Comic Strips

I've started adding 🤡 or 💩 tags to people's usernames when they can't pull their head out of their ass.

Gives me a heads up on what to dodge without falling victim to an overzealous admin wildly swinging the ban-hammer.

A computer-generated "Van Gogh" is not art any more than a mass-produced coffee mug is artisanal, no matter how "realistic".

This has all happened before. Take photography. People thought it was the end of visual art. If anyone can take a photograph, why would anyone spend years learning to paint?

Artists answered by pushing the medium beyond the limits of realism. Impressionism. This did not make photographs go away. But when I see a picture of someone's cat, I don't usually go "art!" – even though 200 years ago the mere existence of a photorealistic picture would have implied very impressive artistry.

The work that clankers are very quickly taking over is that which does not require art. Visual filler. Lorem ipsum. Corporate communications. Out with artisans, in with industrial machinery. This is the same story that has already happened to almost every artisanal trade, from scribery to pottery to smithing. Visual artists and writers thought themselves exempt from the industrial revolution; they aren't. It will be a worsening socio-economic crisis. But it won't "end" art. Clankers definitionally cannot, and will never do art. Not until they gain a conscience of their own.

I think this idea misses the fundamental way that the transformer works on neural networks. The output can be useful, but the mechanism of arriving there is more about probability than creativity.

An LLM cannot create true art because it cannot experience feelings, it has no continuity of being. It can only replicate the artistic patterns it was trained on; those patterns can come from true art, and can be combined in unique ways, but the only real art is in the writing of the prompt and the data it was trained on.

It's like how the patterns of a kaleidoscope can make beautiful images, but all the creativity is in it's construction and how it's used.

We could conceivably extend the transformer model to include other aspects of thought, possibly even a consciousness capable of artistic expression, but it will take a lot of new work, it's not a place we can arrive by simply adding more power or additional training to our current models.

Almost all the algorithms used by modern AI were written decades ago, it's only usable now because compute power has made such huge gains. It will likely take many decades more to create true artificial consciousness.

I wish I could type as fast as you.