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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • but I justify it by pointing to things like splatter or fluid acrylic painting.

    The counter I would give here is that those are just techniques. The challenge, then, is whether the generation machine can be made to do things that are interesting and meaningful. I know it can produce spectacle, but spectacle and meaning are different concepts.

    I don’t know much Pollock, but isn’t he valued largely for his process and expressionism? I’m not making this accusation of you, you do seem to actually care, but a lot of people who bring him up seem to think that his work actually is random and unintelligible—I don’t think that it is.

    I will concede that the process of interacting with the generation machine to produce something is a creative one, I just don’t think it’s anywhere near what a lot of proponents claim it be.

    I’ve used Suno, and my lasting impression of it is that it was fun, sometimes really funny, and overall kind of soul sucking. As a musician, there were essentially no times that I felt anything produced there was mine. It was just novelty. Some of it sounded really cool, but none of it was an expression of me or what I was really looking for.


  • I think that ultimately my push back is on the folks that argue that it can’t be art.

    I’m not really jumping in on this discussion, but I did want to add one thing:

    I can believe two things at once.

    AI generated media can’t be art … because the whole purpose of a generative AI machine is to alleviate the burden of decision making. The fewer places you let something decide for you, the more “art” you can imbue into your project. Art is a communicative effort.

    Artists can use AI generated media … but the points of interest, the meaning, would not (necessarily) be the decisions the machine made.

    An example above, I forget if it was you or someone else, shows a pen sketch of a scene then filled in by the generator, and I think the artist there can be given credit for the perspective, the framing of the subject, the mech-suit, the sci-fi aesthetic; but I wouldn’t credit them with the tally marks on her left shoulder, or the shape details of her eyes, or the various light-up displays that dot the walls.

    There’s also something to be said for choosing as opposed to creating outright, but I think we’re losing ourselves in myopic details at this point.

    The bottom line is that, aside of any ethics issues, I’m not that upset about AI media that’s honest about what it is. I watch youtube channels that depend on AI for their performance art. But, AI proponents love selling this technology as a replacement for people, which is a sentiment I find… disgusting. Inhuman.

    And, I find it really sad the way a person who spent the better part of their life perfecting a style and technique can be essentially shoved out of their own niche by the 10,000 style-copy images a generator can make in an afternoon. This isn’t like photography, where painters and camera-snappers can coexist in separate styles of image production: AI generators can replace both.

    Sorry, I thought all that was going to be just two paragraphs.