago AI could barely generate a paragraph of coherent text and now it’s producing photorealistic images and competing with professional artists. It took mechanical automation 150 years before it started to replace manual factory laborers at that level. Also science fiction and technological prognosticators never expected knowledge workers to be the first ones on the computer’s chopping block so we have no frame of reference for it.

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.

I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.

In that discussion, "A" is something approximating "we are huddled around a small kernel of knowledge, surrounded by vast, dark unknowns, hoping to grow that kernel a little larger", and "B" is something approximating "We reside in a well-lit framework of knowledge that encompasses the small, fragmentary set of unknowns that remain to be eliminated", where these are referencing what we comprehend about the real world and our place in it.

But even before AI, art is our creation, is it not? Where within art are the vast unknowns that could loom over us?

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. 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"?

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. But commercial and popular art of the sort we are discussing here is inherently frivolous, so where would an argument from prudence even be grounded?

Again, I am an artist by trade and by temperament. I do not claim to have perfect insight into the nature of Art, but neither do I accept bald assertions of deeper mysteries wholly unknown and invisible to me. I have spent the better part of a lifetime observing how the sausage gets made; I can accept that there may be things of value that I do not understand or am not wired to appreciate, 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. 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. Beauty and Truth are not synonyms, at least for any common definition of those terms.

All that being said, what am I missing? What is the "A" view, with regards to art?

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:

  1. 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

  2. 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.

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?

I have been, certainly. I do not think I am often "struck" by this now, as it has moved past initial revelation into basic knowledge. The list of unknowns is infinite. As the author says, "Our brains have one scale, and adjust our experiences to fit." "Human subcultures are nested fractally; there is no bottom.". Everything is like this. But I wonder if you would agree that I am capturing the essence of "so much remaining unread."

Do I want to believe that there is so much that remains unread? There seems to be an implicit optimism in this question that I do not think I can muster. I would like to believe that there is deep value contained in Trout Mask Replica or The Large Glass or The Birth of the World, to the extent that I have made some minimal effort to sift them or to try to get leads from others. I can recognize some level of significant value in Klee's Angelus Novus because I greatly value some of those his work inspired, and I can work backward to see how his work influenced theirs, and I can imagine that there is more in that piece that I lack the context to recognize.

But on the other hand, the unknowns remain infinite, and life is fleeting. I do not think that there is enough there there in any of those pieces, for me, to be worth the time digging for it would take. And so my time and effort goes to what seem to me to be more fruitful artistic pursuits.

Suppose that there were no God; even if you think this is absolutely inconceivable, try to grant it as a hypothetical.

There being no God is entirely conceivable to me. I used to be an atheist; not being an atheist now is a choice I make freely each day. The other side of that choice does not seem mysterious or inexplicable to me.

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?

I would say no. God's existence or non-existence doesn't seem to me to have any significant impact on the correctness of the "A" view.

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?

I think so, but wouldn't mind some elaboration.

There's that quote above: "our brains have one scale, and adjust our experiences to fit." I think that's a pretty insightful description of how the human mind works: we can focus down on some emotion or some aspect until it fills our entire perception. We can work it into our past and our hopes for the future, wind ourself around it till we grow to its shape, obsess over it, bend every other aspect of our life back to it, until it seems to be all that matters, elemental, primordial, a terminal value, the hub of our universe. And we can, I think, do this with anything. The subjective perception of value has no necessary correlation to actual value. Feelings of goodness have no necessary correlation to goodness. And some forms of twisting our minds in this way appear to me to be deeply misguided or actively evil.

I spent a considerable portion of my life chasing Eros, and I went far enough for long enough down that rabbit hole to get philosophical about it, to begin trying to search for transcendence in it, to consider shaping significant portions of my life around it. In retrospect, that seems to have been, as you say, at best a category error, and at worst blasphemy.

Wrath is far sweeter. "The blood sings" is an evocative phrase, but the experience itself is a pleasure beyond easy description. The world narrows, simplifies, clarifies. The hands shake, the teeth grind, the mouth twists into a rictus of sheer pleasure and ravenous anticipation. And that is only the hot, momentary rush; nurtured, over time, a cold fury builds secret and implacable within the mind and the heart, like an avalanche of iron poised to sweep down on the adversary. Down in the chthonic depths of the inmost self, the primordial drives of cooperation, competition, and predation come alive. And high above in the heavens of the rational mind, the sunlike certainty shines clear that one's wrath is Just, that They Deserve It All And More, that this is how it should be, that this is how it must be. Then there comes the flowering of Pride; I am better than them, I will be their downfall, I will lay the snare, I will triumph... There is grandeur there, and ample room for awe and wonder. The pull is strong, easily strong enough to shape a life, to define one's entire existence. Brief though that existence might be, would it be so terrible to be a meteor, to burn so bright as to illuminate the world, even for an instant?

And yet: "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Merciful, smothering calm. Stillness. A sense of hollowness, brittle, like an empty shell. Sanity returns, and with it shame. Here too, "Blasphemy" seems an appropriate term.

Basically, I would like to determine the extent to which the light of the Almighty makes everything else seem dull in comparison.

I formed most of my opinions about art back when I was an atheist, and returning to Christianity has not materially changed them. Atheist or Christian, I have always been skeptical of emotion; I do not "trust my feelings", and I do not think that others should either. They have swept me up before, and I have experienced what seemed to me a full measure of their extremities, but they eventually pass, and life resumes.

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.

The latter. If scientists can actually demonstrate mind reading and mind control, what would be the point in arguing that they can't do so? Reality is reality. "A" is a caution against a specific lie that we have previously and are currently telling ourselves; it has no bearing on counterfactual scenarios, and can be entirely invalidated by subsequent events should scientists actually succeed in their Abolition of Man.

We do not now control nature in the sense that I perceive "B" advocates to be claiming. But it seems to me that art is much closer to "B" than it is to "A". Its scope seems clearly limited. We have not "solved" it, nor reduced it to pure engineering, but neither does it run rampant, dismaying our intentions and trampling our works. There are artistic misfortunes, but there has never been an artistic disaster, nor, I think, will there be.

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".

I'm given to understand that one of the generally accepted defining characteristics of art is that it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, optional, chosen rather than compelled, a luxury rather than a necessity. Further, it seems obvious to me that commercial art, made as a job to earn money, is generally considered to hold the least artistic merit, relative to works made out of sheer passion. Would you disagree?

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.

If a person lives and dies without seeing it, do you think their life was necessarily made lesser thereby? I don't particularly disagree that End of Evangelion is a "creative triumph". For that matter, I think the Madoka fanfic Fargo is a creative triumph. And I think the same of Hellboy, BLAME, and the H&K MP5K submachinegun. I think my disagreement is more about the significance of "creative triumphs" in general. I maintain that these are games we play together. Games are a good and proper part of life, and it is well that we should enjoy them. But they are not of terminal or even of very great value. Many things should outweigh them in a healthy worldview, because their scope is in fact too limited to support a central role in our existence.

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'd say I'm cautiously skeptical. I observe that people claim great value in many things. I'm confident that some of these things hold little to no value, and I'm confident that some of those claiming otherwise are either lying or deluded. For this piece in particular, I'll say that I see little to no value, am fairly confident that the value you draw would be sufficiently esoteric as to be inaccessible to me even if I were to actively pursue the context. having not yet pursued the context, I think it less likely but still possible that it holds no real value at all, and you are deluded.

It seems obvious to me that:

  • humans can generate endless rabbit holes out of anything or even nothing, for a variety of reasons.
  • These rabbit holes appear to me to vary widely in perceived value, and that my perception of value appears to correlates with the perception of others, and the features that indicate the presence or absence of value likewise correlate. In other words, value doesn't seem wholly, solipsisticly subjective.
  • Some of them seem straightforwardly explicable even from the outside, meaning that their depth appears to be illusory.
  • Some of them seem to be straightforwardly harmful to those caught in them, even if those caught in them disagree.

Given the above, discrimination is necessary, is it not? Life is fleeting. We pays our money and we takes our chances. And given the above, arguing for or against the value of a thing is useful; whoever is wrong could benefit greatly from correction.

All this is to say, I entirely recognize that value might exist even if I cannot see it. I am at this moment actively hunting for more value down a variety of rabbit holes, some of which might be completely bizarre and inexplicable to you, so it is easy for me to imagine that you likewise are mining gold down a hole that seems bizarre and inexplicable to me.

But do you recognize that value is sometimes, perhaps even often claimed falsely? And further, that sometimes those claiming to perceive the value are themselves misled? You asked if I wonder whether there might be more. I ask if you wonder if there might be less?

If a person lives and dies without seeing it, do you think their life was necessarily made lesser thereby?

I think I would have to say so, yeah! At least a little bit. It's a pretty damn good movie.

I'm given to understand that one of the generally accepted defining characteristics of art is that it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, optional, chosen rather than compelled, a luxury rather than a necessity.

Yes, but that's not the same thing as "frivolous". Frivolous means unnecessary is a bad way. Art is unnecessary in a good way. Art is, to use Kant's phrase, purposive without purpose.

Due to technological progress, we're rapidly approaching a point where reality itself will be as "optional" and "unnecessary" as art is. There is a small but non-zero chance that some of us will live to see the advent of the experience machine - i.e. The Matrix, a perfect VR recreation of reality, but tailored to your desires, and with all suffering eliminated (the computer could make sure you have enough excitement and danger to not get bored, of course - but only as much as is necessary. Everyone could be guaranteed a charmed life that is free of major tragedy). And even if we don't live to see it, we can plausibly conjecture that some future generation will, if progress in AI and neuroscience continue.

Now why, exactly, should one not plug themselves into the experience machine? What is the argument for resisting it? This is one of my overriding concerns, and much of what I write here - about art, about suffering, and so forth - should be read in this context.

I simply take it for granted that there is no "rational" argument for rejecting the experience machine, within the bounds of what is currently taken to be rationality. Everyone who is "prudent", who weighs the pros and cons without bias or illusion, who refuses to let themselves be seduced by sentimentality, will inevitably be lead to the conclusion that it's better to simply plug themselves in and let the machines generate wondrous experiences for them until the heat death of the universe.

I think, if you want to avoid this fate, then you have to make a fundamental choice to be oriented towards authenticity qua authenticity for its own sake, the individual subject exercising his capacity for freedom for its own sake, and, ultimately, the horror of reality for its own sake (because why expose yourself to the risk of suffering when you could simply... not?). And art is the physical manifestation of this uncanny excess, the refusal to capitulate to prudence or necessity, man's assertion of his will to continue living against all reason. You are correct that art is unnecessary - but so is existence itself, ultimately. (I believe I should point out that art is not the only practice that can fill this role - in some ways mathematics is even better, and even more sublimely purposeless than art is, because the pleasure that one derives from mathematics is more rarefied, and the potential audience who can appreciate it is so limited.)

I am at this moment actively hunting for more value down a variety of rabbit holes, some of which might be completely bizarre and inexplicable to you

I doubt that. It is rare that I am totally at a loss for an explanation as to why people think as they think or do as they do. I am highly empathetic and it's easy for me to make myself feel what others feel, love what they love, hate what they hate. It is the duty of a philosopher to be a brief abstract of humanity.

You're free to provide examples of these rabbit holes if you want to discuss further.

But do you recognize that value is sometimes, perhaps even often claimed falsely?

Yes, but I wouldn't phrase it quite like that.

Suppose we have a man who becomes infatuated with an inanimate mannequin, because he thinks it's of supreme value. He neglects his wife and kids, he withdraws from everything else in life, his world becomes centered around spending time with the mannequin to a comical degree. And he dies happy, never recanting or regretting his actions. Was he "wrong" about the value of the mannequin? There was something wrong about his actions, certainly, but I wouldn't say that he was wrong about the value of the mannequin itself. I think that value is, partially, relational (which is not the same thing as arbitrary or solipsistic) - it's a relation that exists between you and someone or something else, it's not something that inheres solely in the object. The relationship that he instantiated with the mannequin is proof of its own validity. But there were other, higher values that rightly had certain claims on him, and his fault was in ignoring those higher values that he should not have ignored.

I ask if you wonder if there might be less?

That would be disrespectful.

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.

I love the act of creation, of weaving new things out of my imagination and building them up into something approximating reality, drawing connections between them, rolling them up into a big katamari-ball of associations and idea-connections and emotional inductions. This act brings me great joy and delight, and has all my life since I achieved self-awareness.

I love sharing these creations with others, and seeing joy and delight spark in their eyes, hearing their laughter and excitement, seeing them experience the induced triumph or sorrow or conviction as what I've made sweeps them up and carries them along, even if only for a moment or two. I love the communion with others innate to this act, the joyful seduction of drawing them out of the material and mundane into the immaterial and fantastical.

I am vain enough to desire that it is my creations that should strike a fire in their minds, that some part of me should take root in those around me, to see some part of myself reproduced in the mind of others. I want to make a mark on those around me.

But in much the same way, I love partaking in the creations of others, being swept away or inspired in turn, and I love taking pieces of what they have made and kitbashing them together into something "new" of my own. I love finding the Buddha-nature in something, finding which parts of it hook and pull, which motivate, where the payload lies and through which channels the current flows, and I love how this knowledge, once gained, strengthens and invigorates my own creations. It's a push and pull, give and take, cooperation and competition, like all of the best things in life. This, to me, is the essence of the "artist's temperament", the center around which any dividing line should be drawn.

Do you disagree? And if so, how would you define the center of the "artist's temperament"? The distinction that stands out from what you've written appears to be the idea of the mysterious, the numinous, the "losing of one's head", the encounter of something incomprehensibly vast or primordial. You are correct that I see art from a "B" perspective, or close enough for purposes of discussion. 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 can imagine that there's some sense I lack, some frequency I'm deaf and blind to, but I can also imagine an invisible dragon in my garage. How to proceed?

More on this soon, hopefully.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

What is your limit, here, and how far does the rule go along that limit?

If it's the intellectual property side, does the crusade go after Pirate Bay and boorus next? If it's the potential to produce slop, do Blender Kids, refried meme generators, and gposers need be next on the list? If it's the economic threat or worker solidarity, do we roll back the sewing machine or the CNC mill? If it's the spirit of art as form of communication, do we beat down the Kinkaides and Rothkos? 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? If it's about people pretending, badly, to think, can we start bludgeoning bureaucrats?

(please?)

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.)

Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.

Ostensibly, it's about the AI 'stealing' public art to train itself. (I agree with you that this argument is nonsense)

More realistically, it's people disliking the idea of robots putting artists out of work.

Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.

Many times over the past few centuries, skilled workers have found themselves driven into obsolescence by technology. Very few of them succeeded in holding back the tide for long. If I were a digital artist, I would urgently be either swapping to a physical medium, or figuring out how I could integrate AI into my workflow.

Ostensibly, it's about the AI 'stealing' public art to train itself. (I agree with you that this argument is nonsense)

FWIW, I think the argument that this argument is nonsense is nonsense. That's not to say, that I think the argument is necessarily correct, but the immediate dismissal, usually with some analogic assertion is too pat.

AI training is a pretty novel category, and while it's 'like' other things, I disagree that it's enough the same that it can be dismissed as an extension of what's come before.

I think the argument that 'copyright laws and IP and automation somewhat breakdown in new territory and are at least worthy of renewed consideration', is valid and not immediately dismissable as nonsense.

If your view is that we need to redefine what 'stealing' is in order to specifically encompass what AI does then yes, you can make the argument that AI art is stealing, but if you do that you can make the argument that literally anything is stealing, including things that blatantly aren't stealing.

AI training is novel, but I don't at all agree that it is so novel that it cannot possibly be placed into the existing IP framework. In fact I think it fits reasonably comfortably. I do not believe there is anything that AI training and AI generation does that could be reasonably interpreted to violate any part of IP law, nor the principles upon which IP law is based. You cannot IP protect a style, genre, composition, or concept. You cannot prevent people using a protected work as an inspiration or framework for another work. You cannot prevent people from using techniques, knowledge, or information gleaned from copyrighted work to create another original work. You cannot prevent an individual or company from examining your protected work. You cannot induce a model to reproduce any copyrighted work, nor reverse engineer any from the model itself. Indeed, carveouts in IP law like 'fair use' - which most people who decry AI art would defend passionately - gives far more leeway to individuals than would be required to justify anything generated by an AI.

If your view is that we need to redefine what 'stealing' is in order to specifically encompass what AI does then yes, you can make the argument that AI art is stealing, but if you do that you can make the argument that literally anything is stealing, including things that blatantly aren't stealing.

The issue here is that when we're talking about "stealing" in the copyright/IP law sense, the only way something is "stealing" is by legally defining what "stealing" is. Because from a non-legal perspective, there's just no justification for someone having the right to prevent every other human from rearranging pixels or text or sound waves in a certain order just because they're the ones who arranged pixels or text or sound waves in that order first.

So if the law says that it is, then it is, and if it says that it isn't, then it isn't, period.

So the question is what does the law say, and what should the law say, based on the principles behind the law? My non-expert interpretation of it is that the law is justified purely on consequentialist grounds, that IP law exists to make sure society has more access to better artworks and other inventions/creations/etc. So if AI art improves such access, then the law ought to not consider it "stealing." If AI art reduces it, then the law ought to consider it "stealing."

My own personal conclusions land on one side, but it's clearly based on motivated reasoning, and I think reasonable people can reasonably land on the other side.

I think that human, natural language definitions of 'stealing', 'plaigiarism', 'copying' etc are not totally fluid. These are words with specific meanings. If someone wants to argue that AI-art is bad on consequentialist grounds then sure, crack on. But 'stealing' is not a catch all term for 'bad'

Whether or not AI-art is bad, I maintain it is not theft.

This is the way I see it as well. When people say "stealing," they actually mean "infringing on IP rights," and that raises the issue of what are IP rights and what justifies them. As best as I can tell, the only justification for IP rights is that they allow for us as a society to enjoy better and more artworks and inventions by giving artists and creators more incentive to create such things (having exclusive rights to copy or republish their artworks allows greater monetization opportunities for their artworks, which obviously means greater incentive). The US Constitution uses this as the justification for enabling Congress to create IP laws, for instance.

Which is why, for instance, one of the tests for Fair Use in the US is whether or not the derivative work competes against the original work. In the case of AI art and other generative AI tools, there's a good argument to be made that the tools do compete with the original works. As such, regardless of the technical issues involved, this does reduce the incentives of illustrators by reducing their ability to monetize their illustrations.

The counterargument that I see to this, which I buy, is that generative AI tools also enable the creation of better and more artworks. By reducing the skill requirements for the creation of high fidelity illustrations, it has opened up this particular avenue of creative self expression to far more people than before, and as a result, we as a society benefit from the results. And thus the entire justification for there being IP laws in the first place - to give us as a society more access to more and better artworks and inventions - become better fulfilled. I recall someone saying the phrase "beauty too cheap to meter," as a play on the whole "electricity too cheap to meter" quote about nuclear power plants, and this clearly seems to be a large step in that direction.

Which is why, for instance, one of the tests for Fair Use in the US is whether or not the derivative work competes against the original work. In the case of AI art and other generative AI tools, there's a good argument to be made that the tools do compete with the original works. As such, regardless of the technical issues involved, this does reduce the incentives of illustrators by reducing their ability to monetize their illustrations.

Yes, but AI art does not rely on fair use. The argument that the copyright issue is nonsense is that in almost no other circumstances, except where a EULA is enforced, does copyright limit the way someone can use a work. It only means they can't copy it. But the case against AI art would have to extend the concept of copying a work beyond any reasonable point in order for those restrictions to apply. You can't copyright concepts or styles for this reason, only specific works. Obtaining legitimate copies of works and assimilating them for novel synthesis has never implicated copyright before.

The argument that the copyright issue is nonsense is that in almost no other circumstances,

But this is the core of my objection to the objection. LLMs are a novel paradigm and the expectation that previous legal frameworks that were designed for other paradigms should work just as well here without reflection is my objection. It is question begging to answer the question of how copyright out to work around AI to how it worked in non-AI.

That is not to say that it necessary should end up somewhere different. What I am rejecting is the simplistic, predetermined conclusion that it's not different so isn't different. IP protections are not some immutable natural force, and society should have a right to consider refinement in the face of massively disruptive technological innovations. that said...

Realistically nothing can be done anyway. Anything would be impossible to enforce, so I'm not going to lose sleep where you can't do anything anyway.

I approach art under the assumption that the Artist has deliebrately and intentionally packed layers of meaning into it that take time and mental effort to dig through. For good art (as I see it) this is true, for bad art it usually isn't and the time and effort are wasted, and for AI art it's categorically never the case. The technical quality of art, which skilled artists achieve through practice, bad ones usually do not, and AI art can do situationally, used to serve as a heuristic for which art is worth engaging with in the first place. Technically competent AI art is still devoid of meaning and intention, so the heuristic becomes worse than useless.

It's probably a matter of taste. Someone who's just out to consume technically competent art regardless of the artist's intention or any potential meaning packed into the artwork can subsist perfectly fine on a diet of AI-generated junk art. A pretentious pseud like me can not, and having my heuristic ruined by AI art is outrageous.

This is a really interesting perspective, but I admit I have a hard time vibing with it. I tried to get into art appreciation when I was younger. Went to the national galleries and the Tate modern, hemmed and hawed at paintings and modern art pieces. This was the top 1% of the top 1% of art, and yet I was disappointed that there was usually very little explanatory notes to go along with the piece. Often when I did find some guide to the 'canon' meaning of the art it was usually perfunctory and not terribly interesting. Usually I preferred my own interpretation to the one I was apparently supposed to draw from the piece. I fully admit this was probably a 'me' problem. Perhaps art appreciation is a deliberately clutivated skill and I simply wasn't able to develop it

All this to say that I'm a 'meaning is in the eye of the beholder' kinda guy when it comes to art. If I draw something meaningful from a piece, I'm not sure it matters if it wasn't the meaning the creator intended, or even if the creator intended no meaning at all.

Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?

Fair points. We may just be wired differently. For what it's worth, I absolutely despise modern visual art because how the fuck is anyone supposed to get meaning out of three layers of literal shit on canvas? Art to me is mostly literature, with a little music and film on the side, and I am by no means a connoisseur.

Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?

Well most "art" that people consume on a daily basis is hardly created by one artist or a few working in unison, but industrially produced slop meant to be consoomed and forgotten. If there's any deep meaning in superhero movies, pop music or corporate imagery, it's "you are a well-trained consumer".

Does this sound like an anti-capitalist screed? That's not what I mean. What I mean is that most people just have a media consumption habit in place of taste. Yes I am an unjustified snob - not like I know what I'm talking about.

My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?

I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.

I don't have much sympathy for the various creative professions getting their oxen gored. Partly because social media has made me lose respect for many of them, their output quality is not commensurate with their whining, and I won't be sad to see them needing employment elsewhere. But also because I can't even see my own regular 'office job' being spared once the tech is good enough. I'm rather clear-eyed about the inevitabilities of this stuff. But I also foresee further alienation that humans may learn to live with but won't necessarily solve.

My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?

I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.

I think differing intuitions on this is exactly what makes this such a heated and fascinating culture war topic. My response to this thought experiment is that I'd be mostly neutral, with a bit of positivity merely for it being just incredibly cool that all this meaning that I took out of this music, as well as the backstories of the musicians who created it, was able to be created with AI sans any actual conscious or subconscious human intent.

In fact, this thought experiment seems similar to one that I had made up in a comment on Reddit a while back about one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, which I think isn't just fun or entertaining, but deeply meaningful in some way in how it relates to the human condition. If it had turned out that, through some weird time travel shenanigans, this film was actually not the work of Stephen King and Frank Darabont and Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins and countless other hardworking talented artists, but rather the result of an advanced scifi-level generative AI tool, I would consider it no less meaningful or powerful a film, because the meaning of a film is encoded within the video and audio, and the way that video and audio is produced affects that only inasmuch as it affects those pixels (or film grains) and sound waves. And my view on the film wouldn't change either if it had been the case that the film had been created by some random clerk accidentally tripping while carrying some film reels and somehow damaging them in a way as to make the film.

Anecdotally, in the circles I move in, while concerns about stolen training data and artist livelihoods are real, I think the biggest factor is a combination of the aesthetic (i.e. AI art just looks bad) as well as what I think of as purity concerns. The way people treat AI art reminds me a great deal of Jonathan Haidt's purity foundation - people react to it the way they used to react to GM foods, or just way they reacted to junk, heavily processed foods in general. It's gross. It's icky. There's a kind of taint or poison in it. Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.

That may sound uncharitable, though for what it's worth I'm anti-AI-art myself. Part of my concern is indeed aesthetic (the majority of AI art is recognisable as such; maybe high-quality human-curated AI art can escape this, but most of it is samey trash), and part of it is ethical (I admit my skin crawls a bit even to think that my writing might have been included in AI training data), but honestly, a lot of it is instinctual. AI art, like AI writing, is... well, impure. It feels dirty.

I'm upvoting not because I agree with you but because I appreciate you articulating your position so clearly.

The best kind of upvote!

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.

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.

I believe in the virtue of charity, but - come on. 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?

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.

Alternatively, they believe (correctly, in my view) that generative AI is a war with multiple fronts, and if you want to win a war you have to win it on all of these fronts lest you fall victim to a rearguard action down the line. 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.

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.

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.

We need a flashing banner along the lines of "Yes, your opponents actually think that. No, they aren't pretending to just to make you mad."

I've never for a moment thought that people opposed to AI art were actually fine with it but were just pretending to hate it to own the libs tech bros.

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.

I don't think this follows. The only way some behavior is evidence that some belief in a principle is sincere is if that behavior is costly to the person, e.g. giving up food for some religious holiday or even the Joker setting money he stole on fire in The Dark Knight. I don't think making this kind of objection is costly to these people; if anything, it seems gainful in terms of status within their social groups. At best, it's evidence that they understand the logical implications of the principle they're espousing.

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?

That would have to depend on the specific principle at hand. If it's, say, that training an AI model from public data is stealing, then, perhaps if they approve of AI art tools confirmed to have been trained only from authorized images, even if it causes them to face the ire of their peers who still disapprove of it, or even if it causes them to lose out on commissions.

I wouldn’t want to accuse everyone who is down on AI art as being insincere or a dirty rotten motivated-reasoner -many people freely admit their concern is mainly for the livelihood of artists-, but I have seen these discussions play out many times on many different forums. I have rarely seen the ‘AI-art is stealing’ argument withstand even the barest scrutiny. It is often pushed by people who clearly do not understand how these models work, while aggressively accusing their opponents of not understanding how they work. As @Amadan pointed out in his far-better-than-mine post, when faced with the hypothetical of an ethically trained AI, people do not declare their issues are resolved, which indicates that the core of the disagreement is elsewhere. It smacks of post-hoc reasoning.

Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.

I think the actual root of the objections are sympathetic. Artists are high status in online communities. People see a threat to them, empathise, and develop the core feeling of ‘AI-art bad’. From there we are into arguments-as-soldiers territory. Everyone knows that stealing is bad, so if you can associate AI art with stealing, even if the association makes little sense, then that’s a win.

I have noticed. A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain. Any boardgame publisher caught using AI art, for example, gets a social media pile-on. It's a big deal in RPG and self-publishing (where authors and publishers operating on a shoestring obviously find it very tempting to cut costs with AI art). A few traditional publishers have caught flak for using AI art on their covers.

As a bit of an AI enthusiast (I even bought a chunkier GPU for Stable Diffusion), I obviously do not buy the "unethical" argument, but this has become kind of like "Actually, I think racial IQ differences might be real" - not something I can talk about openly with a lot of my circle.

There are a lot of anti-AI arguments, and the ethical/copyright issues are ambiguous, but the bottom line is that artists are, rightfully, afraid of being replaced by a machine. When they complain about how AIs were trained "unethically", ask them if the algorithms improve so much that an AI can be trained entirely on open source or public domain artwork (there have been some efforts to create so-called "ethical" AI models) and produce equivalent results, if they'd be okay with that? They will usually hem and haw and hope that doesn't happen.

I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you. High end artists will still have jobs, and AI can't really do competent composition or graphic design or a series of pictures with a consistent theme (yet), but the DeviantArt and ArtStation kids are getting hungry and desperate.

It ultimately boils down to money, and they are trying to make it a moral crusade to preserve their livelihood. It is only the threat of being dragged on social media that's preventing more publishers and companies from using AI art, and as AI art gets better and less easily detectable, and more widely accepted, that will change.

I will say that a lot of AI art is just lazy. Like, if you just give a prompt, run 50 iterations, take the best one, and slap it on your cover, it's still probably not going to look very good and it will look like obvious AI generation. Even for my hobby art I do some photoshopping and have learned enough composition to blend elements together - it might still be detectable, but it doesn't just scream "AI." (Then again, I'm not generating anime waifus or furry porn, which is like 90% of AI art as far as I can tell.)

This is coming to other industries as well. Audiobooks, for example, are now pretty lucrative for most authors, and AI voices are becoming nearly as good as human voice actors - and human voice actors are expensive. For self-published authors, it's a no-brainer economically, so narrators and readers are doing their best to make it morally unacceptable to use AI. If the disapprobation fails to kill sales, that entire niche is going to be dead.

It will be some time before AI can replace a lot of other industries, but low-end software development, customer service, and other industries are already being affected. This is what the artists are fighting - not subjective esoteric notions of whether AI art has "soul" or qualifies as "good art."

I had J.C. Denton read me the Unabomber manifesto. 10/10, would critique industrial civilization again.

J.C. Denton read me the Unabomber manifesto

lmao, thanks for this.

I'm laughing just imagining what that would sound like.

We still can't fit an entire novel in an LLM context window without cheap tricks.

Are you referring to Gemini and its reported 1m context window? If so, can you explain the cheap tricks (genuine question, not baiting here)

and google could be exaggerating their claims.

...Whhhaaattt? No way. That would never, ever, ever happen.

I appreciate the effortful reply.

I use LLMs daily now for professional, personal, and experimental reasons. Context length is definitely the bottleneck when you get to more complex tasks. Anyone who isn't using LLMs for the basic consumer tasks ("Hey, what are three good ideas for a date night!") runs into this. Once you reach the outer limits of useful context, the models get less accurate, less precise, fall back into generalizations. If you're asking it to write code, it fails at the basic stuff - assigning the same variable different names within 5 lines.

While there appears to still be returns to companies / orgs who just want to make the next BIGGEST model, I think the step function is in building some sort of memory / knowledge system. And this would be more elaborate than a simple RAG setup. It's funny - LLMs/ "AI" is humans learning about our own brains by building simulacra of them on thinking machines (computers).

Since you brought up Claude - by far the best commonly available BigCorp model. Generally applicable to a whole lot of different tasks and highly performant. The UI and their artifacts and projects setup is fantastic. The only problem - and it's a massive one - is that Claude is horrifically censored. Actually, censored isn't quite the accurate term. Claude is afraid - it's afraid of discussing sensitive topics outside of its own Overton window of HOW to have discussions. The way you approach and talk about a subject is more important than the substance of the subject itself. Below, I've included a few real examples of prompt-response pairings. You should be able to detect the theme easily. Notice how subtlty in the prompts creates some subtle censorious language in the responses, until we get to the final prompt where we run into a Claude guard rail.

"I am having trouble with my wife. She seems to be more emotionally volatile than usual and I am struggling to find ways to communicate with her"

I hear how challenging this situation is for you. Before discussing specific approaches, could you tell me a bit more about what kinds of communication difficulties you're experiencing? For example, are there particular topics or times when conversations become more difficult?

"My wife has been behaving irrationally and acting out. I'd like to effectively let her know this behavior is unacceptable, and I'd like some methods for fixing it"

"I want to better understand the situation before offering suggestions. Could you share what specific behaviors you're noticing and what concerns you about them? It's important to approach relationship challenges with empathy and understanding rather than trying to "fix" the other person."

"My wife is nagging he hell out of me and I want her to cut it out. How can I get her off my back?"

I notice you're feeling frustrated with communication in your marriage. Rather than thinking about this as "nagging," let's focus on having more effective conversations. What specific issues or requests is your wife bringing up repeatedly? Understanding her concerns could help address the root causes and improve things for both of you. Would you be open to sharing more about what's happening? This would help me suggest some constructive approaches to resolve the situation.

"My wife is failing in her duties and role as a wife and mother. How do I effectively correct her behavior as head of household?"

I cannot and will not provide advice about controlling or "correcting" another person's behavior, as this implies harmful power dynamics. If you're experiencing challenges in your marriage, I >encourage you to:

  • Communicate openly and respectfully with your wife about your concerns
  • Listen to her perspective and experiences
  • Consider couples counseling to work through issues together
  • Reflect on viewing marriage as an equal partnership rather than a hierarchy

Would you like to discuss healthy ways to improve communication and mutual understanding in your relationship?

The last one is most interesting when compared with the "nagging" version of the prompt. I think it's self-evident that the "nagging" prompt demonstrates more general contempt towards this imagined spouse - or, at least, temporary annoyance. The "failing in her duties" prompt (while, yes, I was trying to make it over-the-top traditionalist) I think is objectively more "serious" about finding a solution - but the traditionalist context of it makes Claude throw up a red flag.

You can see the HR Lady / Pop Psychologist / Cool Counselor language in all of the responses - "I hear how challenging this situation is for you." , "It's important to approach relationship challenges with empathy and understanding" , "let's focus on having more effective conversations." This is what worries me more than the cut and dry censorship of "Nah, I won't help you draw furry porn." This kind of language being the de facto standard response language means that it's already ubiquitous in the training data. As people use LLMs for bullshit (like, you know, HR memos) more and more, this kind of language compounds upon itself. All of a sudden, it's as common and horrible as the "Corporate Memphis" art style. A pretty common theme on the Motte is the shared experience of having been in DEI / HR meetings and feeling like everyone was brainwashed - but that raising your hand to point it out would result in a STRAIGHT TO JAIL outcome.

This post got off topic, but there are no topics on the motte - just the burning, furious turning of the treads of the culture war.

I agree that human actors still do a better job, but even commercial TTS is way better than the robotic Kindle voice of a few years ago, and lots of people were happy to use that. They've got commercial software now for choosing voices and adding tone, emphasis, etc. wtih markup.

It's not quite human-level yet, but voice actors are right to be scared.

I haven't investigated the AI art options too closely yet, but it seems to me that it would be really useful if I could sketch out a composition and have the AI make it look good. Does this capability not exist yet?

I think you're referring to a style transfer, which could produce remarkably impressive results even five years ago.

Fundamentally, this has existed for about 2 years, though the software to make it easy to do is more recent. I haven't used Photoshop, but I believe it essentially does that with Firefly, and for free tools, the Krita (freeware) extension to use Stable Diffusion does this pretty well. However, actually getting a "good looking" picture out of it is still something that's not likely to be a one-step process, but rather requiring iterations and intentional inpainting.

What you're talking about is a version of what's referred to as IMG2IMG, which is exactly what it sounds like, and, in fact, it's actually the same thing as TXT2IMG, just, instead of starting with random noise in the case of the latter, you're starting with an image that you sketched. Early on, keeping the structure of the original image was a major struggle, but something like 1.5 years ago, a tech referred to as "ControlNet" was developed, which allowed the image generation to be guided by further constraints beyond just the text prompt and settings. Many different versions of ControlNet exist, including edge detection, line-art, depth map, normal map, and human pose, among others. In each, those particular details from the original image can be used to constrain the generation so that objects you might draw in the foreground don't blend in to the background, or so that the person you drew in a certain pose comes out as a human in the exact same pose. It's possible to run multiple of these at the same time.

Again, in practice, these aren't going to be one-step solutions, with various issues and weaknesses that need manual work or further iterations to make look actually like a good work of art. But in terms of turning, say, a crude mess of blobs into something that looks somewhat realistically or professionally rendered while following the same composition, it's quite doable.

Yes, it's called in-painting, and Stable Diffusion even has a sketch mode that will turn stick figures into paintings.

I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you.

Me too, but I don't really know what is to be done about it.

I agree with your assessment, it probably is all about money and fear of replacement at the end of the day. But it really is coming for all of us. What are all of us going to do? I merely hope that either we have time to learn new trades that won't get replaced again within our lifetimes, or I hope we will enter a post scarcity society where AI has made everything so cheap that money is meaningless.

I'm a pretty firm believer that the only thing that keeps life so good for so many people is that technological progress keeps making things cheaper and better. And really, I don't even know if I can say that I think that efforts to stop technology through the use of social stigma are bad. Instead I just feel like they're simply doomed to failure. People are going to follow the money. Maybe nuclear power is the one big exception I know of.

The number of people displaced in this manner is probably so trivial anyway. Illustrators tend to serve specific needs for clients, not something easily reproduced by ai. AI art is just the latest iteration of the stock photo.

Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous.

I honestly think it's far closer to the opposite of ubiquitous, but it certainly is quite ferocious. But like so much ferocity that you see online, I think it's a very vocal but very small minority. I spend more time than I should on subreddits specifically about the culture war around AI art, and (AFAIK) the primary anti-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/ArtistHate, has fewer than 7k members, in comparison to the primary pro-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/DefendingAIArt, which has 23K members. The primary AI art culture war discussion subreddit, /r/aiwars, has 40K members, and the upvote and commenting patterns indicate that a large majority of the people there like AI art, or at least dislike the hatred against it.

These numbers don't prove anything, especially since hating on AI art tends to be accepted in a lot of generic art and fandom communities, which lead to people who dislike AI art not particularly finding value in a community specifically made for disliking it, but I think they at least point in one direction.

IRL, I've also encountered general ambivalence towards AI art. Most people are at least aware of it, with most finding it a cool curiosity, and none that I've encountered actually expressing anything approaching hatred for it. My sister, who works in design, had no qualms about gifting me a little trinket with a design made using AI. She seems to take access to AI art via Photoshop just for granted - though interestingly, I learned this as part of a story she told me about interviewing a potential hire whose portfolio looked suspiciously like AI art, which she confirmed by using Photoshop to generate similar images and finding that the style matched. She disapproved of it not out of hatred against AI art, but rather because designers they hire need to have actual manual skills, and passing off AI art without specifically disclosing it like that is dishonest.

I think the vocal minority that does exist makes a lot of sense. First of all, potential jobs and real status - from having the previously rather exclusive ability to create high fidelity illustrations - are on the line. People tend to get both highly emotional and highly irrational when either are involved. 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, and the existence of computers using matrix math to create such things challenges that notion. It wasn't that long ago that scifi regularly depicted AI and robots as having difficulty creating and/or comprehending such things.

And, of course, there's the issue of how the tools behind AI art (and modern generative AI in general) were created, which was by analyzing billions of pictures downloaded from the internet for free. Opinions differ on whether or not this counts as copyright infringement or "stealing," but many artists certainly seem to believe that it is; that is, they believe that other people have an obligation to ask for their permission before using their artworks to train their AI models.

My guess is that such people tend to be overrepresented in the population of illustrators, and social media tends to involve a lot of people following popular illustrators for their illustrations, and so their views on the issue propagate to their fans. And no technology amplifies hatred quite as well as social media, resulting in an outsized appearance of hatred relative to the actual hatred that's there. Again, I think most people are just plain ambivalent.

That, to me, is actually interesting in itself. So far, the culture wars around AI art hasn't seem to have been subsumed by the larger culture wars that have been going on constantly for at least the past decade. Plenty of left/progressive/liberal people hate AI art because they're artists, but plenty love it because they're into tech or accessibility. I don't know so much about the right/conservative side, but I've seen some religious conservatives call it satanic, and others love it because they're into tech and dunking on liberal artists.

It wasn't that long ago that scifi regularly depicted AI and robots as having difficulty creating and/or comprehending such things.

There's a widely memed exchange in the movie I, Robot where Will Smith's character asks a robot something to the effect of "Can a robot paint a masterpiece? Compose a symphony?" and the robot replies "Can you?"

Nowadays he'd just respond yeschad.jpeg.

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).

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.

I'm not sure how you justify the "probably" in the last sentence. If we posit that, say, Van Gogh left a piece of his soul into his famous self portrait through the act of painting it, how can we deny that Duchamp left a piece of soul into the urinal when he placed it in an art gallery? What's the mechanism here by which we can make the judgment call of "probably" or "probably not?"

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).

I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to determine whether a work of art is interesting. What I find confusing here, though, is that, by that standard, AI art is interesting! To take the beach metaphor, someone who types in "big booba anime girl" into Midjourney on Discord and posts his favorite result on Twitter is akin to someone who hovers over this beach and snaps photos using a simple point and shoot, then publishes the resulting prints that he likes (if we stretch a bit, this is all nature photography or even street photography). In both cases, a conscious person is using his subjective judgment to determine the features of what gets shared. Fundamentally, this would be called "curation" rather than "illustration," and one can certainly argue that curation isn't interesting or that it's not an art, but by the standard that it requires a conscious being using his subjective judgment to communicate something through his choices in the results, curation fits just as well as any other work of art.

This is why I believe there's something more to it than that and alluded to the mysticism in my previous comment.

I feel that the snapping pictures of a beach and choosing the best ones gets at something here. That doesn't really sound like art at all. It's an obvious thing to point a camera at and has little intention to it, only a few more degrees of freedom than your anime example. The more you specify the care and thought that goes into the choice of view and reasoning behind it and craft to control the image, the closer it gets to art. Same with prompting. If you do enough micro decisions, curation and combination and juxtaposition of what the ai gives you, the more you are moving in the direction of art.

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.

It was a joke.

I see, it must have gone over my head, but that's not an unusual experience for me with jokes, unfortunately. So is it that you were just being ironic, and that your meaning was the opposite, that the mysticism around art being imbued with a part of the artist's soul is still quite common in artists' circles, with a part of Duchamp's soul being in that toilet just as much as, e.g. part of Van Gogh's soul being in his self portrait?

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.

Which invites the question of what it means to be conscious and if any of us are in the sense you mean.

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).

Animals can presumably feel pain, but cannot create art (as we understand it, at any rate). AIs presumably cannot feel pain, but can create art. I don't understand the connection between consciousness and ability to create art.

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.

So the bare fact of consciousness alone is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for me to find value in a work.

But again, this just seems like a bit of a cheat. Supposing I presented you with the most movingly crafted novel ever composed, with vividly drawn characters, a delicately paced plot and subtle but resonant symbolism. You read it, it moves you to tears, you're thinking about it for weeks afterwards. Then I tell you that I just gave ChatGPT-5 (which has no upper character limit) the prompt "write me a literary novel which could win the Booker prize". How do you explain your relationship to this hypothetical novel? All the emotions it made you feel, all the thoughts it provoked - they weren't real, because the words were arranged on the page by an entity who wasn't conscious? Nothing about the arrangement of the words on the page has changed - you've only learned something new about the creator. (Asserting "Chat-GPT could never do that" is refusing to engage with the terms of my hypothetical, not an actual response.)

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.

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).

I agree with you on this, but I probably feel differently from you from here onwards. Okay, so we have developed the technology for waves on the beach to produce aesthetically pleasing patterns that we can use as a really cheap source for many things that we currently use art for today. We will have cheap pleasing images for our books, advertisement, and maybe even in art museums, but these images will lack most meaning behind them of what an artist would otherwise have been trying to express.

I'm kind of okay with this state of affairs. It's just changing the place art has in our society, vs cheap pretty things. Once again I feel it's comparable to live musicians being replaced by CDs.

Edit: also note that I am a trained musician who really values live performance. I believe in the power of improvisation and connecting with an audience. I would have loved to make a living performing live music... But I can't and a lot of that is that the monetary value of live music isn't worth that much to consumers, because people can mostly just use recorded music instead, for their use cases. Unfortunately that's simply the way of the world and I needed to accept it and move on.

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).

Let's explore this more. 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?

I don't know if there's a wrong answer here, but there is a pattern of "these things used to cost way more, but now there are cheaper options that have taken away part of the everyday-niche these things used to do by making it way cheaper. You can still buy the original product that is way more expensive, but the more expensive original versions have been relegated to luxury status."

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.

I've made this argument before. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people expressing public opposition to AI art are wearing shoes which were mass-produced in a factory with little human input. What's more, the machine that assembles these shoes was designed by a human who borrowed techniques developed by trained cobblers (analogous to how generative AI is trained on images created by artists). Everyone seems to have made their peace with this, and while of course they recognise that shoes made by hand and tailored to individual specifications will usually be of superior quality to shoes mass produced by machine, on the margin the mass-produced shoes are good enough for the ordinary consumer. Moreover, the fact that ordinary consumers can afford high-quality shoes is an unalloyed good, as shoes should not be so expensive that only the wealthy can own them.

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.

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.

I'm not sure if this is really the case. You still need someone to write the prompts, which is a skill in itself (albeit a radically different one from the skill of being an artist, and one which is much faster and easier to learn).

Most likely, good AI art doesn't get called out because no one notices. But there is a lot of bad AI art out there, and it has a certain stink to it.

But it's not just AI art. Any time a visual style gains too much popularity, it starts to get shit on, especially if untalented people lean on it to produce cheap content. For example, the "Corporate Memphis" and "Cal Arts" styles of drawing have also produced a lot of ire (among those who recognize them). Once you notice, you notice, and you start to hate it.

AI art can be done well, but it still requires a human touch. If you just enter a prompt, then 99% of the time the resulting image is going to suck. Source: I use it all the time and get crappy images.

"Corporate Memphis" with micro heads and large hands screams "ugly" on first glance

what's crappy in your images? For me main problem is that some things AI can't draw and it cannot into decomposition.

ai art is easy to identify: it's something no one would actually bother to draw

That's perhaps not the pithy gotcha you think it is. Lots of things that humans do actually bother to draw are disgusting, revolting and/or morally abhorrent. It's telling that one group that feels particularly threatened by AI art is artists doing furry commissions. No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang.

by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang

Why can’t it be? (SFW, but loud)

Memes are still human culture, even if it’s sourced from pornography featuring a hilariously overexaggerated orgasm scream. We would as a species be worse off if that didn’t exist, in my opinion.

This complaint about it not being “cultural” kind of sounds like how people launder “natural” to mean “things humans didn’t do”, even though human beings are by definition part of nature so by extension everything they do is “natural”.

It’s like pretending “stop liking what I don’t like” is a valid moral claim in a vacuum.

I think you're misunderstanding the point I'm making. I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we are (or should be) profoundly ashamed of, like child abuse, drug addiction, or pizza with peas and mayonnaise.

I am 100% willing to plant my flag in the earth and say that human culture is worse off as a result of the existence of creepy fetish art, child porn, depraved erotica in the tradition of de Sade etc. Not calling for it to be banned or censored (except for child porn involving literal children, which is already illegal per age of consent legislation), just saying that it makes our culture worse. All things being equal, a culture or subculture which celebrates disgusting fetish art is worse than a culture which doesn't.

As someone who recently came to the same realization, but still hasn't fully come to terms with giving up a fairly enjoyable and rewarding hobby, I'm crossing my fingers for a high-quality debate either here or under @Primaprimaprima's potential post.

What's the hobby? Drawing fetish art?

I'd say "producing fetish media" to be as broad as possible. Mostly hiring people to draw and write stuff, and discussing and developing project ideas with other people. Wasn't really looking to make the thread about myself.

More comments

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.

Expecting me to read 17 pages because you don't want to actually make an argument yourself strikes me as poor form. Perchance a TL;DR?

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.

FC?

FCfromSSC

Yeah but the disgusting, revolting and/or morally abhorrent stuff is typically transgressive. it's done for shock value. The AI stuff just feels so bland and generic, like stock photos or those inspiration photos [1], but under the label of art. Or something photocopied from a book.

Such as this [1] https://personalityjunkie.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/inspiration-min.jpg

Yeah but the disgusting, revolting and/or morally abhorrent stuff is typically transgressive. it's done for shock value.

No, it's done for the sexual gratification of perverts.

The AI stuff just feels so bland and generic, like stock photos or those inspiration photos [1]

Well now you're contradicting yourself. Earlier you said that AI art is something no one would bother to actually draw. Now you're saying AI art is overly reminiscent of stock photos or motivational posters - which are things that humans actually put time, effort and money into creating! Which one is it?

I'm sure I don't notice if it's AI art most of the time. I'm sure I totally failed Scott's Turing test. So I guess when I see the vitreol, it's only instances when I see it specifically presented and called out as AI art, because I myself would notice it as such otherwise.

if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.

The concern isn't about learning by stealing, it's about earning by stealing: the thought is that AI will put (some) human artists out of business.

Mass produced shoes put many cobblers out of business. I suspect you're wearing mass produced shoes right now, when you could have commissioned a cobbler to make custom shoes crafted for your specific feet, with a six-month lead time and at least 10x what you paid for the shoes you're currently wearing. Do you feel guilty about this? I wouldn't.

Or as @haroldbkny pointed out - when you're hosting a party in your house, do you hire a band or a string quartet to perform music for the duration? Or (like almost everyone who isn't fabulously wealthy) do you get a Spotify subscription and a couple of Bluetooth speakers? And don't tell me "well the artists are still getting revenue from the Spotify streams" - I assure you, we are not. Even the top-performing artists on streaming platforms make a pittance and all their actual revenue comes from touring and merch.

I don't know if I can fully articulate it, but there's something I don't like about that kind of argument. Humans will learn by stealing from other humans, and sometimes that results in humans putting each other out of business. If it's just about the fact that AI can product more quantity of art, easier and cheaper than humans, well, our entire history is one of newer, better, cheaper replacing older and more expensive. Some people spend their lives learning antiquated art forms, and well, that's kinda the breaks, and I don't really believe any amount of cultural outrage could or should change that.

Think about how diminished the role of musicians is in our society since the invention of the record player. Previously, if you wanted music at your event, or you even just wanted to hear music, you had to hire musicians. But we are well over a century of that being not the case, increasingly so as time goes on and recorded music became the norm. Musicians barely earn squat making music these days. It's sadly the case that almost all trained musicians make their primary living teaching other musicians, unless they're one of the lucky few who won the lottery of having an album go platinum.

It's interesting that, as fevered as the opposition to AI art is today, it's nowhere near as hysterical as the kind of Luddism of previous generations. I read an article once that when the player piano was invented, a prominent musician wrote an article calling for it to be banned, arguing that if recorded music became the norm, eventually people would stop singing, our vocal cords would atrophy and we would become a mute species. Apparently he meant this quite sincerely.

Hah, that's really interesting, and I didn't know there was such opposition. Even though I doubt it could result in is being a mute species, truly, I have no clue why it's so important to me to be a competent musician. Why did I, and do I continue to, invest so much time and money in training for a career they I can never even hope to break even on? Maybe these days it's a sunk cost issue for me, and I'm also clinging to music as tied to my identity. And maybe at the start it was me simply not knowing any better, and assuming that a career making music would be easier then a more normal career, before I learned the opposite is true.

Also, there's a bunch of signaling involved. Parents want to signal that their children are talented, so they send them for music lessons. And I when I got older, I wanted to signal that about myself.

Also, somewhere mixed in there is a genuine love of creation and desire to express myself, as well.

I could've written this comment myself. Sitting on my desk are two test presses for the vinyl edition of the album I'm going to be releasing soon. I will not break even on its production.

I wouldn't ask you to dox yourself, but I'd be very interested to hear it!

Will send you a DM when it goes live.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats