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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2543 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Disagreed on the 90% figure. The AI can spit forth from its datasets superficially accurate renditions of tropes and imagery from other works that it has seen. What it cannot do is perfectly mold every detail towards the purpose of a given scene. The act of expression is missing, and thus 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work is missing. All you have in the end are a variety of statistically likely tropes and images strung together in some pattern of Baudrillardian remove, lacking any signification or meaning.

As a designer and a creator and aesthetic person I would argue that "the act of expression" is nowhere near 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work. This is a really postmodern notion, if you're someone who like weeps at Cy Twombly or whatever then sure I guess that's what you think. But the technical detail of say, JC Leyendecker or Maxfield Parrish to me is easily 90% of the value of their work. I actually agree with you on the rest of what you're saying but I think you are devaluing broadly the value and worth of the technicality of craft or whatever which the AI can do in, on average, 90% of the same quality that a talented human can do. The 10 percent of expression in the end is crucial as I tried to lay out but it's not 100 percent of what matters.

Craft would be about strategically wielding the narrative elements in order to achieve affect or to convey meaning. In the second video in the post to which we are replying, when the girlfriend character gets stabbed by the demon, does it register as anything other than bathetic? Or does it even register at all?

Those artists you mention, they achieve affect through the careful arrangement of skillfully created elements. With the AI, there is no cumulative impact, and it doesn’t use skill to recreate things. All we have is a clunky copy-paste machine.

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