Yup. I’d definitely think it’s more to do with utility 10 years ago than AI now. That’s enough time to see that some people who went to college aren’t using their degrees and some people who didn’t are doing just fine, and that for a lot of people then biggest difference is debt. Current AI tools haven’t had enough time influencing the market to make it clear if they’re actually going to change things significantly or not.

I think the political difference is between which groups value education in the abstract more, and see college as a way to get that, despite a possible lack of utility. College can be a way to learn critical thinking and such. In an ideal world, we’d also be more okay giving anyone who wanted it knowledge for knowledges sake without making it so focused on utility.
I’d love if I could pop over to the nearby university and sign up to take an intro course on something that I know I will never practically use.

People who play sports games don’t even blink when you tell them you like strategy games in my experience.
Turns out people who enjoy pretending to manage a sports team don’t think it’s odd that someone might enjoy pretending to manage an army or empire. Or that people in general don’t usually think most hobbies are unusual, if you talk about them like a sane person.

They’re also just general 4chan Internet weirdo. I take it you’re thinking there’s a particular type of racism libertarians are more prone to? Probably “we don’t need racial discrimination protections, the market will punish it if people care”?

I think it was the soviets that had more of a prolonged track record of “state propaganda is lies” that worked to distance it from the notion of “propaganda is messaging” sense that’s technically usable.

Basically everyone has propaganda at the same time the Nazis did. It wasn’t until the soviets used it to spin things more in the way we associate with the modern sense that the term fell properly out of favor.

I mean, you’re entirely correct, but there’s also racial politics as in “race relations”. Like “why are we regressing on race based civil liberty protections and seeing an upswing in racial prejudice”.

Racial groups don’t have homogeneous political opinions, but they are often the subject of political opinions.

All that to say: there are many different ways to express a disgustingly inappropriate blend of racial and political opinions in a workplace, and we shouldn’t assume they picked any particular inappropriate way.

Ah, alright. :) sometimes these things are hard to tell in text.

I wouldn’t say it’s ignoring it. I’m incredulous that DHS would pressure Facebook to cancel an account or something for the same reason I’m not as bothered by it happening: it doesn’t have real consequences.

If the government censors you, it can take your money or your freedom. Not only does it have much higher stakes, it has stakes you can’t get around. You can’t go to a platform that doesn’t mind and keep going.

If the government leans on a company, first of all that’s still government censorship and it’s not legal for the government to get a company to do what it cannot. If the specifics of the behavior are legal, it’s still government censorship and wrong (with aforementioned caveats).
That being said, the consequence of that type of censorship is loss of a social media account. You can find another venue and all they can do is keep asking people to remove the content. If someone refuses or you host overseas, there’s not really anything they can do.

There’s a benefit to society, in my opinion, for people to reject an idea. Refusing to help someone spread a message is about the most passive way to do that.

I’ve worked in the webhosting industry. If someone has a Nazi website and they need tech support, you need to ask yourself if you’re willing to take that support request or if you’re letting your manager know you’re not gonna help that message.
If the employees at a company don’t want to help you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I have a really hard time saying that it’s wrong to tell Nazis to take their website elsewhere.

I’m not aware of the specifics of that group to know how I feel.

My feelings are more born from looking at webhosting and hate/harassment websites. I have a really hard time saying it’s wrong to take down a Nazi website.
I don’t think the government should be able to, because as abhorrent as it is it’s still a political position and protected. But if the people you’re paying to host your shit don’t want anything to do with you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I don’t think society gains anything by forcing them to keep it up.

I also don’t think that applies to monopolies, quasi or defacto.

I think there’s a benefit to telling hateful groups and people they aren’t welcome in civil society. The alternative is to say that there’s no line at which society can tell you to gtfo, and people just need to tolerate you no matter what.
Shunning or deplatforming is how you do that without violence.

The grammar is ambiguous, FYI, of if you meant the censorship done by collective shout or the censorship being done to collective shout.

It doesn’t impact my reply, but I figured I’d let you know. :)

I’m against government censorship in all circumstances outside the cliche “you can’t threaten people or spread injurious falsehoods”.

I’m okay with private entities not giving people a platform if they aren’t a defacto institution. Credit card companies and financial services should be agnostic to which legal businesses they process payments and hold assets for. Much like how shipping companies are agnostic to what’s in your package, beyond what’s necessary to move it safely.
If you’re needed for society to function, I want you to blindly service society, even if people I dislike also get service.

I don’t want to be in a place where every platform needs to accept all participants as valid. There’s plenty of ways to share your viewpoint.

I think you missed that the next portion of their statement was connected to the part you (inappropriately) added the missing word to.

They’re saying, essentially, that it’s important to learn math just for a rounded education, even if it lacks application. They’re saying closer to “even if we’re eating sushi, we still need fire”.

There’s a lot of different things that get pumped into “intelligence”. There’s “reasoning ability”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.

Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn’t the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you’re eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don’t calculate 6*6=36 every time).

Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can’t really make someone more able to have insights and such.

Wisdom is something that can be trained I’d phrase it. I don’t think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren’t.

It sounds like you’re mostly taking what I’ve called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. “How sure am I about this?” Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you’re not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
(A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts.

That feels like a quirk of your professor. You should look into using a definition used by the rest of the field. Your usage makes it seem like your listening too much to people who are trying to hype AI, and not enough to people who are building it or invented the field.

So, that’s a hilarious example to me. I know what you mean, but… Buffalo wings are a style of wing invented in Buffalo. It’s actually possibly the worst example you could have chosen because it’s actually right there in the name.

The name proves nothing, but in general I don’t think you need to prove that something is art if people are calling it art.
You’d think that in a thread about how a premade object can be presented as art and people accept it that people might understand that specific criteria for art is an amorphous and futile effort.

Well, in that regard I’d agree. I don’t think beauty and art are the same though. :)

Something is art, in my opinion, if it’s it’s presented as art or perceived as art. I think art is often more interesting if someone puts more thought, effort and skill into it. Beauty and aesthetics are a different thing.

What? I replied to you once because you were an asshole, and then in reply, you were an asshole.

Do you think I’m following you around reading everything you do? How the hell would I know you changed your mind? I’ve replied to you twice.
If you can’t stand having people reply to you, a conversation thread might be the wrong place to post messages. You’re entirely in control of your engagement, so it seems odd to reply, insult me, and then whine about how the conversation keeps going.

In any case, I’m glad you changed your mind!

They can’t conceptualize abstract ideas and apply them to predict never-before-seen circumstances.

That’s not the baseline for intelligence. Intelligence doesn’t even require thought, to say nothing of abstract thought.

that’s not what the modern usage is referring to. The academic term is referring to artificial general intelligence

No, the academic term is artificial intelligence, if what you’re referring to is “artificial intelligence”. If you’re referring to AGI, you typically say … AGI.

It seems you’re inflating what intelligence is, at the simplest levels, to be human level intelligence. Conceptualization and generalization are definitely properties of an intelligent system if they’re present, but they aren’t prerequisites. Intelligence doesn’t mean “very intelligent”, or even “stupid”.

Do you think a koala possess intelligence? I would say they certainly do, despite not being able to conceptualize abstract ideas, or handle unforseen circumstances. They struggle with “leaf not on branch”. But they can learn new information and apply it to their environment, as long as that information is along the lines of "where is eucalyptus leaf on branch?”

That’s a very stupid argument if you’re going to “ship of Thesius” a print. It’s still a version of the original, just not the original itself.

1. Well fuck you too, no need to be uncivil.
2. That’s not a ship of Theseus argument.
3. A question isn’t an argument.
   As I said, I think it’s art too. If someone believes it to be art or it’s presented as art, I’m content to call something art.
   As the person who’s saying sometimes things aren’t art depending on how it was made, I’m trying to figure out what your rules are so I can argue against them if I disagree. If art requires intelligence and intent, and being intended as art doesn’t matter, then something produced by a machine possessing neither might not be, regardless of the intelligent and intentional human input on the other side.

For the randomness bit, you can replace ‘random’ with “arbitrarily, unconcerned with the output, in a fashion rendering it unpredictable to them”. I’ll admit to using the casual definition of random.
To do so, put the canvas on the floor, dip your brush in the paint, close your eyes and move your hand in sharp jerking motions over the canvas. Technically not random, but the distribution of paint isn’t known to the artist until they look. Or, you could consider John Cages music, like I mentioned, or any of the other artists that have incorporated randomness into their art. https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/112012 might be one example.

It seems needlessly complex and exclusionary to say that every piece of the output must tie back to human intent, when so many artists try to not do that, and the creation itself was an act of intention.

If you put the same prompt in then it’ll generate different results each time

That’s not actually true. Some tools don’t give you the option to do otherwise, but the image generator is entirely deterministic. It is, after all, a computer.
The general process is that it will generate an image consisting of psudo random static based on an input seed (often the current time), and then use the CNN as a denoising algorithm on the image, using the prompt as a guide for how it “fixes” the image.
Hold the seed steady and it will produce the same result for the same prompt each time. You can also disregard the seed and provide your own static or not static image and it’ll deterministically try to correct it.
It’s as much a carrier for the humans intent as anything else that a person controls to produce an output.

With the “mystical human only thing” I wandered away from my point a little. The part about the threshold for art and intelligence was more to the point. The threshold for intelligence is barely different from “accepts information, which is utilized for a purpose”. A thermostat fits the bill. Everything else is a matter of degree or related phenomenon like sapience and sentience that synergistically enhance intelligence. As I said from the beginning, modern AI lacks those things.
In my opinion, art only requires that something be presented or perceived as art. Otherwise you start to run into issues where people say a certain tool disqualifies something as art, or that it’s not art because they don’t like or get it.

I’m not. Well, you do seem to be quite specifically gatekeeping on method.

I’m curious if the awareness that the image generator is deterministic changes your thoughts, or that the inputs don’t need to be words.

AI art, in my mind, is art in the same way that “photography” is art. It’s people using a tool.
AI art is unsatisfying not because it’s not art, but because it doesn’t have as much depth or intention behind it.
In the image above, you know exactly what I’m trying to convey and what references I’m making in doing so. But knowing that it’s AI, you also know I spent all of 10 seconds on it for a laugh. I could have put in more work to flesh out how the details should look, and to get everything just right, but the tool makes it too easy to get “close enough”, so there’s no push to refine, get the details right, and put the time into it that would make someone else feel compelled to appreciate the attention or statement.

My hand drawn representation of the same idea in about the same time conveys roughly the same expression and meaning, if we adjust for “drawing with thumb on a phone”, “bad handwriting in general”, and "why did my own default to… Fuschia? "

It can be. If presented as art, then yes. If crafted so masterfully that it’s perceived as art, then also yes.
If neither intended nor received as art: no.

The functional contains beauty. It can be artistic to remind someone that functionality is a type of beauty. It’s also possible to create an expression of form so perfectly that you can’t help but notice the beauty.

While attempting to find some images of beautiful tools (I was thinking fine wood carving tools from the mid 1800s were a good bet), I found this: https://fortune.com/article/beauties-of-the-common-tool-walker-evans/ I think it does a good job conveying the notion. :)

? You mean where I shared a picture I thought was fun something like a year ago?

Fuck off with claiming you know how someone feels on a topic when you’re clearly not even able to understand what they’re saying.

Yes, I believe AI is intelligent. With the caveat that the bar for intelligence is low enough to include thermostats.
Yes, I think AI art is art. *Shitty, low effort art, like from a dentist office.".
Without knowing to what you’re referring, I can’t tell you why you’re full of shit with your “defending AI” claim. I’ve defended the academic discipline of AI, which is different from the generative AI tools we seem to be discussing. I’ve told people they don’t understand AI tools, but that’s not “defense”.

Did you read the ones where I’ve said that we intuitively feel that the way LLMs scrape data is unfair, but that that unfairness isn’t represented in copyright law, so rather than trying to twist current law to fit, we should understand how it actually works and adjust laws to match our sense of fairness?
What about where I’ve pointed out that LLMs can’t think, but generate statistically likely continuations of input, hence propagating misunderstanding and creating misunderstanding because people are using a language tool as though it’s a knowledge tool?

Did you consider that maybe I’m not pro AI or anti AI because I view it as a tool, and one wouldn’t be pro belt sander or anti belt sander, but rather irritated at people who misunderstand them, frustrated that we’re spending billions on the least useful sander for what it’s being used for because it’s the most magic looking, and annoyed that we’re jamming sanders into word processors when no one asked for that?

Anyway, we were talking about how you’d rather believe random Tumblr screenshots than reality when you got caught up trying to enforce your orthodoxy that anyone who doesn’t passionately hate anything that could be perceived as being AI related or supporting is clearly an ignorant techbro fetishizing the singularity. You’ll be damned if you need to understand what any of those words mean to know that you hate them.

I don’t know that I give a shit what the post says in regards to if he made it or bought it for the purposes of the question. It’s irrelevant to the point actually being discussed, to say nothing of “seemingly not true”.

Also, since you’re very concerned with addressing what the post says: people overly obsessed with enforcing the form that art takes are fascists, per the post. Feel like you’re kinda missing the forest for the trees there.

How do you mean it doesn’t have to be measurable? You’re actively talking about it’s absence or presence, so how do you know it’s there if you can’t measure it?
I’m also a bit baffled by the assertion that you can’t communicate “no idea”, along with the assertion that an AI generated image doesn’t have meaning.
If it has no meaning, doesn’t that mean it’s communicating “no idea”?
How do you know something has meaning or not if it can’t be measured?
Personally, I think you can only know if a person tells you that they think it has meaning, and that that’s independent of how they made the thing, but I’m curious what you think.

I really don’t see the difference in your camera argument.

Contrast that with a camera, where you simply point it at what you want to see, and it takes a picture. You can spend hours, days, weeks perfecting The Parameters so that it takes exactly the picture you want to see, and you will never be the one who made the picture, because the machine is the one that made the picture. See paragraph one for why that picture can’t be art.

You don’t explain why a machine you control making an image is art in one case and not in the other. I’ve seen where you argue direct correlation, but the prompt is directly correlated to the output, allowing the individual to tweak and change the output. They don’t have total control over the output, but neither does an oil painter, someone blowing glass, or Pollock swinging a brush to create paint splatter. A medium, tool or technique can have limitations.

And what if I’m not telling it what I want? What if I give it a long string of numbers that I’m tweaking until the output matches my wish? That feels a lot less like “describing a commission”, even though it’s the same process.

Personally, I think it’s obvious that AI art is art in the same way that a photograph or using Photoshop can be art. It’s a tool just like any other. It’s just currently more likely to be boring because it invites shallow art, and for what it needs as the artists input it’s more direct to just use that as the art. If you can jam your vision into a prompt, you can almost certainly convey it better with the words themselves, so you’d skip the tool and just write.