Posted by vinhnx 4 days ago
I'm not claiming it's a good thing by any means but there's no point in worrying about it, the paperclip maximizer has done its work.
Perhaps allowing them to find the positives in new technologies.
Or, you know... Slop.
An open mind doesn't hurt though.
How many pieces of AI art can you actually remember? I mean, call to mind in the same detail as you can remember a photograph?
I think AI generated imagery is fundamentally compromised somehow in this regard: something subliminally uncanny, no matter how realistic, makes them harder to recall.
For this reason I personally doubt AI generated art will ever have a profound effect on people. Because it really seems to lack the mechanism.
If the medium is the message, then the message of any AI production is that the correct amount of time to care about this thing is zero seconds.
It may be, I concede, that I see more AI-generated photos than other art types (AI generated photo fraud is a serious issue in a corner of the web I frequent) but I tend to find that I literally can't remember what they look like long after I see them.
Same exercise, focussing on faces specifically:
- try to visualise Taylor Swift's face. Or that of Rachel Weisz or Ming-Na Wen, or Sarah Silverman, or Alfre Woodard.
- now try to visualise the face of Tilly Norwood.
Obviously if you don't know who any of these people are, you can't do this exercise (which is why I included Taylor Swift). And if you don't know what Tilly Norwood is, you can't do this exercise.
But if you've seen a lot of content about Tilly Norwood, can you visualise the face in the same way? Is it memorable? It is not.
It is my contention that these images actually have something very undefinable missing, that my brain needs to find them worth memorising. I have seen many "AI models" now and I can't remember any of "their" faces.