I spend some time writing online. It’s a pretty different style than the comments I write here but, who knows, maybe someday someone will find it and it will end up posted here. I indulge in that...
Exemplary
I spend some time writing online. It’s a pretty different style than the comments I write here but, who knows, maybe someday someone will find it and it will end up posted here.
I indulge in that writing, which I consider art, not for the final product. I write because of the way that the process of writing transforms the person that I am. I think many of us get distracted by the commercialization, attention-seeking, and productivity-optimizing of the modern era. AI might prevent most artists from commercializing their work and from getting a wide audience, but those things were always modern privileges. Historically, artists and their art were lost to the sands of time, and today they will be lost to feeds of AI slop.
The pieces that I work on will never be remembered, cannot be sold, and will likely only be appreciated by a handful of folks, probably personal friends. Yet, my engagement with art yields a deeper reward about my human condition. AI can’t take that away, and it doesn’t even feel like a threat.
This article from April synthesizes a lot of thoughts that I've heard online and in the real world. Here's one quote quoted within the article that really resonated with me: Ack! I just noticed...
This article from April synthesizes a lot of thoughts that I've heard online and in the real world. Here's one quote quoted within the article that really resonated with me:
What I am not happy to outsource is most of the things that AI is desperate for me to outsource. I do not want a computer to summarise texts sent by my friends into shorter sentences, as though the work of being updated on the lives of those I love is somehow strenuous or not what being alive is all about. I do not want Google’s AI feature to summarise my search into a pithy (often incorrect) paragraph, rather than reading the investigative work of my fellow humans. I don’t want AI to clean up the pictures that I take on my phone that are rich and strange in their messiness.
[...]
Simply put: I don’t know where this endless march of shortening the act of living leads us to. AI promises to free up time. But if what it spares us from is learning from our friends, writing, painting and exploring the world, then what, actually, are we meant to do with that time?
Ack! I just noticed this author is also a tildes user. @winther you sly dog you've convinced me twice to watch more Michael Haneke: once through Tildes and once through your bookmarks page! I feel like I'm in a "temporal pincer". I landed up on your site from the about/ideas/now microblog index.
Funny to see my post suddenly pop up here. Had to read what I wrote again, and I can still stand behind it. If I have anything new to add today, it would be that has created a new sort of...
Funny to see my post suddenly pop up here. Had to read what I wrote again, and I can still stand behind it. If I have anything new to add today, it would be that has created a new sort of skepticism when I encounter something I think lacks quality, then you start to think it might be LLM-generated. Even though it might, the mere suspicion is introducing a new level of distrust with how we engage with anything new.
I think the blog post articulates the issue well enough. Of what you have quoted, I personally sometimes do want that. For example, the AI cleaning up a picture, but I want to be the one to decide...
I think the blog post articulates the issue well enough. Of what you have quoted, I personally sometimes do want that. For example, the AI cleaning up a picture, but I want to be the one to decide where I might use it.
Generative image creation lacks most controls, you can sort of encourage it to go into a direction. But in the end it is still going to stick to its training data.
I think that it is possible to create art with generated images (though we do need to ignore the ethics of the training data) if they are not the end result. In much the same way, someone might use snippets of other things (paper articles, screenshots, etc) in a much larger art work. Basically, when agency is taken back in how exactly the material is used and viewed.
Complete side note about monospaced fonts
Please don't use monospace fonts for long form text. They might look cooler on your tech blog, and many people who spend many hours in IDEs might have not an issue with them, but when you are targeting any audience slightly larger than developers you should reconsider. There is some nuance here, for people with dyslexia monospaced fonts might actually work better. A serif font on modern high density displays also does not impact readability, however even today everyone will always read your text on a high density display. So overall, sans-serif is still the best choice to offer readability to the widest range of people.
Thank you for pointing out the font issue. Honestly not something I have given much thought, beyond trying to mimic the look of webpages in the mid 90s, though I don't even use frames or comic...
Thank you for pointing out the font issue. Honestly not something I have given much thought, beyond trying to mimic the look of webpages in the mid 90s, though I don't even use frames or comic sans, so I didn't fully commit.
I spend some time writing online. It’s a pretty different style than the comments I write here but, who knows, maybe someday someone will find it and it will end up posted here.
I indulge in that writing, which I consider art, not for the final product. I write because of the way that the process of writing transforms the person that I am. I think many of us get distracted by the commercialization, attention-seeking, and productivity-optimizing of the modern era. AI might prevent most artists from commercializing their work and from getting a wide audience, but those things were always modern privileges. Historically, artists and their art were lost to the sands of time, and today they will be lost to feeds of AI slop.
The pieces that I work on will never be remembered, cannot be sold, and will likely only be appreciated by a handful of folks, probably personal friends. Yet, my engagement with art yields a deeper reward about my human condition. AI can’t take that away, and it doesn’t even feel like a threat.
This article from April synthesizes a lot of thoughts that I've heard online and in the real world. Here's one quote quoted within the article that really resonated with me:
Ack! I just noticed this author is also a tildes user. @winther you sly dog you've convinced me twice to watch more Michael Haneke: once through Tildes and once through your bookmarks page! I feel like I'm in a "temporal pincer". I landed up on your site from the about/ideas/now microblog index.
Funny to see my post suddenly pop up here. Had to read what I wrote again, and I can still stand behind it. If I have anything new to add today, it would be that has created a new sort of skepticism when I encounter something I think lacks quality, then you start to think it might be LLM-generated. Even though it might, the mere suspicion is introducing a new level of distrust with how we engage with anything new.
I think the blog post articulates the issue well enough. Of what you have quoted, I personally sometimes do want that. For example, the AI cleaning up a picture, but I want to be the one to decide where I might use it.
Generative image creation lacks most controls, you can sort of encourage it to go into a direction. But in the end it is still going to stick to its training data.
I think that it is possible to create art with generated images (though we do need to ignore the ethics of the training data) if they are not the end result. In much the same way, someone might use snippets of other things (paper articles, screenshots, etc) in a much larger art work. Basically, when agency is taken back in how exactly the material is used and viewed.
Complete side note about monospaced fonts
Please don't use monospace fonts for long form text. They might look cooler on your tech blog, and many people who spend many hours in IDEs might have not an issue with them, but when you are targeting any audience slightly larger than developers you should reconsider. There is some nuance here, for people with dyslexia monospaced fonts might actually work better. A serif font on modern high density displays also does not impact readability, however even today everyone will always read your text on a high density display. So overall, sans-serif is still the best choice to offer readability to the widest range of people.Thank you for pointing out the font issue. Honestly not something I have given much thought, beyond trying to mimic the look of webpages in the mid 90s, though I don't even use frames or comic sans, so I didn't fully commit.