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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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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.

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