You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.
Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.
Okay so here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out for a third time to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.
I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend where we’re letting these AI companies convince us that we can use these systems to streamline our lives by flattening the complexity out of them, as if our problems are a standard dataset we can summarize our way out of instead of this massive nightmare jumble of causes and effects we don’t always see and that we definitely do not understand.
And I find it paradoxical how the word “context” has become so associated with the use of LLMs when context is precisely the thing that they are stripping out of our lives. Knowledge isn’t supposed to exist in a vacuum; it’s supposed to be developed through being in conversation with other people and their needs and with the real world and with other knowledge, and it is through the specificity gained through that kind of conversation that information becomes more meaningful. We act as if this act of seeking and internalizing context is grunt work that should be offloaded toa machine in order to make room for the real work, when it is, in fact, the real work.
I am currently doing what I am going to call “spring cleaning” on my blog. What this means is that I want to get rid of a huge backlog of articles and things I started writing about in the past because I have lots of ideas for new things I want to do here (how shocking), and I’m honestly not super happy with the direction this blog has been taking. I don’t think I write enough about my own ideas, or about the things I spend hours learning about. In fact, I don’t think I write enough at all.
Hi! Here is a linkdump. I told myself I would post these with really minimal context because I am too busy to summarize these things and have a really giant backlog of links I’ve been wanting to post, but uh, the writer in me won out and I failed. Some of these have way more description than others. But I do also have quotes I’ve pulled for some of them, so maybe that will help make this post more interesting.