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If the AI is going to obsolete anyone, then it will quite literally be my enemies. I am very much opposed to the twitterati ruling class. I make a living by writing code. And yet I am in complete agreement with Vaush's views on AI art. How do you explain that?
Hating progressive excess doesn't make you not on their side. Are you against leftist hegemony and what it has produced, and would be comfortable in a world with actual right-wingers in charge, or do you just not like the fringe of your own people?
You're really grasping at straws here.
You're evading a simple question, likely because the answer would indicate you are broadly aligned with the leftist hegemon.
I literally, unironically support the establishment of white ethnostates. Is that sufficiently opposed to the hegemon for you?
It is, though your initial evasiveness now leads to my being unavoidably skeptical of your assertions. Assuming you are telling the truth, and you would indeed rather see the right flourish above the left (rather than the left above the more-left), then you are evidence against my theory. I do not have an explanation for you; you could be evidence of my being wrong, or there could be an explanation I'm simply not seeing at the moment, given my inability to holistically examine you.
So let's proceed from the position you're sincere, and I am wrong. You see before you something that is going to transform the creative landscape - by empowering people who don't yield to the progressive hegemon to create things they like. You see an evolution of expression that will offer infinitely more creative freedoms to people.
You loathe this. Why?
That is one thing it certainly does not do. It does not expand creative freedom - it can only offer a kind of pseudo-creativity that further alienates people from authentic creativity and distorts the meaning of what creativity can and should be.
If what you want to create can be packaged into a convenient verbal "prompt", then it's probably not very creative. There are images in my head that I wouldn't even know how to describe to a human artist, because they're barely even images - more like indistinct nexuses of concepts, emotions, and desires, that also include some visual elements. Things like that can only be realized as what they are in the concrete working out of the thing, with all of the surprising contingencies that that process includes. You can't just say to another agent "make it so", regardless of whether that agent's intelligence is artificial or organic.
I'm a professional artist, and I think this statement is flatly false. What the AI is doing is exactly what I do every time I pick up a pencil: synthesize novel output from a broad collection of previous data.
Again, flatly false. Ideas can be encapsulated and compressed, and executions of those ideas contain details which exist in a hierarchy of relevance, following something like an exponential curve. Prompts work because this hierarchy is an emergent property of the human mind.
To the extent that such ideas are coherent enough to actually execute, you can in fact tell another agent to "make it so"; artistic collaboration between artists and, say, writers or directors or producers or developers happen all the time. To the extent that this is difficult, it's because really nailing down the specifics of the prompt is a fairly unwieldy process... but it absolutely can be done, and it is done every day.
Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.
The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."
I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.
AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.
"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"
I find this to be offensive nonsense.
How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".
I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.
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