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i think the reason that creative types tend to feel such a deep disgust towards ai is that taste is such a fundamental part of creative expression, and ai systems produce a perfectly average, tasteless result by default, by design. knowledge and skill are no substitute for taste
or perhaps i should say a deep alienation. even the most unskilled, naïve artist has some kind of æsthetic preference, that comes from something within them, that's not just some average of all that has been across everything on the internet. the preference is what makes the art
now you say, ah, but i can prompt the machine to make it create something in a particular style. and sure, you can inject a tiny bit of taste there, with words. but taste is as fractally complex as all other beautiful things in this world, and the prompt box is finite in size
the prompt becomes a jealously guarded secret because to understand it would be to destroy the intrigue, something like dissecting a joke. a human being is such a complex creature that a paragraph of text can never come close to describing them. the prompt has no greater depth
the wonder of human creativity is found in the endless depth of the human soul and the inability to completely convey it. every work of art is made in the image of its creator, but only a very tiny part. to consume art is to have a conversation and try to complete the puzzle
what's toxic about the slop is that there is a limit to the depth. that, even if there was something interesting at the very surface, once you break past it, there's no more layers, only endless emptiness. the brain is punished for attempting to understand at all. it's numbing
implicit in what i say here is that ai can still be used as a meaningful creative tool. but because its outputs are inescapably bland, the meaning has to be constructed outside the box
@hikari genmoji is a beautiful microcosm of all of this — the most fun i’ve had with it has been generating visual non-sequiturs, like the abstract objects you get when the model doesn’t know what to give you
but i don’t feel like i have much creative input into it, if any. it certainly doesn’t feel like *I* created the result, even if it was technically based on a prompt i typed in