art0- the elephant

I’ve wanted to write some thoughts for a while now on art, technology, meaning, emotion, feeling and its relationship to the big gray box taking up all the air presently, Ai. To keep the word count down and distinguish Ai related ‘Art’ generation from language, music and drone piloting Ai, i’ll use GW for Generated Work from now on.

Something I keep facing when the topic of GW comes up with friends, family and other artists is that the emotion behind everyone’s perspective (including my own) tends to come out swinging first. Discussion of GW tends to collapse into one of two rails before anything can be discussed. The environmental perspective, and the theft perspective.

Both absolutely valid and worthy of their own dissection. Both a huge factor in weighing its cost and one I want to circle back to in future posts.

Environmental

The ecological cost. Namely energy, land and water. The knock on societal impacts these cost humanity. Driven my those with a rapid expansion plan and helped along by local governments eager to either attract big fish, or make some money off the land before the next election cycle.

Theft

Initial models were trained on data scraped from the web. No recompense was given. No credit or attribution exists. A fact. Subsequent models might have been trained on closed datasets, but are likely built on previous training data that wasn’t. The horse has bolted and isn’t being put back in the bag.

These are our fails and had solutions. All of them. And I say ‘our’, as humanity are the consumers partially driving demand. Myself included. Perhaps not proportionate to the investment, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we said people weren’t leaning into it. They are. Businesses too.

As someone in IT, who uses it every day for help writing code I can’t possibly remember for myself, it’s become another tool I lean on. In saying that, I know enough about how it works i’ve had to push back on asks from higher up on how to shoehorn ‘Ai’ into where it’s not needed. It’s not a magic bullet. It has places where it’s useful, as well as the potential for absolute disaster if not planned, managed, audited, moderated. Just like all other tech. The entirety of the I.T. world has built slowly (slower than the tech itself) through it’s missteps, how to approach ‘best practice’. Today, all of that is being thrown out the window in a gamble on being the first to leverage what it might be able to do. No other technology has had such a free pass

The biggest year in the US of all time, of IPO’s was about 142 billion, that was in 2021 with SPACs. So when people are talking about 300 Billion, 350 billion, 400 Billion of Ai related equity supply, like need for new dollars , that is a huge amount of money that has to come from somewhere… … the most dangerous moment for the Ai bubble is when the confidence has to be converted to cash…

Smarter people than me see the bigger fin-bro picture, but for us plebs, Joe Scott and Hank Green have some easier to get-your-head-around summaries:

Joe Scott - ‘AI Is Now The Biggest Bet In Human History’

Hank Green - ‘The Riskiest Moment of the AI Bubble’

We seem to have a remarkable knack as a species for taking genuinely interesting technologies and surrounding them with all the incentives we need to bring out our worst instincts. Whether it’s’s social media optimised for outrage or ‘Ghostbuster’ing kids, or pharmaceuticals optimised for quarterly returns, or AI companies racing to satisfy investors before society has had a chance to decide where the boundaries ought to be.

Those are conversations need having.

They’re just not the conversation I want to have here.

Because if we strip away the stock market, venture capital, datacentres, copyright lawsuits, and corporate implementation, gaming the wording, there’s still a question sitting quietly underneath all of it.

One that would still be the one I want to ask if someone had invented this technology in a garage, powered it with solar panels, trained it only on consenting artists, and released it as open source. In spite of all of that…

Is what comes out art?

That’s the question I’m interested in.

Not because the other questions don’t matter. They’re super-fucking-important. Just not ones that are going to get past step one.

We’ve become so busy arguing about the consequences of the tool, we’ve skipped over a much older and, to me, way more interesting question.

What is art, anyway?