Arguably more so chemists but yeah I’m aware. Most / all of their paints were made by hand themselves as well, part of the reason it was a sensible transition to film production and manipulation.

You know this argument would apply to any digital tool used to make art right? Like Photoshop is using logic and algorithms to create image manipulations and similarly for vector art and video editing. Many effects one doesn’t know the actual outcome until it’s rendered and you have to go in and skillfully play with the software to get the desired result from the logic manipulations you’re not performing by hand. It’s not unlike crafting a prompt to get a desired result. An analogy to photography may be how people played chemically with film to get desired results. In an abstract sense one is twisting and dialing knobs of their tool to create art, not cognitively different than one playing with paint, brushes, and canvas to get a desired result.

I’m not inclined to conclude algorithms in blender, lightroom, Krita , after effects or Photoshop are intrinsically different than algorithms used for NN. Like hypothetically one could run through all of these algorithms with a pencil and paper, it would just take a really really long time.

There’s a bit of subjectivity in that argument, for instance someone who dislikes rock music could argue the energy used to play or produce it was wasteful.

A large portion of your argument up to now dealt with choices individuals and companies have made in their attempt to develop and power NN and not about the nature of NN’s themselves, particularly in contrast to other algorithms we already use to make what most people consider art.

It seemed the argument you were building was anything generated by NN was not art because of those issues. It’s maybe a more valid argument if one is speaking specifically about a particular model whose development or use is mired in copyright and environmental controversy but it’s not useful to apply that to all NN full stop which is why I posed the hypothetical.

Yes in the long term there’s no such thing as renewable energy since entropy always increases. It’s a misnomer that only has meaning in small human timescales.

Yeah if the big crunch is accurate and the universe is eternally expanding and contracting then all energy is renewable. Although this is way way outside the scope most normally have in mind when speaking about renewable energy.

I think we’re having two discussions. There is the discussion about whether or not media created using a neural network with a human prompting it can be considered art. Hypothetically an individual could design, train, and prompt a NN including creating the dataset themselves it was trained on. Would that also be discredited just for the fact part of their process used a NN? What if one also used all clean carbon neutral energy to run and train their NN?

The other discussion is about the issues surrounding people’s current choices on how to develop neural networks. I guess you could link them together and say because of these issues anything created using these tools is not art. It would beg the hypothetical of if it would be art if these issues were not there.

Not every art piece is even physical or tangible in any sense. The art is in the conception or the idea. There is indeed a skill in constructing models as well as using them but ignoring all of that there’s still the artistic touch in creating thought provoking or impassioned concepts irrespective of the tangible form they’ve been given. Although one can most definitely use a medium to impart meaning.

It was never my argument that people who have issues with new technology are necessarily luddites or that AI or really any technology whatsoever is absolutely problem free. Everything has its pros and cons, for example nuclear gave us access to functionally limitless clean (compared to coal and gas) energy as well as more powerful weapons. One unavoidable rule or law of reality is we don’t get something for nothing.

Ultimately what is and is not art was, is, and will be an open question each individual has to answer for themselves. Even today an individual is free to view photography not as a legitimate art form or digital art or CGI and so on.

I think ultimately the will or mind should be unbounded sans the ability to willfully cause harm to other minds. It’s purely due to limitations of technology that we are in our current predicament. The famous prosthetic engineer Hugh Herr made the argument it was not him who was disabled but our technology that was disabled. Now what minds do when they are unbounded by the reality around them is their own responsibility. If you’ve seen the show pantheon then things could turn out similarly aka minds in multiple embodiments exploring physical and simulated realities or otherwise experiencing whatever they desire without limitations beyond the limitation of willfully causing harm to others.

Ideally minds unchained from limitations wouldn’t desire to cause harm anyways, but there’s some real jerks out there.

It’s more so historical fact. It was denounced for like nearly a century if not longer depending how you’re measuring. It’s similar to AI in that it decreases the mechanical effort one needs to create content but also itself imposes new required skills to develop that content. There’s definitely a hierarchy in AI content and so far at least to myself it’s very clear when there is a person actively trying to create something vs a completely automated content pipeline. I would challenge anyone who thinks all AI creations are nothing but slop to create something themselves equal to or better than some of the better works I’ve seen. Similar to a challenge of a traditional painter to create a compelling photographic composition.

Maybe to add to this I think it’s worth noting the creative demand of designing and training a model. It’s not without inspired thought. I’m curious to see the code as well. Amongst people who program there can most definitely be beautiful and ugly code in the same way there can be a pleasing or unpleasant movie scene or painting.

I’m not sure more people having more access means things are now worse. Like more people have more means to create art today than 500 years ago and yeah there’s a lot of uninspired or derivative content but also there’s a lot more legitimate artists making passionate and thought provoking work.

Yeah I imagine what you’re saying will come to pass although I think it’ll look more like parlor walls from Fahrenheit 451 for the majority. I think my main issue is when a human is totally uninvolved in the process. So far it seems pretty noticeable when there’s someone with an actual idea they’re trying to create vs there’s no mind behind it.

I mean we can install data sensing butt plugs into every last citizen and get even more data and even more security.

It reminds me of what painters said about photography early on. While they toiled for hundreds of hours to paint a realistic image a dude with a box and zero skill beyond maybe some chemistry could snap an even more realistic image. Photography was not considered art for a very long time by the formal art community.

Yes and no. Like towns have town halls where such issues are voted on or debated. There are most definitely actions individuals and more importantly communities can take to stop the spread of distributed surveillance. There are already laws about filming in private locations aka it’s currently illegal for someone to be filming in a public restroom or in your house or in a business they don’t own.

Yeah it’s a more jarring and immediate concern than the amorphous state level data collection and profiling concern of distributed systems although both boil down to privacy concerns. Like its one thing to have a dash cam in your car or a household security camera or even for a business to have internal and external security cameras it’s another thing all together for the state to have a distributed camera network accurately tracking everything you’re doing or for an Individual to be illegally recording in private locations to make compromising content.

How do we feel about flock or similar camera networks around the world? Like yeah a dude with cameras on his face is one issue and then there’s the systemic distribution of millions of cameras which is arguably worse but feels more normal to many.

Yup it’s tossing off all that entropy and life is able to locally reverse some of it temporarily

Also other organisms, i wonder if it’s safe to say all water is dinosaur piss or not

Yes it’s converted and stored solar energy and it is renewable if you wait long enough but not on any reasonable timescales for human society. The sun isn’t big enough to become a supernova but if it did I guess you could argue if you wait long enough the material would most likely form other stars a few times until the stellar era of the universe winds down which will happen with or without any beings extracting energy to perform work.

Unless any of you has a dope space station or starship we are indeed all stuck with one another here.

Just picking up some gifts

I think we’ve run afoul of two issues. How do you define Marxism-Leninism? Through which means do you know its correctness?

If you know its correctness through implementation and then measuring the results then that’s science testing a hypothesis. For example I know my nose is between my eyes because I can measure through my senses and test that idea repeatedly until I have statistical confidence that’s the location of my nose. If for some reason the location of my nose changes then that information can be updated with testing and measurement most likely through my senses.

If you know through some other means like spiritual revelation then it’s still the case that the concept will have measurable outcomes we can use to test and compare with other concepts to verify its correctness.