Your quick take lacks perspective. Photography wasn't always viewed to be art. Critics called photography "slop" in its infancy for a long while. See Charles Baudelaire for his 1800's take on photography:
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.
Harsh. It wasn't a fringe view either. I encourage you to read how much creatives despised photography.
This argument was transferred to film when it first came out as well. It took a long while and a couple court cases before it was accepted that it took editorial choice for a photograph and film to be good. When it was accepted that to be the case, despite the aspects of mechanical reproduction, it was also accepted into the pantheon of fine art.
So it will be for AI generated images and video. So far, I've seen nothing inherent in the properties of AI generated media as a medium that obviates a human editorial eye. Even if AI could exercise comparable judgement, we will like an image because we want the curation of a specific person.
In Grant Sanderson's interview with Dwarkesh Patel about the future role of mathematicians (36:25), he says:
> One interesting take that I've heard about what mathematicians will end up being is that it's actually more analogous to art museum curators than anything else. The AI solved the thing, so the art exists. They even know how to explain it really well. But you still want someone to help you navigate this nearly infinite space of what ideas are worth engaging with. Even if AIs were in some sense better at that, I think we would always still prefer a human that we had a relationship with, because the way we get motivated to be interested in things is a social phenomenon. If you have some specific technology you're trying to build, that might be different. But the people listening to this podcast trust your curation on what's an interesting topic in the first place. It's not that they're landing here because whatever your next topic is, that's what they wanted to understand in a prior sense. They're trusting you as a curator. So my role, and arguably that of other mathematicians, might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are worth pursuing. That's a lot of my job right now.
Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions--as well more mundane uses like what's sitting on your phone right now--just like how photographs are used today.
> Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions
Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence, given generative media has been around for about 6 years?
Does the lack of an existence proof for fine art photography in the first six years mean that photography will never be fine art? Obviously not for us living in the future.
You'll need to propose a different, more honest test.
> Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence
"Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" is thought to be the first staged photograph and it carries a powerful artistic and political message.
Literally everyone in the world with access to a browser can prompt chatgpt for an image. Billions of AI images have been generated yet you can't point literally to a single one.
Illiterate hunter gatherers in the Paleolithic with a life expectancy of mid-20s scrounged what few pigments they could muster and left their hands' imprints on stone. Even in this age of globalization, immediate access to information, and the sum of human knowledge on your pocket, having stood in one of these caves I can tell you it's breathtaking. A billion clanker slop images later and you can't produce ONE (fucking 1) of value. And you think I'm the one who's "lacking perspective"?
But once we have AGI and ASI the Minds will produce great art! Super related to current transformer architecture slop.
Was "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" thought of as great art at the time it was taken in 1840? Or was its status as great art a retroactive judgement with the perspective of time by people after 1840?
Not being familiar with the piece, so I looked it up. Seems like it was a protest correspondence aimed at a specific institution, not a public artwork. It doesn't appear to have been exhibited, reviewed, or discussed in print in 1840. Mostly circulated privately.
So I don't think it's a good test. Because you're asking me to point out an equivalent piece in the billions of generative art produced in these six years that would be judged by future historians to have great artistic value. If we were both back in 1840, we both wouldn't be able to point out "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" either. It never posed itself as art at the time, and we'd have to know what future art historians thought.
Yes, I stand by the "lacking perspective" comment, because your judgements on photography and what's considered art are from the current modern point of view, rather than putting yourself in the shoes of those judging photography when it first came out--which is the shoes we find ourselves wearing when it comes to judging generative images, because the alternative (retrospectively judging it from the future) is unavailable to us.
Hence, my core argument still stands. In what way is photography different than generated images, where in photography is considered art because humans can exercise their creative judgement, but in generative images isn't because humans cannot exercise their creative judgement?
To argue against my own stance, the tact you should have taken could have been:
If one major component of art is the human judgement, how could humans could be credited for exercising any judgement at all when prompting, when LLMs are at the end of the pipe? And if they're at all intelligence, what's to say they're not superseding our intentions with their own?
Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process.
Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.
I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses.
In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.
Yeah if you want recommendation of things I like, drop a contact and I'll send you some. But I don't really want to get into a public debate about taste in art, because that's all posting anything would come down to.
It's a losing battle, because the bias is so strong you can post an actual Monet but say it was generated by AI, and people will come out to tell you how it's clearly not art:
Which is funny because that's how Monet and the Impressionists were originally received by critics. The comment about the light rendering being wrong, so clearly it couldn't be Monet is especially funny given the origin of why they are called Impressionists:
Le Havre, he called it Impression. The term, springing from the jargon used by painters, had been an artistic watchword since the middle of the century, reflecting the growing interest in capturing the atmosphere of a scene, or impression, rather than giving a painstaking description of nature
I told you why I won't, I'm not getting drawn into an argument about aesthetics. What I personally think has artistic value and whether or not you agree doesn't matter at all.
My comment was referring to the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder. Given your biases, nobody could show you an AI image that you would say is art.
Exactly my point. People simply weren't alive in the beginning of a medium, so they think how it is now is how it was always so. For the first 20 to 30 years of film, people disregarded it as art.
And somehow, it's a leap of logic that just because the AI image is generated that the text is also. It's as silly as asserting because someone used a camera, they hired a ghostwriter.
Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited.
If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here.
> most people make garbage,
That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined.
These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
It's a mix, because some stuff tends to just use `T`, but there's better descriptors elsewhere.
There's IList<T> but Task<TResult>
There's Action<T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, T6> but also Dictionary<TKey, TValue> and Map<TIn, TOut>
This stuff kind of "makes sense" once you're used to it, because it's difficult to say what IList<T> ought to have been called otherwise, IList<TContainee> is a mouthful, and Action<T1,...> simply suffers from the inability to specify an unknown number of generic parameters.
Azul 100% comes from Arabic (well Persian, but through Arabic), although I think the specific Andalusian form that was borrowed was a bit different from that.
It’s funny that Amodei has ended up with a worse reputation - in tech circles at least - than Altman. When I hear Amodei's name I can only think about him preaching his doomsday predictions, like everything that doesn't directly benefit Anthropic will bring hell on earth. As opposed to Altman, who I think is just a regular kinda-likeable hypeman CEO.
Altman raped his sister, assassinated a whistleblower, started his career with fraud, and has a thoroughly documented history of being allergic to the truth. So overall I have a pretty negative image of him as well.
The difference is Sam is just your regular soulless sociopath CEO, we're used to them.
Dario is just a profoundly weird freak, who is obsessed with trying to cover his endless greed in messaging of safety and "alignment" even though every single fucking thing he does is diametrically opposed to them.
He literally named his company after humanity even though his main messaging this entire time has been that the technology he insists on developing will a) destroy the world b) leave us all jobless on the street before it does.
Dario is a fascist who wholeheartedly believes Yankee exceptionalism and its divine right to brutalize anyone in order to achieve its goals. Anthropic's models have helped bomb innocents over and over and over again, and will continue to do so.
If you think he gives half a shit about safety you've had a dozen lobotomies too many and should reconsider every decision you've ever made.
Regarding words and their meanings, would you agree the current US regime is fascist in nature? What with the wars of aggression, the setting up concentration camps to put the undesirables to deport, using masked thugs with no badges to kidnap people in the street (and shoot people who protest), disregard for the Constitution and rule of law, curtailing of human and civil rights, ever increasing surveillance? Weird how people really close to the highest echelons of the regime keep getting in trouble for throwing Sieg Heils.
Would you not agree Palantir is at the forefront of this transition towards fascism?
What would you call someone who, as CEO, chooses to partner with said regime and Palantir? And not just in unrelated, innocuous shit, but in actively helping blow up innocents, including triple tapping a fucking school and killing hundreds of schoolgirls?
> So do you consider everyone who works at defense primes like Raytheon fascists?
They are collaborating with fascism, yes. Of course most of them worked in the industry before the current regime came in and made its fascist turn so they didn't set out to do so. Though the industrial military complex still was the main driver of US imperialism and so anyone who chooses to work in it is absolutely complicit in the mass murder of innocents the US has carried out. No idea about Boeing, can't comment on that.
Not that the agency of some working stiff is comparable in any way, shape, or form to that of the CEO of a private company valued at over a trillion motherfucking dollars.
> Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology. Its core features include a dictatorial leader, the complete suppression of opposition, and the belief that the nation or race is above the individual.
So no the current regime is not fascist in nature. There’s pieces that rhyme for sure but still words have meaning - the opposition isn’t meaningfully oppressed, we don’t have a dictator. Trump is awful but words still have meaning.
> Would you not agree Palantir is at the forefront of this transition towards fascism?
No more towards a surveillance state.
> Of course most of them worked in the industry before the current regime came in and made its fascist turn so they didn't set out to do so
So was Dario in his field?
So yes I don’t think there is a serious argument that Dario is a fascist.
> > Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology. Its core features include a dictatorial leader, the complete suppression of opposition, and the belief that the nation or race is above the individual.
All of those fit to a fucking T, except being a dictator which he hasn't yet managed. But he's been thoroughly undermining the constitution and limits on his power, has thanked Elon publicly for fixing the election, said he wants to run despite it being unconstitutional, and even that elections won't be needed anymore. He's fired was it Pam Bondi I think because she wouldn't persecute his political opponents as aggressively or vindictively as he wanted.
> No more towards a surveillance state.
My brother in Christ why the fuck would a democratic republic need a surveillance state. You're literally making my case.
> So was Dario in his field?
He was in AI sure. He CHOSE to partner with Palantir and lick the boots of the fascist US regime and its fucking department of war.
No skin off my ass though, it's your country. Enjoy the last dying gasps of your vaunted FrEEdUM. As we say in my country, nobody blinder than he who doesn't want to see.
I think we probably have a lot more in common than you think man, I am deeply troubled by things happening in the country and the world right now. That said, during difficult times it is more important than ever to think critically and not lose your head in a parallel reality.
Anyway, you really didn't make a point where it's fair to call Dario a fascist which was the point of this thread.
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