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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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What are you talking about? Anime and manga is a multi-million dollar industry. Of course people want the work. Again, why the fervent desire to build machines to replicate it if people don’t want the work?

Apologies, terminology failure. People want "work", meaning the things the artists produce as an end-product. They don't generally care much about "work", the specific labor involved in making them. How many hours of marvel movies have you watched? how many hours of "behind the scenes" footage for those movies have you watched? I'd guess there's a serious disparity there, no?

This doesn’t actually matter. Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.

...Provided you can tell which is which in some reliable fashion, and in an extremely rarified and highly-manipulated market, yes. Neither condition generalizes. If your bastion against the AI apocalypse is to hope that general art consumption conforms to the fine-art model, I think you're setting sail for disappointment.

Naturally, I also contend that “beauty” and “meaning” are at least partially relational properties.

Elaborate?