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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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You know what this showcase reminds me of? The Emergent art from A Deepness in the Sky. It looks high effort, like one of these mandala coloring books for adults. If I buy a picture like this from a "local artist", the primary reason is that it is a form of concentrated labor, "someone spent a lot of hours to make this" is the message. Photoshop has already devalued this kind of art a lot (which is why there was evidently so much of it in Midjourney's training data), with Midjourney and similar tools able to crank it out in literal seconds the devaluation is almost complete.

Highbrow art went through this crisis literally 150 years ago. Claude Monet painted this in 1872; when Ivan Shishkin painted his innumerable stalks of rye, he was already looking dated. Today you can ask a hyperrealist painter to do a landscape, and you will be able to examine every blade of grass under a loupe, but the painting won't have a "punch".

I'm not saying that AI art is useless. Just using it to replicate human art is a waste of time. However, this music video is great. It doesn't try do something humans did, it throws thousands of AI-generated images at you in a fever dream. It's not totally novel, when I watched Big Time for the first time I thought I was hallucinating, but it's sufficiently unique that it doesn't feel like one of these "stained glass" films you can glue to your windowpanes.