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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Finally something that explicitly ties AI into the culture war: Why I HATE A.I. Art - by Vaush

This AI art thing. Some people love it, some people hate it. I hate it.

I endorse pretty much all of the points he makes in this video. I do recommend watching the whole thing all the way through, if you have time.

I went into this curious to see exactly what types of arguments he would make, as I've been interested in the relationship between AI progress and the left/right divide. His arguments fall into roughly two groups.

First is the "material impact" arguments - that this will be bad for artists, that you're using their copyrighted work without their permission, that it's not fair to have a machine steal someone's personal style that they worked for years to develop, etc. I certainly feel the force of these arguments, but it's also easy for AI advocates to dismiss them with a simple "cry about it". Jobs getting displaced by technology is nothing new. We can't expect society to defend artists' jobs forever, if they are indeed capable of being easily automated. Critics of AI art need to provide more substantial arguments about why AI art is bad in itself, rather than simply pointing out that it's bad for artists' incomes. Which Vaush does make an attempt at.

The second group of arguments could perhaps be called "deontological arguments" as they go beyond the first-person experiential states of producers and consumers of AI art, and the direct material harm or benefit caused by AI. The main concern here is that we're headed for a future where all media and all human interaction is generated by AI simulations, which would be a hellish dystopia. We don't want things to just feel good - we want to know that there's another conscious entity on the other end of the line.

It's interesting to me how strongly attuned Vaush is to the "spiritual" dimension of this issue, which I would not have expected from an avowed leftist. It's clearly something that bothers him on an emotional level. He goes so far as to say:

If you don't see stuff like this [AI art] as a problem, I think you're a psychopath.

and, what was the real money shot for me:

It's deeply alienating, and if you disagree, you cannot call yourself a Marxist. I'm drawing a line.

Now, on the one hand, "leftism" and "Marxism" are absolutely massive intellectual traditions with a lot of nuance and disagreement, and I certainly don't expect all leftists to hold the same views on everything. On the other hand, I really do think that what we're seeing now with AI content generation is a natural consequence of the leftist impulse, which has always been focused on the ceaseless improvement and elevation of man in his ascent towards godhood. What do you think "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is supposed to mean? It really does mean fully automated. If everyone is to be a god unto themselves, untrammeled by external constraints, then that also means they have the right to shirk human relationships and form relationships with their AI buddies instead (and also flood the universe with petabytes of AI-generated art). At some point, there seems to be a tension between progress on the one hand and traditional authenticity on the other.

It was especially amusing when he said:

This must be how conservatives feel when they talk about "bugmen".

I guess everyone becomes a reactionary at some point - the only thing that differs is how far you have to push them.

I've been going over Chesterton and Lewis lately and I can think of something from both of them that seems relevant to this matter:

Chesterton, Heretics Ch. 17 ("On the Wit of Whistler):

He was not a great personality, because he thought so much about himself. And the case is stronger even than that. He was sometimes not even a great artist, because he thought so much about art. Any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a congestion and a kind of difficulty.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art.

Lewis, The Great Divorce. (Here we have a conversation between a heavenly Spirit and a Ghost coming from hell, both of whom were artists in life):

"How soon do you think I could begin painting?" it asked.

The Spirit broke into laughter. "Don't you see you'll never paint at all if that's what you're thinking about?" he said.

"What do you mean?" asked the Ghost.

"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."

"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."

"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."

"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."

"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower-become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."

"I don't think I'm much troubled in that way," said the Ghost stiffly.

"That's excellent," said the Spirit. "Not many of us had quite got over it when we first arrived. But if there is any of that inflammation left it will be cured when you come to the fountain."

"What fountain's that?"

"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."

Now. Personally, I have already felt the sting of feeding one of my own drawings - one that I had thought was one of my best - into Stable Diffusion's "img2img" and, via the magic incantation "trending on ArtStation," seeing the results come out in some ways better than what I had put in. Not in every way, not yet, and of course there are mangled faces and hands and all sorts of details where, if you asked yourself "so what is that, exactly," you'd find yourself disturbingly unable to answer, but - it could still do much better rendering and textures than I had.

I said that stung, and it did, but how did I deal with it? I had to remind myself why I made art in the first place. Did I do so to make money? Now, if I had, I would have had a material complaint - but ha ha, no, I was never remotely good enough for that to be on the table anyway. The threshold of commercial viability was always out of reach for me - and for most everybody - anyway.

But more dangerously, was I making art to say something about myself? To give myself a self-image, to bind my self-worth to being able to do something others couldn't? To make myself a special person? Well, if so, I would have been doing a pretty poor job of it anyhow, but as both those authors say, that's a corrupting impulse on a person, anyway.

No, the good reason I have for creating is because I have something to say. Because there's some idea or image in my head that I need to get out of it, at the very least because I don't want to forget it, as I would if I left it at the mercies of my own squishy memory. As such, I expect that even if I did drink from that Lethe-like fountain, I'd still have something to appreciate in my own works, because they're about things that I've been interested in anyway.

Well, perhaps that fountain is right before us all now. Perhaps pride in proprietorship is something that's about to be technologically taken from us. But perhaps this isn't such a bad thing; perhaps, while I lose the ability to pride myself on being a More Creative Person than others, I gain the ability to actually get ideas out of my head that I never would have managed before. See all the beauty and wonder that I've hitherto seen only "through a glass, darkly" in much greater detail. So have I lost or have I gained?

(Of course, this doesn't resolve the question of losing one's livelihood, so I note that this analysis is sharply limited!)

No, the good reason I have for creating is because I have something to say.

You can’t see the problem with AI art if you just focus on you, yourself, and your personal capacities and motivations for artistic production.

The problem lies in how AI art alters the nature of art and how we relate to it, at a societal level.

Vaush gestured towards this by attempting to locate the problem in communication - highlighting the relationships between people rather than focusing on individual people in isolation.

I hope to have more to say on these points in a future post.

So there's another good reason to focus on art as expression - you won't have a problem with ai art.

Jokes aside, I think you have been duped, or are duping. The critics of ai art are not concerned about society, they are concerned about themselves. We have had this argument before, and it invariably comes down to insecurity about the future. It is no different here. And we know it is no different because depending on how you look at it Vaush and other ai critics have had at least 5 years - if not a hundred - where they knew this was coming and did nothing about it. It wasn't a problem until it threatened their livelihoods, or the livelihood of someone they love, because it is only a problem because it threatens their livelihoods.

5 years ago I thought that everyone concerned about AI was crazy. I just didn't think the technology was there. I imagine others felt the same.

DALL-E 2 is the first thing that made me pay attention and acknowledge that there really was something there. Maybe machine language translation should have done that sooner, but it didn't, for whatever reason. DALL-E 2 was the first time where I was truly blown away by a new technology in at least the last 15 years.

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