Category: Other Page 15 of 177

This is pretty much how I feel about the upcoming US election:

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s mind and body are at peace, one should meditate on being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead.”

Found via. Context (Wikipedia)

Source:

It is easy to focus on all the ways that generative systems get things wrong but it is important to recognize that there are possibilities in the spaces where, not without some oversight, they are both not right but also not wrong at the same time. Some of the names we use to describe this space are playful or silly or even weird and what generative systems allow, and what is novel, is the ability to not only synthesize these behaviours but to automate them at the scale of our collection.

Great article in general, worth a read.

Rather than trying to prevent generative systems from entering that maze of weird assumptions and associations what if instead we let them loose to map that territory as a way to deliberately create alternative narratives about the objects in our collections? In literature we sometimes call this form magical realism.

This is very much the approach I’ve used in the AI Lore books. Let the machines be wrong and weird and “silly” and playful. Land continues:

These alternative narratives are not meant to replace or minimize our existing practices. They are meant to sit alongside them or, and this is important, to act as placeholders for those things in our collections which continue to lack any kind of narrative at all.

Alternative narratives can serve as a vehicle to reveal objects whose stories have been lost, neglected or forgotten. Second, they can demonstrate the idea that the strength and value of these stories, and the objects they describe, is in their ability to be retold and reimagined.

The piece ends by talking about how comic book culture is very welcoming of these kinds of alternative re-tellings of narratives, and ends on an interesting point about those alt-takes actually supporting the main “official” authoritative narrative.

One, it is a welcoming hand inviting the people who read comic books to participate in the narrative and world-building of those works. Second, it displays a confidence in the actual work itself. It says: Not only can these works stand alongside alternative interpretations but they are, in fact, buttressed by them.

Excellent article, much food for thought.