art is human expression

finally i read that article about the evils of ai in art. you know, that ramble that’s been kicking around social the last couple days, by that one published author

i knew going in i wouldn’t like it. but i made myself read to the end anyway. it was pretty good, honestly

go believe them, if this stuff excites you

i didn’t like it, because:

1. impulse
2. gatekeeping
3. othering

on top of that, i’d like to address:

4. furry fappery

before concluding with:

5. why art

if you’re one of the six persons in the world who humor me by absorbing my words, here now i spill a lot of words on this topic

i’ve written one true book and three-point-nine fantasy novels. but then, i’ve never published any of them. that other author is a real author, and i’m not, and you should go believe them instead

before that i ran a video company. i paid full time to each of my director, cinematographer and intern, plus part time to our sound tech, and contracted with an animator. i also ran lights. we farmed our team out to make kickstarter videos

we were making money, so i thought i was good at business. then somewhere in there i got bored, shook hands with my team, kept the toys, and moved to colorady. later i went to business school, earned a masters degree with a focus on startups, and realized that i should have sold all our gear to my main guys and helped them take the business from me. whoops. clearly i’m not good at business either

honestly, these days i am anti-capitalism

if you want to use ai to make money, i am not the words to read

still here?

let’s get into it

the number one mistake is that you all seem to see ai as an impulse function, not a curve. i mean, with stunning originality, that other author got this wrong in two completely separate ways:

• assuming no more advancement – everybody’s mistake
• seeing no intentionality

everybody’s mistake

the first error is assuming that all the ai we have is all the ai we will ever have

this is bullshit

ChatGPT is two years old

ChatGPT is a for-free version, so that common everybodies can start getting used to the idea of ai

accordingly, a few thousand companies have spawned in the last six months, all re-selling ChatGPT customized into various niches. it feels these days like ChatGPT powers every bot from amazon to email to grindr to twitter

but ChatGPT is still the v3 chat model. Bing search is their v3.5 model. GPT4 is open to only some paying customers. The company’s v5 model was once called Q* and we still don’t know anything else about it

that’s all from OpenAI

Google has understood the threat this poses and is pivoting their entire mega-gazillion-dollar business to catch up. Google basically invented half the tech that underpins modern ai, so they will manage to make something that matters. (nvidia built the other half.) Facebook has manipulated social trends with ai for years. China doesn’t trust anything the west does, and is absolutely in the same arms race. plus, i once heard that India has more honor students than the US has students

inside two years we saw ai grow from a toy only geeks played with into a trend the general populace noticed, and then into something corporations are firing some of their workforce to make room for

the trend is not stopping

you get that, right?

we are all living on an exponential tech curve, and for ages now we've been teaching that STEM is the only career path that's rewarding

sure, some smallish art tech company was embarrassed last week because they used a piece of obvious ai art in an advertisement that targeted artists

yet i promise, by even next year, the ai art won’t be obvious anymore

no intentionality

i’m proposing the author who wrote that thing linked above has never themself actually pushed "go" on an ai image generator

i say this because they refer to it repeatedly as pushing a go button. half their rant is the idea that art has intentionality and there’s no intentionality on pushing a button

but this is wrong because using an ai image generator is not one push of a button, it’s a hundred pushes. it’s the idea of throwing a thousand pieces of crap at the wall and choosing editorially the best of the best (of the best) along the way

we’ve spent generations teaching everyone that having an opinion is all that’s needed to be human. we don’t need virus experts to tell us how to handle a pandemic any more than we need environmental experts to interpret the climate. instead, social media lets the news experts poll us for what we collectively believe the truth to be

that is: having an opinion on art is one and the same thing as making art

sorry

this is actually the same way artists learn art. we make a thing, and then have an opinion on what parts do and don’t represent what we want. then we refine it for a while. then we throw it out and hate it all. then another day we bravely make another thing, and judge it all over again

in education theory this dovetails with bloom’s taxonomy: learning to recognize something is indeed learning, but low-level learning. learning to express an opinion on the thing is one step up. many people stop there. but learning to make a thing from our opinions is one step higher. above that is learning ways to express opinions on what we ourselves make

ai image generating tools present options, and encourage the user to make choices to shape the results. the good tools go beyond text prompts, they let us upload style match. the tools still in research map results into unentangled latent spaces, which means we get sliders that control things like “facial expression” instead of things like “random seed”

people who really drive these tools also refine bits of an image slowly by parts as they build a gestalt whole

it is not push one button and masturbate at being able to call ourself an artist. sure we can do that, but we can do so much more

it is a tool for self-expression

like every tool for self-expression, any individual can invest lesser or more parts of ourself into learning it

this then is the crux: all the arguments i hear against using ai seems to come down to gatekeeping. that is, either:

• it’s unethical to make human expression with less effort

or

• it’s unethical to let machines reprocess human outputs to help us do this

ultimately, we’re propping up capitalism

that is, both arguments are about the idea that some folk prove their value as people by producing art for others. these new tools exploit these people’s efforts to produce similar results, but without compensatory flows of mana

the idea that art is inherently human expression is thrown out

instead, these arguments pose that art only is art if it makes money for someone who’s job is being an artist. anything that flows mana toward tech-bros but not artists is not art. (nevermind that tech is art.) then by extension, anyone who makes art by sampling parts is also evil. (music wrestled with this idea ages ago)

but copyright will save us!

this is the funniest one to me. i keep hearing people say that because OpenAI admits they scrape the sum of human knowledge to build their models, somehow that violates some holy grail called copyright which means they shouldn’t be doing it

i’m gonna vehemently disagree. what OpenAI does to scrape the web is not much different from what every search engine in the last 20 years has been doing. that is, it is absolutely covered under “fair use,” and should be. i am really not comfortable standing on a platform that the government should be punishing people for reading the internet

beyond that, are these folk really going to hold copyright law as being their best metric of good and evil?

what i hear of this whole argument is:

• we shouldn’t use search engines to help us express ourself, because that devalues the human resources who would normally act as paid middlemen

i don’t buy it, i’m sorry

to me human expression is more than capitalism

i am truly sorry that the art industry is collapsing

i believe all our industries are going to collapse soon. even coders. artists are unfortunately getting the first brunt of it, like the canary in the coal mine of economics. but i mean, creatives have struggled to prove we’re valuable to society for hundreds of years. this is nothing new

actually, coal miners went before us, fully automated away in the last decade. but they were generally not online so the collective us never really noticed.

that gets then to the issue of who is doing the harm

i am not arguing that billionaires are people. even i have limits. but i do feel that using “tech-bro” as a pejorative to dehumanize actual people is wrong

not everyone is doing this for shareholder profit, nor for bragging rights in the bro-game

like or not, many of the absolute most wrinkle-brained researchers in the world are focusing 100% of their waking hours to driving this industry as hard as possible. (many of the smoothest too, of course, which is probably scarier.)

this is an existential game

a youtuber i like said the companies playing with ai all see it as the winners are the ones who get to stay in business. yet i hold even that’s too narrow. i mean, the philosophers who play with this stuff are saying things like we’re currently inventing the successor to humanity itself

if life has meaning, then right now, at this moment, is the moment that meaning matters most

i am not going to try to convince you that anyone is right

i just want us all to stop calling each other names

except billionaires. it is wholly unethical to be a billionaire

nowhere is this argument at higher current ferver than among us furs

to be clear, the entire visual design industry has been saturated for basically ever. the college i used to advise at awarded digital media degrees, and four of every five graduates wanted to be a designer. to this day i still get a ton of talent-placement spam, almost all of which is designers desperate for work. meanwhile, the price of gently-used logo parts remains $1 each on vectorstock

yet all this time, one tiny niche existed: artists who drew furry art (porn) could actually make a living off their art (porn)

thus in furry, this topic hits hard. the artists who’s businesses are shaking are people we know! the styles ai copies are real people whom we recognize! and if we are not each an aspiring artist ourself, every one of us has commissioned character art along the way. we all feel love toward every artist who helped us realize our own self

i’ve heard it proposed that any fur who engages with ai art should be banned from every convention forever. the argument was obvious: if we call ourself a fur, yet so slap-in-the-face the very artists who define what furry is, we don’t deserve to be a fur anymore

sadly, this is wrong

not only is it propping up capitalism, not only is it praying that big-daddy’s forceful paw knocks down deviants, but it also acts like somehow graphic artists are the definition of furry

like nobody can be furry unless we respect and worship the right icons

it’s the same gatekeeping argument that i’m not a fur because i’ve never bought a fursuit. but now, not even fursuit makers are necessarily true furs. now, one is not a fur unless we define furry porn artists as the absolute center of furry. no fur can have a reason for feeling like we’re furry unless we center our lives on fapping to furry porn

come on, us, we can do better

i reach now my final points. let me summarize them:

• capitalism must fall

• yes we need to support each other as this happens

• but art is human expression

each of these i could write an essay on. let me start today with:

art is human expression

i gave up that video company i used to run because i couldn’t convince my own team to put down their commercial goals. i was paying the paychecks whether our team brought in money that month or not. but the goal of making money was so strong that my main director guy couldn’t put it on pause long enough to help me make any art i actually had any interest in making

i gave up that video company because the only path to making money as an artist is using our own art to sell other people’s ideas

i gave up that video company because i’m blessed to be able to pay bills without fighting tooth-and-claw to make every effort one of making money

my team lost their jobs because they were so focused on making money they wouldn’t help me not make money for a while. that’s ironic

but i have had this blessed opportunity. that’s why i started. nobody gets the chance to walk away and not be commercial for a while. i had that chance and took it. fourteen years later, i live in a rotting manufactured home in the middle of nowhere. yet still, the things i stress about are whether i’m representing myself authentically enough, not whether i’m going to freeze or starve or both

i’ll run off the end someday. its also possible the world will end before my last ember of capitalistic ownership does

i don’t know my future. i can’t predict any of our futures. yet, fourteen years ago i did see the rise of ai and walked off my lucrative tech-bro career because i wanted to do some living before the “singularity” got here. we’re in it now. the “quote-unquote” mother-flaming singularity is on us. (honestly, it’s about two years late. i blame the pandemic.)

i’m glad i did it

capitalism needs to die. capitalism is a suffering machine. it’s really a question of how much suffering we keep manufacturing before we turn the machine off

art is human expression

art is far more than the career of making money with art

art is the need to create for the shear self-validation that the act of creating gives us

art is the drive to represent our own point of view, whether or not the way makes sense

art is the study of how to do exactly that, better and better, each time we try

art is representing ourself when we drown in others

making art is the very definition of being human.