damn remember nfts
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nfts were fascinating because either you bought into the magical thinking that allowed artificial market dynamics to confer abstract value onto, you know, an ugly drawing of a monkey—or you pretty quickly realized that there was nothing there
every now and then someone gestures at a vague connection between nfts and ai, whether to argue for the existence of that connection or against it, but for my money i think there is a connection and this is at the heart of it: either you buy the movie logic that lets you make the logical leap from "information-shaped noise" to "intelligence," or you take stab at it and immediately write it off as a waste of your time
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idk maybe i'm just wrong and have just meticulously curated an environment where i'm never exposed to data that doesn't validate my biases. but like every single thing i've seen come out of ai falls somewhere on a sliding scale between "this could have been a normal ass google search" and "literally worse than nothing"
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like the nfts were obvious garbage in part because the visual style—the actual artistic choices that were made in defining the parameters of bored apes or whatever—were nakedly repulsive. i look at something like the sample poems from that study that purports to show that AI is "better" than humans at writing poetry, and i'm just like... how do you not immediately recognize that there is nothing there
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remember in the 2000s when you'd go looking for desktop backgrounds and it'd be all 3D renders and skulls and stock photos with the saturation slider cranked to like 80? that's what comes to mind for me when i hear that "AI" "poems" are rated as more "inspirational" than real poetry
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the thing about nfts and ai is that they're not just curios, fun diversions that the true believers can engage in without bothering the rest of us: they are an attempt to replace art (not just art, but for the sake of continuity of argument i'm keeping the scope narrow) with a very particular simulacrum based on a crude and superficial understanding of what art is and what it's for. it only makes sense to even use the word "art" in reference to bored apes and ai poetry if your understanding of art begins and ends at the passive consumption of surface-level aesthetics.
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i saw an interesting video the other day of some folks with actual background in poetry looking at the examples from that study, and the only way the ai was able to consistently fool them into thinking its output was human written was by plagiarizing passages from real poems verbatim 🤷♀️
anyway i'm harping on about that study in particular because i'm annoyed that it's being presented as good science when its methodology is so flawed: the criteria the authors asked participants to evaluate reflect, well... just a vapid perspective of art, to be frank. is it any wonder that ai excels in those conditions?
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the point of poetry isn't to be "inspirational," not as a whole. certainly not chaucer or shakespeare or poe. "inspirational" is the purview of self-help books and quippy mugs and posters with pictures of sunsets and kittens. nor does anyone read poetry because, golly, they just really love a rigid AABB rhyme scheme.
poetry evokes, yes, poetry plays with language and forms, poetry says things without saying them, says things that can't be said in dry prose. poetry is both abstract and specific; what LLMs produce is doldrum and vague.
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anyway, i guess my point is twofold:
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i'm mad because i like art, and i would like artists to continue to make it and get it read and be able to survive, and the idea that poetry can be replaced by text, the idea that illustrations can be replaced by images, the idea that art can be replaced by art-shaped data spat out by an overgrown text predictor, is the culmination of a decades- (or if you're really keen, centuries-)long process of subordinating the substance and processes and creators of art to mean consumption. and i think that sucks
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there's also a definite sense that the AI plague is intrinsically linked with capitalism. this is a connection people are making intuitively, even if they aren't able to pin down the exact nature of the connection.
labor relations are the obvious aspect, and not just as relates to "creative" labor (there's a load-bearing ontology for you). but the starker observation, i think, is this: the CEOs, the boards, the people who Run This Shit—they are all falling over themselves to get AI everywhere, no matter where it belongs, right now.
yes, part of this is putting pressure on labor.
yes, part of this is FOMO.
but more than anything i think people should take it as an indication that these people, both individually and as a class, have totally lost the plot. they are constitutionally incapable of prioritizing material matters like quality, or fitness for purpose, or even relevance.
capitalism is an optimization engine that has broken all links to what's worth optimizing and is now free-wheeling.
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isn't it funny how every Big Problem ultimately comes back around to the fact that, at the end of the day, the money machine runs everything and the Big Problem is just a by-product of the money machine money-machining? someone should look into this
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@sjolsen for what it's worth we understand the math (as well as anyone who's not an expert in that specific field can), and we agree with you that there's nothing there
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@sjolsen no lol that was slightly after our time, 90s wallpapers were ... different
but we'll cheer for any piece of art that's the product of a person doing their best to express themselves, in the end. it's just the quality of the art affects whether we're admiring them as a mentor we respect, or cheering them on the way we would a small child
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