site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24832 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Even I'm a little (pleasantly) surprised at how vehement the anti-AI-art backlash is. During the early days of DALL-E 2, there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human or not were professional artists themselves who were worried about losing income. Or maybe ideologically motivated leftists; but certainly no one else. But even on forums that have nothing whatsoever to do with AI, art, or politics, I commonly see people expressing their disdain for AI art, scrutinizing any art that does get posted for signs of AI use, etc. AI is simply not "cool". At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)

I fully acknowledge that experiments like the twitter experiment you linked to do make the anti-AI crowd look silly. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and say that it doesn't matter in the end. If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.

There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level. You can see this on full display in Scott's recent posts about artistic taste, and how uncomfortable he was that anyone would allow themselves to be blinded by extraneous (social) factors that are unrelated to "the intrinsic properties of the artwork itself". If it can't be codified in a system of clear and repeatable rules, then it should be extinguished by the light of reason. If the AI can do exactly what Monet does, then the AI should be held in exactly the same level of esteem as Monet, whatever level that ultimately works out to be; continuing to ascribe a special aura to Monet that is not extended to the AI would be arbitrary and irrational. You would just be saying that Monet is "cool" because he's already cool, basically. But status games are eternal. You can redistribute wealth, you can redistribute opportunities, you can democratize access to the means of production; but you can't redistribute coolness. Not until we develop the ability to directly control people's minds, I suppose. Maybe we will soon enough.

I mean keep in mind that no one is buying this art. I’ll say this about most art whether literary or visual: unless you’re buying it to be an “art snob” in the sense that you only want it to show off your good taste to others, most people don’t really care. If the “trashy” genre fiction book you’re reading turns out to be written by ChatGPT and maybe has a passing edit by a human, I don’t think most people would care. Looking at my own reads, I don’t recognize most of the names, so I don’t see why I’d care all that much that my book was written by AI. And if I’m buying art and not looking for a high end piece, I wouldn’t care. The point in either case is my own enjoyment. And if you add in the very likely outcome of paying a significant premuim for “real human created” books, paintings, and sculptures most people would not pay it. It adds no value.

if you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

Let's talk about color! No, not artistic color theory. I mean an obligatory link to the relevant: what Color are your bits?. Interestingly, the author has added a short preamble that mentions generative AI! Albeit mostly from a copyright perspective, which was one of the original reasons for thinking about Bit Color.

There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level.

The 'fundamental level' is that they cause a lot of human misery to those who find themselves on the bottom end.

the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

Outside of the objections others have provided, does this apply when the AI imagegen process involves those features?

If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.

This is a leap in logic that I see so often, and I don't quite get it. It almost seems so natural to them that they don't even notice it.

Because, given that human effort has intrinsic value, all context has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, etc. - which I subjectively agree with - it doesn't actually imply anything about the value of the artwork in question. Yes, effort has some ineffable intrinsic value - but, by no means, does that imbue the outcome of that effort with any value. Likewise with context.

In terms of human connection (and human effort as well, actually), pretty clearly any claims of some grid of pixels "connecting" the viewer to the placer can be applied just as easily to AI (of the modern sort, not scifi agentic AI) generated grids as to manually generated grids.

Right, but I have no interest in being connected to the AI.

I think you misunderstood my statement. To clarify, here's an edited version of the last paragraph of my previous comment:

In terms of human connection (and human effort as well, actually), pretty clearly any claims of some grid of pixels "connecting" the viewer to the placer can be applied just as easily to AI (of the modern sort, not scifi agentic AI) generated grids in how it connects the viewer to the human who used the AI to generate the grids as to manually generated grids.

The point is that, whether a human uses an AI or a paintbrush to generate the grid of pixels, if the latter connects the viewer of the grid of pixels to the human who generated the grid, then certainly the former does as well.

there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human

We don’t know those comments were made by “people”.

Some contemporary discussion here and here and here.

I am pretty sure hydroacetylene is a person, and I'm not even sure his predictions were unreasonable so much as missing the cultural influence of porn artists on the left. TheAntiPopulist..., uh, not gonna make a bet on that one.

You're correct, 'the cultural influence of porn artists on the left' is something which teaches me the true meaning of ignorance being bliss.

I can’t remember any specific names now, but many of the comments I’m referring to would have been made between mid 2022 and early 2023, when ChatGPT was brand new (or even prior to it). I don’t think we have much of a problem with bot posts on this forum anyway. Many accounts here are longtime users who were posting years before modern LLMs existed.

We can at least be sure that they were proximally caused by people, even if people didn't actually make the comments.

human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc

Come now. I'm confident it would take me, who has two left hands, at least ten times as much effort to paint or carve a great work compared to a great artist. Does the work become more valuable because it's hard for me? No, nobody cares. As long as there's some minimum effort involved, this seems to satisfy that requirement. How low is the minimum? Presumably it's arbitrarily set somewhere above "repeated workshopping of an image with an AI" and somewhere below "tape a banana to a wall". The astute reader may notice that the latter is plausibly less than the former.

The rest might work as arguments against art generated entirely autonomously with zero or minimal human input, but clearly fall apart if the prompter has a vision that he uses the AI to realize. Or do you think that AI art has no historical and social context? Surely you of all people would agree that you can't do anything entirely outside of your context.

I'm confident it would take me, who has two left hands, at least ten times as much effort to paint or carve a great work compared to a great artist.

This is obviously not the case. The effort the great artist took was the tens of thousands of hours perfecting his craft and his artistic taste. Even with ten times the amount of effort on a single work of art, you wouldn't come close to what the great artist produces.

I'm counting that as part of the effort, naturally.

Or do you think that AI art has no historical and social context?

It’s a valid point and I recognize that these things operate on a sliding continuum. All we can really do is exercise our judgement in each individual case.

This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.

It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.

There are relative ways said value can be determined. Artificially rigging market conditions is something multinational firms mutually collaborate with one another in doing, and have been for a long time. You see it when Google pays out $X billions each year to Apple to bribe them not to go into the search business. There was a time in industry when the value of aluminum was worth more than gold. The value came from the difficulty of extracting the former relative to the material input costs of extracting the latter.

Maybe artists will shift to becoming programmers and that’ll become the new frontier of artistic elegance and taste. The average person I imagine is completely indifferent to it all and barely notices anything.

I think people should be open about the social and contextual reasons they like a piece of artwork without having to pretend there’s something intrinsically special about the piece itself.

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring. If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

AI art is a replica of human creativity, it feels hollow because there’s no one to connect to, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the output itself.

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.

I think this is culturally contingent.

I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.

Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?

If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?

Incredible worldview, thank you for sharing

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity…

People find it difficult to appreciate things they don’t pay for. Pay close attention sometime to an office or cafeteria setting at work on days where free food and drinks or a highly discounted menu is available. People will leave half drank soda bottles on the table, won’t recycle, chips fall on the floor; and none of it comes at any cost or with any responsibility to those being served. If I tell you this option comes along once a year, most people be much more measured and let nothing go to waste.

Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.

In my own life I’m a huge fan of horror cinema. I’ve loved the Halloween franchise for as long as I can remember watching it as a kid. And I have quite a lot of horror memorabilia. I have a signed John Carpenter kitchen knife, several autographed items, and other rare collectibles that practically make a shrine I’ve got dedicated to the genre itself. The cinematic masterpiece of all these franchises and aesthetics and the historical “link” it has to the items I own gives me a great sense of feeling attached and connected to the things I enjoy that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.

I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.

But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.

Yeah the current arc of the TCG market feels sufficiently mature that it's gotta be close to another big correction, but I don't think that necessarily renders the whole thing valueless. Even NFTs haven't like literally gone to zero even if you've obviously gotten absolutely fucked if you got in anywhere near the top.

Exactly, you’d probably feel cheated if it turned out the autographs were all done on auto pen by an assistant even if the signature was indistinguishable. The reason art is valuable is generally much closer to the reason memorabilia is valuable.

And actually people try to make the same kind of arguments about the “1st edition” having some special property or unique trait, like saying a Stradivarius has a magical sound modern violins don’t have, even though no one can actually distinguish between them in a blind test. Isn’t it enough to say that a Stradivarius is valuable because it’s a high quality 300 year old instrument made by the most famous luthier in the world, without having to resort to nonsense about no one else being able to reproduce the sound?

If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

You thought you were looking at legitimately ancient stone axes, but discover they're fake. That has nothing to do with the visual impression of the axes in an artistic way. This is orthogonal to the labor theory of value wrt to AI art though. The boomer making the replica may very well work twice as hard at it than the stone age man. It's still worse. Its value is lower, despite the labor.

because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

It just doesn't, though.

Ever seen the movie Holes? Or read the book? The work describes a juvenile detention facility on a dry lake bed where the inmates 'develop character' by digging deep holes and then filling them in again. Imagine, the plot of the Holes long past and the facility demolished, you're considering purchasing some land on the dry lake bed. Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't? This is not a small amount of human effort! In total, I bet it's more than 99.9% of paintings. There's a human connection, not merely to a single artist, but to a story that, in our world, makes for an OK movie, and same for the historical and social context.

I think if you're trying to sell this land and promote it on that basis, you'll get laughed at. Not only will most buyers not be willing to pay more, I doubt you'll find even one single one who would. Maybe if there were more history -- the site of some politically relevant atrocity, say -- you'd find someone somewhere who wants to build a museum there or whatever. But for a moderately shitty juvie location? Not likely.

Imagine they didn't fill the holes in. This is land that was actually altered by a huge amount of human labor! Unfortunately, that alteration wasn't landscaping or gardening or a pool, it was a bunch of pointless holes. Bet you couldn't sell this land for anywhere close to what you could get for the unaltered plot next door.

This is the just the labor theory of value, and it's false. The value of a person's labor is not measured in sweat, it's measured by how much someone is willing to pay for the result. Now, (some) people are (currently) willing to pay more for the same pixels produced by a human, though I suspect that number is smaller than it seems. First, most people aren't willing to pay for (static, visual) art period. But mainly, I think people who buy art are willing to pay more for human-made pixels because the AI actually can't generate the same pixels. AI art can be good and god knows human art can be awful, but if you want the highest quality art, commissioning a 99th percentile human is your best bet. And if they're buying the art to include in project, because they're scared of luddite backlash.

But sure, there's some number of people who do genuinely value the human effort that went into it... but that's still not intrinsic value. There's literally no such thing. Value doesn't exist outside of a market context (defined broadly: any system in which one or more people exchange things for other things). Value is inherently subjective, so those people aren't wrong. But they're not right either.

Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't?

With all sincerity, yes. That would be quite an interesting backstory!

So how much you think they should mark up the listing for that?

If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

I am a hobbyist writer (100% human-made), and I have also dabbled in adding AI art to my stories. I can tell you that trying to add art almost doubled the time it took me to craft a story, and if anything I got less engagement on the stories I added carefully curated AI art to. Frankly, I don't think people can "see" the human effort that goes into something, even AI art.

I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.

I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have /r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.

It's always entertaining to me when the large D&D subreddits are so hostile to AI character portraits... apparently everyone forgot that the truly virtuous way to get a character portrait was to google some vague traits and grab the first thing on image search that was kind of like what you had in mind.

At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)

To be cynical, how many of them only care because it's become somewhat polarized? If it had instead gone the route of "AI is left-aligned, because it allows the poor and underprivileged without money or time for training to create art and collaborate", and anyone against AI was getting pilloried on social media in certain circles, I have a hunch that there'd be some (but not all) reversing their dtance.

I've wondered about the reception of AI art compared to hip hop in the 80s. Similar claims were made then, about plagiarism, the dilution of musical art, electronic instruments merely aping the real thing etc. I think what's different this time, or why the democratization idea doesn't go far, is because AI is a development given to us by a small number of wealthy nerds, and deeply corporate. Hip hop was DIY, and welled up from poor neighborhoods populated by people who are considered the antithesis of nerds.

I think the key point is that AI art is hitting the business of relatively low-skill commission artists.

I'm active in TTRPG subreddits and periodically see people post commissions of their characters: sometimes they have some neat stuff going on but the artistic merit is almost always lacking (the first result I found was this), and slapping a vague description into an image generator is going to produce something way more impressive pretty much every time. Yeah it might not hit the exact note you were looking for, but that's true of commissions too, and you can't tell the artist to go back and try again for free.

Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.

These people are often trying to do this as their job, which means their workday involves sitting around and posting on the Internet a lot, and they're often doing that for hobbies too. They also saw AI coming before most people did, because the early adopters playing around with Stable Diffusion would have been visible in their corners of the Internet. So they're initially the only ones who care about it, and being extremely online (and as artists, overwhelmingly left-wing) they know how to leverage progressive terminology to make their points. By the time it propagates out to the normies, the claim's been staked.

Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.

I have an online friend who briefly became 'the guy' for a fetish in the furry community since he started as just kinda doing very-vanilla art, then one time included something that wasn't the fetish he became known for but was like adjacent enough that his DMs started getting filled with people looking for that kinda content. Then, despite not particularly liking the fetish in question, he eventually folded after somebody offered him about 5x his going rate for something low-key in that space.

6 months later he's making like a good middle-class professional income for his developing country essentially being a fulltime fetish artist since it had kinda snowballed from there. And like his art skills are fine but we're not exactly talking a Renaissance Master. I haven't asked him, but I'd be shocked if the rise of AI hadn't absolutely nuked that line of art production even if some purists complain since you can knock together SOMETHING a lot quicker/cheaper, and AI has a lot more patience for infinite re-do requests than a human artist with limited time. Porn's also just uniquely suited to be hit by AI since it's either 'vanilla stuff tends to be super formulaic and there is an infinite sample basis' or 'more exotic stuff having an AI you can endlessly dictate your very particular desires to is more practical than having an artslave'

I'd be a little interested to know what the current situation is, for your friend. From what I've seen, the overall velocity and pay structure is still looking pretty healthy, with maybe some minor impact that could be holistic economic trends. Admittedly, most of the public data is about the Big Name Popufurs, and imprecise at that, so info from the selling side of the market would say more.

Some of that missing update is because almost all of the 'legitimate' sites ban the stuff and furry is a social environment as much as just a plain kink, but there are Discords and boorus where it's allowed, and it's not too hard to spin up alternative hosts... and those haven't been that badly flooded, either. E621 average around 900 posts per day, to E6AI's 120ish, for example, and that's with a lot of mainstay kinks getting very little focus.

I think part of it's the difficulty of the tools, and another are limits of AI-generator user creativity. You can prompt a ten thousand images overnight of <your favorite artist> doing <your favorite kink> with <your favorite species>, even if the artist doesn't even draw your preferred kink or even sexual orientation. AIgen's definitely beaten prima's test for simple sex in almost any gender combination and hole, and it only takes a little bit of work to get into threesomes or foursomes. But like my experiment three years ago with buff werewolf dudes, the fifth gigabyte doesn't have anything the first four didn't.

There are ways to get novelty or at least 'surprise' out of these tools, but it takes enough effort that most people would probably rather see their own ideas instead. To do that, though, you need to seriously think about what makes those ideas good, or work, and artists have a significant advantage actually breaking things into their components and drives. Even if it's just how poles go into holes.

I believe his stuff's slowed down a bit in recent years due to a combination of some other big artists popping up in the same fetish-scene and him taking a few hiatuses. Still got a backlog of commissions, but it's not what it was relative to the 2020-21 kinda peak (which goes for most digital jobs, realistically)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats