By and large, people get the art they deserve. There's plenty of quality stuff out there, but if all you do is root around the internet on your phone with no intention, scrolling scrolling scrolling, then you will be served up an endless stream of shit.
As an active musician, I can only shrug and continue as I always have--cheerfully laboring in obscurity.
Indeed. Doomscrolling invariable leads me to this shit, but there’s still a great gallery just down the street, full of fantastic art by local creatives…
Maybe the trick then is to get offline. I'm noticing this more and more. That relative happiness, at least a reduction in comparsonitus-driven or slop poisoning induced depression, can be had by walking away from an internet connection in to nature.
Or speaking to real human beings face to face about what they love creating with their actual minds and hands. It's bizarre actually as someone old enough to remember the digital wave, but young enough to have embraced it unquestioningly at the time.
I don’t even think it’s getting offline, necessarily. Just social media, and perhaps using alternatives to Google and Amazon. I started doing these things and my mind is much more clear and I find myself thinking about AI garbage far less than I used to, except to hand-wring about what everyone else is doing.
That's interesting, I do some of those but I find either I have ADD or some tech induced version of it. I'm so distractible there's other benefits to getting offline for me too.
I'm 110% using the alternative to Amazon in our country. What do you use instead of Google?
Hear hear. Instagram should be renamed to Slop. It is an essence of a cultural nadir hijacked by all sorts of d listers and their performative bullshit for clicks from brain-dead morons who sustain them. Quality stuff has to be sought out and people need to be more outright in calling out slop when they see it. It is no longer a matter of taste.
Could it be that it's because "normal people" now are the main users of the Internet?
"Normal people" often lack a developed sense of aesthetic preference. They tend to gravitate toward whatever others like, which usually amounts to the least common denominator dictated by influential voices. Most don't really even WANT art, and are only exposed through it indirectly through popular culture.
Apart from MEME based absurdities, slop-art is mostly what I would describe as "paintings" of social media photos: Usually just one subject, trying to look good in front of a background that is far more interesting than their face.
I think that the Slop aesthetic predates widely available AI. To me it has the same vibe as the many, many would-be wacky commercials that are odd but in no way funny or interesting, and that revel in those qualities. "Wink, wink, we know this commercial looks like a 6-year-old created it. Now howsabout some car insurance?"
Yeah I feel like internet humor has always been absurdist. People wish they could have "old Youtube" back. Things like the gummi bear song or the emu committing suicide are classics on the internet.
My guess is algorithms have a lot to do with it. Shock is an easy way to be noticed on the internet so a ton of humor probably has become absurdist because of that.
Shock art is a sign of a cultural movement that has exhausted its useful ideas and is desperately treading water. What we are now in is a sort of post-shock era where Americentric popular culture has fully settled into brain death but nothing is waiting in the wings to replace it. Normally when an artistic movement reached this point it would be tossed aside and replaced (like how European classical music tumbled into history's garbage can when the shock of free atonality gave way to serialist numbness), but today there is no replacement, only slop.
Same vibe for sure, but somehow less irritating than AI Slop. Probably because we know actual humans with actual talent made it, whether it's to your taste or not.
I have some connection to the insurance industry, which, in all its guises, fundamentally deals with human tragedy. It is, as the old saying goes, "funny like a crutch". And yet, these weird, minute lizards and strange ironic people, seem to somehow get the marketing job done.
My first recollection of slop would have to be the “Shake Weight.” It’s an “exercise” device clearly designed to be absurd for the sake of spreading in peer-to-peer media. (Debuted 2009)
Everything everywhere all at once was the first slop movie. The alternate dimension aesthetics really mirror ai in that they’re strewn together yet missing something. Fake cloying sincerity.
At one point I told myself I could never completely write off a whole artistic movement as shit, but I feel very comfortable doing so with anything produced with generative AI. Besides the queasy, shiny, fake airbrush aesthetic, it's terrible for the environment with the obscene amount of resources required to power and cool the servers.
Any child's drawing of a stick figure is inherently more interesting and has more artistic integrity than any of the garbage Ted embedded in this post.
This is an important point you raise, Nick: "Besides the queasy, shiny, fake airbrush aesthetic, it's terrible for the environment with the obscene amount of resources required to power and cool the servers." Obscene is a good word for this kind of waste.
AI consumes TONS of energy to function. Between the energy to run the programs and the water used to cool the servers, it has a massive, massive environmental footprint.
A chatGPT query uses 10x the energy of a basic non-AI search.
Part of the problem is that slop retro-actively diminishes the reputation of previous art movements. Van Gogh's a great example. We had pop culture riding him for decades. Even before AI, there were touring IMax's and "interactive experiences," with animated paintings and 360 projections. Then he became THE testbed for style-transfer techniques. He's been reduced to the gradeschool legend of the crazy painter who lopped his ear off and a stylistic meme. It's absolutely arduous to try clearing your mind of the gunk and really appreciating what statement his aesthetics left in their actual context. But it's not just him.
What we see of Western Canon's artistic contributions today used to be the parody and homage of cartoonists, and animators, but with AI, the idea that Art Nouveau, or ukiyo-e, or Cubism, are just a "skin" you can put on anything, including your "Avacado couches ridden by cowboys," has really just reduced them all from a visual language, to a kind of noise.
Some years ago, I downloaded a data-set representing "all of Impressionism," there were tens or even hundreds of thousands of paintings. Me and my wife made plans to peruse this virtual gallery on the couch as a sort of date night, since we love Impressionism... But after a while it became a game of "countryside, pretty girl, potato," potato being our term for the homely men. We'd look at a painting, categorize it, and move on. Even to try to appreciate works of art on the scale made possible by modern technology, as we certainly intended to, was to flatten everything into a mass of totally conventional stylistic and subject choices.
The conclusion I've come to is that the fleeting specter a universal, international, mass art social consciousness as the 20th Century promised us was impossible. Today, art can only exist on the small scale, within communities that have formed around enough of a shared aesthetic vision to have developed it into meaningful kind of language again, but not one that will generally hold any currency to outsiders. It belongs to the idiom of the specific sub-culture, and it's specific, tastes, values, and ideas - it belongs to the kinds of people who can, at least, still talk to each other, and not just man-machine-interfaces masquerading as a go-between for human users that don't really exist.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
but not use them.
Let them cherish their lives and not move far from home.
Even though they have boats and carriages,
they will not ride them.
Even though they have armor and weapons,
they will not display them.
Let them return to the knotting of cords in place of writing.
Let their food be savory,
their clothes beautiful,
their homes secure,
their customs joyful.
Though neighboring states are within sight and their dogs and roosters can be heard, the people will grow old and die without ever visiting one another."
This is exactly what i expect for music. That real music wont die, itll be grassroots, underground, but still very real. "A sword of the revolution.." i think i said, or some such nonsense lol(my attempt at being poetic being the nonsense)
True, it can help along the appreciation. And yet, with so many galleries, you eventually find yourself in a bare room face to face with a Barnet Newman or similar, thinking, "This hack didn't even bother to use his roller correctly," and then the sudden suspicion overtakes you that someone realized people would appreciate pretty much anything, so long as it was in a gallery, and Saatchi comes immediately to mind. And you wonder if someone stuck real art treasures - just obscure enough not to be immediately recognized - into a cafe, or a Subway, whether anyone would notice their brilliance. AI walked straight into these 20th Center conundrums and exploded everything essentially for good.
High culture has always been the purview of a leisured and educated minority. Until the 20th Century, it wasn't just that, but it has always been, at least that, which is why the high art of Europe, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan, could all be so different.
Different cultural communities had different ideas, sentiments, and social contexts they were capturing and commenting on. Art was enmeshed in the totality of aristocratic life and therefore needed to adhere to standards that made it as amenable to serving its cultural role as a letter carefully written in the expert hand of a calligrapher.
When Colonialism finished kicking apart the boundaries between nations, it declared the universality of a Neo-Classical idea that had already died, and then attempted to fill in the gap with a "Modernism" that itself descended into slop around the time of Klein and Warhol, but certainly by Koons and Hirst. The meaningless pop culture in-jokes, hands-off factory-direction approach, and disdain for meaning were already there, and have been the vaunted ideal of the high arts going back in a trajectory that originates with Duchamp. It is a sign of a loss of the loss of the very basic humanistic glue that holds actual societies, ones wherein their people have anything in common, actually together.
The attempt at a "culturally universal" art was an overreaching aspiration of the West which killed the Western tradition - and for what? So that Japanese tourists can visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, then promptly leave? It was never going to happen that the rest of the world would truly appreciate what the Renaissance meant for our culture, but likewise, the culturally neutral art of the blurry photo and concrete slab was an equally implicit iconoclasm that diminished our own culture's ability to connect with it's own aesthetic past.
Whatever recovery is at this point possible will depend on an a leisured and educated segment of the population with genuine social engagements that require aesthetics. Fortunately, our society has the greatest number of under-employed college graduates in history. What they need is serious, real-world commitments, relationships, communities, and institutions in which to develop a shared aesthetic language with fixed minute rules that requires attention to detail both by creator, and audience. The "rules" which prevailed through art history and which today are so unfashionable, were necessary as shared signifiers of meaning and value - whether they were Neo-Classical Geometries, or the particularism of particular brush trails in Asian ink washes, people needed a sense of art as indeed being an ideal of their culture - the shared possession of their people - and not just some mild, half-smiled affection for a breakdancing Astronaut done in "Vaporwave Style."
When Vermeer paints a pretty girl, he cares about the earing, and so do we. When AI paints a pretty girl, it does not care about the earing, and neither does the audience. Only where it is necessary to have an art that is not simply "dictated" can it exist. Ai can't create two lines of good poetry because it has nothing to say, and we will not have art again until we likewise learn what it is to produce and appreciate expressions that are "precious."
People might be getting tired of TV, but only because there's worse mind-rot out there.
I think AI's here to stay. Not quite like books, radio, TV, and video games before them. AI isn't a medium, it's a "tool." In the same way that clip-art, default website templates, PowerPoints (all of them), and Comic Sans are "tools." As long as credulous people are put into circumstances where such "tools" seem to solve some immediate problem, or as the tool demanded by bad policy, people will use them.
As more slop isgenerated, more of it will get fed into training. The AI firms acknowledge they’ll need to use “synthetic data” in the future. The deterioration accelerates at that point in a recursive loop of trash.
Kind of like when we make a copy of a copy of a copy of a cassette tape. Eventually it sounds like the speaker is covered in a foam stuffed sock. Perhaps the best we can hope for is reaching wall to wall slop asap so people get interested in not-slop for the novelty.
Funny enough, your favourite chatbot will likely concede the above is fairly accurate.
It's almost a dystopian take on Baudrillard...first the simulacra and simulation are worshipped, then the simulacra and simulation of the simulacra and simulation!
Photographers -real photographers - call it generation loss. Alvin Lucier made that cool piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" using the principle, but it was all about resonance, and really resonated!
I've used AI to create pictures. No matter how carefully I describe what I want, there is always a weirdness to the creation as if AI almost understands what it's doing, but not quite. Faces are alien masks. Finger, arm, and leg counts are almost always off and many times are in anatomically impossible positions. It's demanding slop.
I work with a sculptor who makes serious work in real materials using hundreds of traditional and novel processes. It is slow, laborious, and expensive, and we wouldn't have it any other way. We get requests from writers to use imagery of his work to illustrate their articles and are usually happy to oblige. That was true pre-AI image generators and it's it's even more true today.
Hm, but we deserve what we tolerate, right? Theres truth in that.
Perhaps "we" is too inclusive for this conversation. When i see people absorbed by their phones, i think "them" not "us". Bc they and i are different, in a fundamental way. They like the slop(which i think online social interactions also qualify for), i avoid it. They are going deeper, im crawfishin my ass outta there. They WANT this, i do not.
Let them have it. They need it. Real humans know better
Vonnegut wrote that no one ever lost money by over estimating the vulgarity of the American people. (I think this applies to most the Western world and some other parts of the world)
When I read creative work (vs business posts, wiki stuff, etc.), I want to know that there’s a human soul at the other end. This matters.
A writer’s struggle with the blank page and triumph when the words come matters. Meaning, description, and narrative that’s tied to person’s unique experience or the imagination that comes from that experience matters.
What doesn’t matter is language and narrative, however beautiful, written of AI mind sans heart and soul. Without heart and soul, there is no authenticity.
Why do we care about authenticity? Let us count the reasons.
What you summarized, Ted. Many people will tire of it and move on. And others will have a crisis which will make them reevaluate their lives. They will wake up and seek to mend their earlier superficial, hapless and infantilized ways and genuinely reconnect with real people. Perhaps they will emerge from a hypnotized state into the sunshine. I think it is already happening.
You're an optimistic guy and I'll happily sign a manifesto with you, but I remember an old woodworker friend who helped me remodel an old house. His favorite saying was, "Good enough for who it's for." Like old television shows, Ai is good enough for who it's for. I hate that, I've spent my life working against it, but...like the Buddha said, "anger, greed, and delusion." That's the world. Beauty (and Buddhism) is where people who don't like the world seek refuge. The entrance to beauty gets ever narrower. If I wasn't so damned old, I'd grieve over it. But since I'm old and it doesn't matter I might as well keep working for the Right Thing.
Great point. I left a career in tech marketing as ChatGPT was coming in, and it was blindingly obvious that it was perfect for the task of, generally, filling some white space with blandly unchallenging copy at a very low price. No one in tech had any problem with that at all…
One of my favorite parts of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that is only somewhat in the Blade Runner movie is the concept of “kipple.” Several years ago I started thinking of the internet as an ever-growing mountain of digital kipple.
On p30:
"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over.
Agree with the premise, but several of those images are funny, in an absurdist way (crocheted tank and Washington on an ostrich, for two).
Maybe when the dust settles, we will find that the vast majority of these artificial "creations" have gone down the drain, while a few remain.
Komar and Melamid, who are conceptual artists, were doing pieces in a highly absurdist vein - like some of these images - in the olden days of dialup. A lot of the Pop art movement was equally banal and absurdist.
It's true of some Dada and Surrealist art as well. The pieces that come to mind are ridiculous, though also puerile. (Duchamp's "Fountain," is an obvious example.)
I notice that when it comes to aesthetics, pop and higher culture, you like to campaign against AI with great fervor. Almost like “Make the analog world great again.” Wonderful, I think it's great! As a musician, I can understand this very well.
However, when it comes to AI, I would move away from art production and focus on AI agents. This isn't meant to be an advertisement, I'm being serious: these modern, artificial "agents" can now actually do the boring, repetitive part of your work for you. So what's left for the average office worker when they have nothing to do now that AI has taken over the majority of their work? That's right, in a dialectical reversal he can finally devote himself to the finer things in life and... produce art. (Via Google Translate, hehe)
By and large, people get the art they deserve. There's plenty of quality stuff out there, but if all you do is root around the internet on your phone with no intention, scrolling scrolling scrolling, then you will be served up an endless stream of shit.
As an active musician, I can only shrug and continue as I always have--cheerfully laboring in obscurity.
Indeed. Doomscrolling invariable leads me to this shit, but there’s still a great gallery just down the street, full of fantastic art by local creatives…
Maybe the trick then is to get offline. I'm noticing this more and more. That relative happiness, at least a reduction in comparsonitus-driven or slop poisoning induced depression, can be had by walking away from an internet connection in to nature.
Or speaking to real human beings face to face about what they love creating with their actual minds and hands. It's bizarre actually as someone old enough to remember the digital wave, but young enough to have embraced it unquestioningly at the time.
I don’t even think it’s getting offline, necessarily. Just social media, and perhaps using alternatives to Google and Amazon. I started doing these things and my mind is much more clear and I find myself thinking about AI garbage far less than I used to, except to hand-wring about what everyone else is doing.
That's interesting, I do some of those but I find either I have ADD or some tech induced version of it. I'm so distractible there's other benefits to getting offline for me too.
I'm 110% using the alternative to Amazon in our country. What do you use instead of Google?
Sorry to intrude on the conversation, but here are two search engines orientated towards the 'small' web.
https://marginalia-search.com/
https://wiby.me/
For general searching, DuckDuckGo is a (somewhat) more privacy focused alternative to Google.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Thanks for sharing and adding Devin, I'm going to dive into the first two.
Duck Duck Go I've known about for years, but maybe that's also worth a try to burst out of the search bubble I'm likely stuck in.
I thank you sincerely for your laboring.
You're doing God's work, sir
Hear hear. Instagram should be renamed to Slop. It is an essence of a cultural nadir hijacked by all sorts of d listers and their performative bullshit for clicks from brain-dead morons who sustain them. Quality stuff has to be sought out and people need to be more outright in calling out slop when they see it. It is no longer a matter of taste.
Could it be that it's because "normal people" now are the main users of the Internet?
"Normal people" often lack a developed sense of aesthetic preference. They tend to gravitate toward whatever others like, which usually amounts to the least common denominator dictated by influential voices. Most don't really even WANT art, and are only exposed through it indirectly through popular culture.
Apart from MEME based absurdities, slop-art is mostly what I would describe as "paintings" of social media photos: Usually just one subject, trying to look good in front of a background that is far more interesting than their face.
I think that the Slop aesthetic predates widely available AI. To me it has the same vibe as the many, many would-be wacky commercials that are odd but in no way funny or interesting, and that revel in those qualities. "Wink, wink, we know this commercial looks like a 6-year-old created it. Now howsabout some car insurance?"
Yeah I feel like internet humor has always been absurdist. People wish they could have "old Youtube" back. Things like the gummi bear song or the emu committing suicide are classics on the internet.
My guess is algorithms have a lot to do with it. Shock is an easy way to be noticed on the internet so a ton of humor probably has become absurdist because of that.
Shock art is a sign of a cultural movement that has exhausted its useful ideas and is desperately treading water. What we are now in is a sort of post-shock era where Americentric popular culture has fully settled into brain death but nothing is waiting in the wings to replace it. Normally when an artistic movement reached this point it would be tossed aside and replaced (like how European classical music tumbled into history's garbage can when the shock of free atonality gave way to serialist numbness), but today there is no replacement, only slop.
@Mike - Yes.
Same vibe for sure, but somehow less irritating than AI Slop. Probably because we know actual humans with actual talent made it, whether it's to your taste or not.
I have some connection to the insurance industry, which, in all its guises, fundamentally deals with human tragedy. It is, as the old saying goes, "funny like a crutch". And yet, these weird, minute lizards and strange ironic people, seem to somehow get the marketing job done.
My first recollection of slop would have to be the “Shake Weight.” It’s an “exercise” device clearly designed to be absurd for the sake of spreading in peer-to-peer media. (Debuted 2009)
Everything everywhere all at once was the first slop movie. The alternate dimension aesthetics really mirror ai in that they’re strewn together yet missing something. Fake cloying sincerity.
At one point I told myself I could never completely write off a whole artistic movement as shit, but I feel very comfortable doing so with anything produced with generative AI. Besides the queasy, shiny, fake airbrush aesthetic, it's terrible for the environment with the obscene amount of resources required to power and cool the servers.
Any child's drawing of a stick figure is inherently more interesting and has more artistic integrity than any of the garbage Ted embedded in this post.
This is an important point you raise, Nick: "Besides the queasy, shiny, fake airbrush aesthetic, it's terrible for the environment with the obscene amount of resources required to power and cool the servers." Obscene is a good word for this kind of waste.
Interested in the environmental impact of AI. Can you expound on that?
AI consumes TONS of energy to function. Between the energy to run the programs and the water used to cool the servers, it has a massive, massive environmental footprint.
A chatGPT query uses 10x the energy of a basic non-AI search.
You can read more about it here:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/16/ai-environment-carbon-footprint/
And here:
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about
🙌🏼
Part of the problem is that slop retro-actively diminishes the reputation of previous art movements. Van Gogh's a great example. We had pop culture riding him for decades. Even before AI, there were touring IMax's and "interactive experiences," with animated paintings and 360 projections. Then he became THE testbed for style-transfer techniques. He's been reduced to the gradeschool legend of the crazy painter who lopped his ear off and a stylistic meme. It's absolutely arduous to try clearing your mind of the gunk and really appreciating what statement his aesthetics left in their actual context. But it's not just him.
What we see of Western Canon's artistic contributions today used to be the parody and homage of cartoonists, and animators, but with AI, the idea that Art Nouveau, or ukiyo-e, or Cubism, are just a "skin" you can put on anything, including your "Avacado couches ridden by cowboys," has really just reduced them all from a visual language, to a kind of noise.
Some years ago, I downloaded a data-set representing "all of Impressionism," there were tens or even hundreds of thousands of paintings. Me and my wife made plans to peruse this virtual gallery on the couch as a sort of date night, since we love Impressionism... But after a while it became a game of "countryside, pretty girl, potato," potato being our term for the homely men. We'd look at a painting, categorize it, and move on. Even to try to appreciate works of art on the scale made possible by modern technology, as we certainly intended to, was to flatten everything into a mass of totally conventional stylistic and subject choices.
The conclusion I've come to is that the fleeting specter a universal, international, mass art social consciousness as the 20th Century promised us was impossible. Today, art can only exist on the small scale, within communities that have formed around enough of a shared aesthetic vision to have developed it into meaningful kind of language again, but not one that will generally hold any currency to outsiders. It belongs to the idiom of the specific sub-culture, and it's specific, tastes, values, and ideas - it belongs to the kinds of people who can, at least, still talk to each other, and not just man-machine-interfaces masquerading as a go-between for human users that don't really exist.
It’s interesting that certain philosophers like Lao Tzu ascribed to that idea that balanced living was only possible in small groups.
Did he say that? I don't doubt it, but where is that from? I don't recall it in the TTC....
A different translation of chapter 80:
"Let there be a small country with few people.
Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred,
but not use them.
Let them cherish their lives and not move far from home.
Even though they have boats and carriages,
they will not ride them.
Even though they have armor and weapons,
they will not display them.
Let them return to the knotting of cords in place of writing.
Let their food be savory,
their clothes beautiful,
their homes secure,
their customs joyful.
Though neighboring states are within sight and their dogs and roosters can be heard, the people will grow old and die without ever visiting one another."
Perhaps a bit ambitious but interesting.
Chapter 80 is apt: "A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster
than man, they are not needed."
This is exactly what i expect for music. That real music wont die, itll be grassroots, underground, but still very real. "A sword of the revolution.." i think i said, or some such nonsense lol(my attempt at being poetic being the nonsense)
I was in Costa Rica and went to an "interactive AI Van Gogh" exhibit. Yawnsville.
In the same vein, how about all of the "ironic variations" on Grant Wood's American Gothic with animal heads or people in disrepute?
Actually going to an art gallery is always a good start, nothing can beat seeing the brushstrokes in the paint.
True, it can help along the appreciation. And yet, with so many galleries, you eventually find yourself in a bare room face to face with a Barnet Newman or similar, thinking, "This hack didn't even bother to use his roller correctly," and then the sudden suspicion overtakes you that someone realized people would appreciate pretty much anything, so long as it was in a gallery, and Saatchi comes immediately to mind. And you wonder if someone stuck real art treasures - just obscure enough not to be immediately recognized - into a cafe, or a Subway, whether anyone would notice their brilliance. AI walked straight into these 20th Center conundrums and exploded everything essentially for good.
This conclusion illustrates the mutation causing new proliferation.
High culture has always been the purview of a leisured and educated minority. Until the 20th Century, it wasn't just that, but it has always been, at least that, which is why the high art of Europe, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan, could all be so different.
Different cultural communities had different ideas, sentiments, and social contexts they were capturing and commenting on. Art was enmeshed in the totality of aristocratic life and therefore needed to adhere to standards that made it as amenable to serving its cultural role as a letter carefully written in the expert hand of a calligrapher.
When Colonialism finished kicking apart the boundaries between nations, it declared the universality of a Neo-Classical idea that had already died, and then attempted to fill in the gap with a "Modernism" that itself descended into slop around the time of Klein and Warhol, but certainly by Koons and Hirst. The meaningless pop culture in-jokes, hands-off factory-direction approach, and disdain for meaning were already there, and have been the vaunted ideal of the high arts going back in a trajectory that originates with Duchamp. It is a sign of a loss of the loss of the very basic humanistic glue that holds actual societies, ones wherein their people have anything in common, actually together.
The attempt at a "culturally universal" art was an overreaching aspiration of the West which killed the Western tradition - and for what? So that Japanese tourists can visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, then promptly leave? It was never going to happen that the rest of the world would truly appreciate what the Renaissance meant for our culture, but likewise, the culturally neutral art of the blurry photo and concrete slab was an equally implicit iconoclasm that diminished our own culture's ability to connect with it's own aesthetic past.
Whatever recovery is at this point possible will depend on an a leisured and educated segment of the population with genuine social engagements that require aesthetics. Fortunately, our society has the greatest number of under-employed college graduates in history. What they need is serious, real-world commitments, relationships, communities, and institutions in which to develop a shared aesthetic language with fixed minute rules that requires attention to detail both by creator, and audience. The "rules" which prevailed through art history and which today are so unfashionable, were necessary as shared signifiers of meaning and value - whether they were Neo-Classical Geometries, or the particularism of particular brush trails in Asian ink washes, people needed a sense of art as indeed being an ideal of their culture - the shared possession of their people - and not just some mild, half-smiled affection for a breakdancing Astronaut done in "Vaporwave Style."
When Vermeer paints a pretty girl, he cares about the earing, and so do we. When AI paints a pretty girl, it does not care about the earing, and neither does the audience. Only where it is necessary to have an art that is not simply "dictated" can it exist. Ai can't create two lines of good poetry because it has nothing to say, and we will not have art again until we likewise learn what it is to produce and appreciate expressions that are "precious."
Won't it be great when people get tired of AI? But we might have to wait for an Apocalypse for that to happen.
People might be getting tired of TV, but only because there's worse mind-rot out there.
I think AI's here to stay. Not quite like books, radio, TV, and video games before them. AI isn't a medium, it's a "tool." In the same way that clip-art, default website templates, PowerPoints (all of them), and Comic Sans are "tools." As long as credulous people are put into circumstances where such "tools" seem to solve some immediate problem, or as the tool demanded by bad policy, people will use them.
As more slop isgenerated, more of it will get fed into training. The AI firms acknowledge they’ll need to use “synthetic data” in the future. The deterioration accelerates at that point in a recursive loop of trash.
Kind of like when we make a copy of a copy of a copy of a cassette tape. Eventually it sounds like the speaker is covered in a foam stuffed sock. Perhaps the best we can hope for is reaching wall to wall slop asap so people get interested in not-slop for the novelty.
Funny enough, your favourite chatbot will likely concede the above is fairly accurate.
It's almost a dystopian take on Baudrillard...first the simulacra and simulation are worshipped, then the simulacra and simulation of the simulacra and simulation!
🫠
Photographers -real photographers - call it generation loss. Alvin Lucier made that cool piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" using the principle, but it was all about resonance, and really resonated!
You have me with Alvin Lucier. And yep, generation loss - why original source material used to be so valuable! Well spotted.
Sigh. And Jesus Christ on an AI-generated cross.
You’re right on here, Ted.
Though deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
As a Bluesky poster said “I can’t be bothered to read something a human couldn’t be bothered to write.
I think the NEA slogan is, or used to be, “A great nation deserves great art.” They should add “And so do we.”
Anyway, I’m martini-posting.
I've used AI to create pictures. No matter how carefully I describe what I want, there is always a weirdness to the creation as if AI almost understands what it's doing, but not quite. Faces are alien masks. Finger, arm, and leg counts are almost always off and many times are in anatomically impossible positions. It's demanding slop.
Don’t worry, it’ll get better…
I work with a sculptor who makes serious work in real materials using hundreds of traditional and novel processes. It is slow, laborious, and expensive, and we wouldn't have it any other way. We get requests from writers to use imagery of his work to illustrate their articles and are usually happy to oblige. That was true pre-AI image generators and it's it's even more true today.
Hm, but we deserve what we tolerate, right? Theres truth in that.
Perhaps "we" is too inclusive for this conversation. When i see people absorbed by their phones, i think "them" not "us". Bc they and i are different, in a fundamental way. They like the slop(which i think online social interactions also qualify for), i avoid it. They are going deeper, im crawfishin my ass outta there. They WANT this, i do not.
Let them have it. They need it. Real humans know better
Vonnegut wrote that no one ever lost money by over estimating the vulgarity of the American people. (I think this applies to most the Western world and some other parts of the world)
A quote appropriated and modified from a quote by PT Barnum. It didn't start with AI
Brilliant reply!
When I read creative work (vs business posts, wiki stuff, etc.), I want to know that there’s a human soul at the other end. This matters.
A writer’s struggle with the blank page and triumph when the words come matters. Meaning, description, and narrative that’s tied to person’s unique experience or the imagination that comes from that experience matters.
What doesn’t matter is language and narrative, however beautiful, written of AI mind sans heart and soul. Without heart and soul, there is no authenticity.
Why do we care about authenticity? Let us count the reasons.
What you summarized, Ted. Many people will tire of it and move on. And others will have a crisis which will make them reevaluate their lives. They will wake up and seek to mend their earlier superficial, hapless and infantilized ways and genuinely reconnect with real people. Perhaps they will emerge from a hypnotized state into the sunshine. I think it is already happening.
You're an optimistic guy and I'll happily sign a manifesto with you, but I remember an old woodworker friend who helped me remodel an old house. His favorite saying was, "Good enough for who it's for." Like old television shows, Ai is good enough for who it's for. I hate that, I've spent my life working against it, but...like the Buddha said, "anger, greed, and delusion." That's the world. Beauty (and Buddhism) is where people who don't like the world seek refuge. The entrance to beauty gets ever narrower. If I wasn't so damned old, I'd grieve over it. But since I'm old and it doesn't matter I might as well keep working for the Right Thing.
Great point. I left a career in tech marketing as ChatGPT was coming in, and it was blindingly obvious that it was perfect for the task of, generally, filling some white space with blandly unchallenging copy at a very low price. No one in tech had any problem with that at all…
One of my favorite parts of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that is only somewhat in the Blade Runner movie is the concept of “kipple.” Several years ago I started thinking of the internet as an ever-growing mountain of digital kipple.
On p30:
"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over.
Agree with the premise, but several of those images are funny, in an absurdist way (crocheted tank and Washington on an ostrich, for two).
Maybe when the dust settles, we will find that the vast majority of these artificial "creations" have gone down the drain, while a few remain.
Komar and Melamid, who are conceptual artists, were doing pieces in a highly absurdist vein - like some of these images - in the olden days of dialup. A lot of the Pop art movement was equally banal and absurdist.
It's true of some Dada and Surrealist art as well. The pieces that come to mind are ridiculous, though also puerile. (Duchamp's "Fountain," is an obvious example.)
Regarding Komar and Melamid, see https://news.artnet.com/art-world/komar-and-melamid-2303263
Komar and Melamid, The People's Choice series of paintings, created in the late 90s. There is also "music." Not very listenable.
http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/rrushing/501/Images/Pages/The_Beautiful.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Choice_Music
"The Most Unwanted Song" is one of the greatest musical compositions ever made, it is just devastatingly funny from beginning to end.
I notice that when it comes to aesthetics, pop and higher culture, you like to campaign against AI with great fervor. Almost like “Make the analog world great again.” Wonderful, I think it's great! As a musician, I can understand this very well.
However, when it comes to AI, I would move away from art production and focus on AI agents. This isn't meant to be an advertisement, I'm being serious: these modern, artificial "agents" can now actually do the boring, repetitive part of your work for you. So what's left for the average office worker when they have nothing to do now that AI has taken over the majority of their work? That's right, in a dialectical reversal he can finally devote himself to the finer things in life and... produce art. (Via Google Translate, hehe)