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Credit where credit is due, I got a full two - three dozen lines lines into the story before the uncanny valley effect killed it. I feel like that might be a record for GPT-N generated text, though part of it might be the performative inhumanity of the green-text format masking the inhumanity of the machine.
Regarding the rest, I think that one of the great triumphs/tragedies of modernism has been the shift in emphasis from message to technique. IE once upon a time it was widely understood that the mark of great art, was the ability to convey complex messages to as broad an audience as possible. But lately the consensus has shifted towards esotericism. the more inaccessible and obscure a work the greater the value. I'm remain deeply skeptical of current machine-generated art at least at this stage in large part because it's pretty clear that it has nothing to say. But I have to thank you because reading your description here I think I am beginning to grasp why so many people are freaking out about it. To the degree that ML enables laymen to duplicate previously difficult techniques it completely upends the modern artist's entire worldview/business. They're mid level portrait painters suddenly recognizing that photography is about to make the jobs of all but the most gifted portraitist obsolete. After all, Why pay [deviant artist] for colored pencil drawings of different characters from Harry Potter fucking each other when you can roll your own.
Those sorts of ideas are considered old-fashioned (and elitist! and racist!) in the high art world now.
In literary circles, it's all about elevating previously marginalized voices, writing about the sorts of things that marginalized people like to write about, in a language that marginalized people can easily understand. Just look at who's winning awards, who's getting positions and grants from universities, and who's getting assigned on college syllabuses.
As for visual arts, this year's Documenta was more akin to a street festival than a traditional art exhibition. Imposing and inscrutable works of high modernism replaced with food stands, half-pipes for skateboarding, and graffiti murals.
Certainly even the "high" art world isn't a monolith, but pursuing obscurity for its own sake is generally considered suspicious now; it's an abdication of "social responsibility".
:doubt:
They might make pleasing mouth noises about "elevating marginalized voices" but what does the high art world do? what is their nature?
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