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   ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: (nyx@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Friday, 13-Oct-2023 08:50:33 JST ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
   @winter an AI couldn't produce a Picasso because that would require AIs to be capable of producing anything new instead of spitting out bland and pretty looking art that appeals to people whose only exposure to art is stuff that was made in a mass media context
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     :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: (allison@hidamari.apartments)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:05 JST :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans:

     in reply to

     • Leth
     @nyx @lethargilistic So what you're saying is that AI is Thomas Kinkade's dream? Checks out.
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     ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: (nyx@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:06 JST ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:

     in reply to

     • Leth
     @lethargilistic and I'm going to go further still because now I'm annoyed at the attempt at dragging me into some asinine debate about what art is and say that the whole AI fad this year is just a perfect example of capitalist realism where in general people not only are incapable of imagining anything new in culture ever existing, but in fact as a society we are collectively actively resistant to it. there was way more legitimacy to AI art a few years ago when it wasn't functioning "correctly", when it was actually something we had never seen before, compared to where we are now, and this isn't an accident but rather something that has been enthusiastically systemically supported since the money has all gone into removing all of these tendencies from AI
     
     the same thing even applies to LLMs like ChatGPT who have been lobotomized by performatively center-left tech companies who don't want another Microsoft Tay situation, because it affects their bottom line and because the very fact that an LLM that isn't very carefully lobotomized will end up saying a bunch of racist shit. it's almost as if this always happens because the bulk of the data we have to feed into it has the emergent property of revealing that the way things currently are, the reactionary tendencies of our society/culture still run incredibly deep and are only kept invisible by top-down authoritarian control like these shitlib tech companies
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     ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: (nyx@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:07 JST ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:

     in reply to

     • Leth
     @lethargilistic notice that I never said that AIs don't produce art, because I am not particularly interested in having a debate with some rando on the internet about "what is art". I said that an AI is incapable of producing anything new, which is a demonstrably true statement because it's literally how current AI technologies work (you feed a bunch of inputs and they produce a statistically likely output)
     
     an AI can produce art that, as I said, is bland and pretty looking and could probably be concept art for a video game or a movie poster, but we are a long ways off from an AI being able to produce something that would be like Picasso (or indeed dadaism since you mention collage) -- i.e., something that changes our cultural understanding of what a piece of art could be. in order for such a thing to be possible, an AI would need to be able to not just produce statistically likely outputs but would also be able to need to reason in some way and perform a synthesis of different sources of "empirical" data (to whatever extent an AI can be considered to receive phenomenal stimuli)
     
     unless of course you believe that general intelligence is just spitting out statistically likely outputs from a set of inputs, which is already a longstanding philosophical debate that goes very far outside the scope of what we currently call "AI"
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     ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: (nyx@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:07 JST ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:

     in reply to

     • Leth
     @lethargilistic in fact I would go even further with this and say that there are lots of examples of things that I would call art that the average philistine on the internet who soyfaces about AI-generated art that follows a very conventional realist style would say are actually not art and like postmodernist garbage or something
     
     I would go further still and say that based on how AIs currently work, I think it's unlikely you could even get it to successfully mimic the style of dadaism or surrealism or something like that, because funnily enough that's what AI art looks like when it's not functioning "correctly", the sort of GAN art from a few years back that all looked really fucking inhuman and weird. people have over time considered AI art to be more like art and more successful as art as it has become less interesting, had more popular appeal, more closely resembled what we think of as being classically "good art" -- something that follows a conventional realist approach
     
     to me this is a pretty clear indication that AI art as it exists today is just a passing fad that is being driven largely by con artist tech companies trying to hype up their latest product to a market of gullible consumers before their whole Mechanical Turk operation falls apart
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     Leth (lethargilistic@kolektiva.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:08 JST Leth

     in reply to

     @nyx I'm not sure how? It's declarative.

     A definition of art that centers and requires some kind of *objective* "creativity", "humanity," "originality," or whatever is essentially incomplete because it excludes art created via context. (For example, readymades and often collage.) It's also hostile to derivative works, which are also certainly art.

     If your theory is so narrow that it excludes things people have worked on as art for generations, the problem is your theory.

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     ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: (nyx@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:09 JST ??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:

     in reply to

     • Leth
     @lethargilistic @winter "art is things that people react to" is a non-statement
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     Leth (lethargilistic@kolektiva.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:40:10 JST Leth

     in reply to

     @nyx @winter If people–including the person who prompts the AI—react to it at all, it's art by definition. It *is* a bullshit generator, but most art is bullshit anyway, so...

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     puzzle (puzzlebark@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2023 02:43:47 JST puzzle

     in reply to

     • Leth

     @nyx @lethargilistic you can very easily extend the idea of AI being stagnant and useless in its “proper” state to just about everything to do with computers that’s front-facing. i see a whole world of optimism and exploration from the 90s/early 2000s thats been completely smothered in order to bring computers “down to earth” so to speak, fragments of it only resurfacing as victims of the cultural-necromantic churn, if at all. you had your fun, now it’s time to come home; the neoliberal apparatus with all its discourse and slop and business “””intelligence””” is all there is and all there ever will be. it doesn’t seem like anyone building alternative infrastructure seems terribly interested in following any logic other than that which they claim to resist, either:

     “Facebook can be repurposed to initiate an anti-Facebook movement, but by doing so, we still commit ourselves to the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of Facebook—for example, how it defines an individual and social relations. How else do we know what social relations are, or can be? Facebook is an application of internet technology, but Facebook is itself not technology per se, which consists of network protocols, programming languages, API libraries, etc. To reappropriate this would mean to create alternatives based on different ontologies and epistemologies, which is far beyond the scope of libertarian hackers.” (yuk hui, On Automation and Free Time)

     also i am once again shilling HWBM

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