Day: October 13, 2023

You don’t owe anyone anything on social media….

You don’t owe anyone anything on social media.

You can better meet your personal and social responsibilities elsewhere in a manner you think is best. If you think there is something wrong in the world, you can contribute directly either with your time or your money or with whatever resources you see fit. If you need ideas, consider this thing I wrote some time ago.

Social media is a construct of large corporations to capture your free user generated content and feed it into a mechanism that allows them to capture fees (usually ads) from other corporations and organizations. In exchange for that free work, you get an opportunity to read what others are saying gratis, as well as giving others a chance to see and comment on what you are posting, also without cost. That’s it. That’s social media.

If you want to contribute your voice on social media to a cause you feel strongly about, go ahead. I personally believe it doesn’t amount to much, but your mileage might differ. Like I said above, you’d likely be much better off meeting your responsibilities elsewhere.

Social media these days is largely a mess, and it is doubtful it has an overall benefit on the whole. So extract what value you can from it, then leave it alone. You don’t owe anyone anything on social media. Not the people who see your posts, and certainly not the people who run the companies.

 

Using AI in art making, from David Salle to Kevin Kelly (and how Walter Benjamin can help)


Using technology to make art is not new. Gerhard Richter used special software to make the work you see above (4900 colours). Before computers, artists would use lens and photographs and even craftsmen and women to help them create their final artwork.

What is new now is artists (and non-artists) are using AI to make art. Kevin Kelly talks about how he is using AI in his creative process. David Salle has dived deep into making new work using AI. NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo is using visual tools like Procreate to make AI art.

I have seen Kelly’s work, and Manjoo and Salle’s work are on display in their articles. Kelly experiments with AI to produce images in various styles. Perhaps he has changed, but there is no artist in his work that I can see. With Manjoo, you can see more of him in his drawings. And with Salle the artist’s presence comes in as an editor of the works the AI produces out of his original pieces.

In trying to assess these AI generated works, I think Walter Benjamin and his idea of an artwork having an aura can be useful here. Benjamin was thinking about how original art works have an aura that reproduced images of it do not have. I agree with that: no matter how good a reproduction of a work is, it rarely compares to the original work. There’s that something extra in the original.

I think we can extend out the idea of a work having an aura and also having a humanity. What does a work say about the person who created it? What do I recognize in it that is human and unique to that person? What ideas are there that could only come from that person in that time?

You can argue back that this is irrelevant and that AI generated images are interesting and beautiful and furthermore I cannot distinguish them from human generated images. That might be true. Maybe galleries will be filled with images and sculpture with no human involvement whatsoever, not unlike deep learning software that comes up with ways to be best at playing games like Chess and Go. Such AI artwork may be interesting and even beautiful and may seem to have that aura Benjamin talks about. They just won’t be associated with a human.

Even minimal and conceptual art has a humanity associated with it. Duchamp’s Fountain embodies Duchamp’s intelligence and wit and contrariness.  Arp’s “According to the Laws of Chance” likewise shows his interest in pushing the bounds of what is acceptable in a composition of an abstract work. A person is responsible for the work and the work is tied to them. A person is what makes the work relevant to us in a way that a wall covered with children’s collages or a shelf of toilets in a hardware store are not.

We need a new aesthetic philosophy to deal with the firehose of AI art that is coming our way. I propose we tie the art back to our humanity.

P.S. For more on Richter’s 4900 colours, you can see it here on his web site. There’s also a great view of  4900 colors, here,