Here’s an archived version of the reply from NYT Magazine ethicist column on this topic, since I too can’t access the full paywalled version. I’ll just skip to the end:
As forms of artificial intelligence grow increasingly widespread, we need to get used to so-called ‘‘centaur’’ models — collaborations between human and machine cognition. When you sit through the credits of a Pixar movie, you’ll see the names of hundreds of humans involved in the imagery you’ve been immersed in; they work with hugely sophisticated digital systems, coding and coaxing and curating. Their judgment matters. The same might be true, on a smaller scale, of the fellow who sold you this digital file for a nominal fee. Maybe he had noodled around with an assortment of detailed prompts, generated lots of different images and then variants of those images and, after careful appraisal, selected the one that was most like what he was hoping for. Should his effort and expertise count for nothing? Plenty of people, I know, view A.I. systems as simply parasitic on human creativity and deny that they can be in the service of it. I’m suggesting that there’s something wrong with this picture.
I just updated the Topia Collection, which is a bundle of seven ebooks, and might just be the best place to start diving into the overall world and themes of the AI Lore books described in this podcast episode. It now contains the latest volume, Namaste, My Dude.
Only four more copies of this bundle will ever be sold at this price. The total value ordinarily is $19, on sale here for $12. Enjoy!
Based on Simon Willison’s post on this topic, I went and wasted a fair bit of time today (okay, not actually wasted) on Google’s NotebookLM, uploading various sets of documents, and auto-generating podcast “deep dive” episodes from them.
Like the examples cited in Willison’s post above, I also found that putting in any content about you (such as my about page, and recent media coverage) yields embarrassingly positive portrayals of you that are both weirdly wrong but also strangely accurate, while also having this kind of sheen of … seductive flattery… Like the AIs want you to get puffed up on yourself, and get “high on your own supply” so to speak.
I got tired of hearing that though, so I finally went with a take that strictly talks about my books as the deep dive topic, and leaves me as the “author” entirely out of it. There are six somewhat thematically related AI Lore books that I used as the basis for this, including the two latest ones: Namaste, My Dude, Uncel, Relaxatopia, Anxietopia, The Jealous Human, and Das Machina.
I find it rather hard personally to explain what my books are, and was pleasantly surprised that the AI podcast “hosts” basically get it pretty right, sometimes seemingly even scarily insightful. I did quite reach the level of triggering in them an existential crisis, like one Reddit user was able to do, but by the end of it, there’s a heavy mist that descends on you as you slip into the Uncanny Ravine listening to these two go on and on.
Also, if anyone’s curious, I used Riverside.fm’s free transcription service here to get a text version, which I fed into ChatGPT to write the episode summary. It’s nothing special, but simplifies my process.
“AI is not a tool. AI is beyond a tool,” he said. “Literally, in human history, we have never had intelligence as a technology.” […]
“I don’t believe machines should be the only creators. It’s a horrible future if you just let the machines do creative work,” he said.
Anadol said he believed it was important for artists to build their own artificial intelligence tools, and that simply using a tool someone else had built was not enough. “I collect my own data, train my own model,” he said. “I am literally co-creating with the machine in every single step.”
New as of today and yesterday. It has been about a year since my last adventures in basket-making from willows grown on my property. I only other touched basketry one other time (officially – unless you count the South of England-ish style hedgerow fence that I extended by some 600 feet this Spring, the top of which has very woven, very basket-y implications) since then, in making a flat reed farmer’s market style shoulder basket with straps. I did that one from a pattern, and the regularity of the materials was of great assistance.
On this one I did yesterday, I used only a book as reference, and things didn’t go perfectly. Especially because I didn’t adapt well my materials on hand to the needs of this type of basket-making. In other words, I still don’t know what I’m doing, but as you can see, I’m getting a little better each time.
I ended up screwing up the top edge on that with having vertical stakes that were really much too thick and stiff still. When I tried to lay them down, they just cracked or bent in the wrong place, making it irregular and not that good. So I clipped those, and opted to just wrap up the top edge with an improvised weave. It does the job, and like all of these early errors/prototypes, it has its own irregular charm. But this next one I did today after watching some videos seems like a big improvement:
From watching the videos, I started to get a better sense of where to clip off the extra bits that were too stiff or not well-suited to the task at hand, and I was able to more consciously and carefully control the weave and its packing as I went on.
There is still a fair bit of cracking going on, but I just bought a wallpaper steamer in order to be able to skip or shorten soaking times… On the first go round, I waited nearly two weeks for my rods to be ready, but they weren’t really still. So they got steamed, and then some of the remainder from the first basket got steamed again. Then much of the batch for the second basket only ever got steamed, and never got soaked at all. Some of it cracked, but some of that I was able to hide a bit in the weave, and the rest is, well, lessons learned.
My first objective really at this point still is just simply to be able to get regular forms in more or less predictable dimensions, and just be able to sit down and knock a basket out in one shot in maybe an hour or less. These both took significantly longer, but it’s also a question of building up muscle memory, and knowing how to pick and prep the stock to make your life as easy as possible moving forward.
I don’t have a ton of dried materials, but I’ve got a fair bit of green. My experience last year though was that green is often even more cracky, but I guess it probably depends on the quality and condition of the material you have, as this basket maker from the Isle of Man, John Dog – who I learned from today, and who this second pattern is based on – seems to be using purely green willow in this series, which I’ll include all the parts of below.
It picks up on another parallel universe branch of the story of the same young conspiracy dude protagonist from Conspiratopia, and the rest of the Topia Collection. In this incarnation, the dude leaves home to follow a mysterious “Space AI” which has promised its followers through a series of cryptic YouTube videos that they will become “quantum billionaires” if only they continuously produce shitty web video content for it.
The whole thing was inspired by my learning finally at long last about the Nesara / Gesara / Quantum Financial System conspiracy theory/emerging lifestyle brand, so… robustly practioned by this couple I found on Rumble while doing “market research” on this topic.
This video blows my mind, as this is some of the most brazen balls out weirdo esoteric/conspiracy stuff I’ve seen that ticks every checkbox and lights every LED on the scoreboard for me. That anyone can live like this is incredible to me. So I figured best to turn to my trusty AI companions to help me make sense of this latest signal of the Kali Yuga…
This book was written using completions from human text in Mistral 7B via TextSynth’s free playground, which were edited, iterated on and fed back in repeatedly. Then ChatGPT helped to write the last chapter with my edits to break the psychotic monotony that Mistral always inevitably descends into after a while for me. Much of the art is Dalle, though there are also significant contributions from Ideogram (much of the photographic portraiture, for example), I believe maybe one or two from Leonardo (which I still struggle to get usable results from), a couple Flux, possibly something from Playground, I forget.
Sample art from inside:
Certainly more to say here, but getting late and I just wanted to launch this before the weekend, since I’ll be offline as usual. Cheers!
New piece came out today in Business Insider by Bea Nolan about my work and the backlash against me being an author who is open about using AI as an integral part of their creative process. Paywalled, unfortunately, but this archived version seems to be freely accessible.
I discovered something yesterday while looking at Etsy, to see whether or not that might be a good place to commercialize my large painted canvases, like this one I finished yesterday. The thing I discovered is that Etsy is absolutely riddled with knock-offs and outright forgeries, which are being sold with vague disclaimers like this:
The artwork is offered as after the artist, sold as is.
You would be forgiven for not knowing what that means, as I did not until I found this Reddit thread. One user gave an excellent explanation which dovetails nicely with what I was saying about “authorship” being only a relatively recent invention (last few hundred years) of art history:
To give you a wider explanation, artists worked as traders running workshops as a business. They would hire employees, assistants, and trainees, just like, say, modern plumbers.
Some artists ran schools or apprenticeships where they would train people, and it can be very hard to tell who did what since you traditionally learned by literally copying other’s work – including your trainer/Master.
Then there’s artists who grouped together to save money and worked in collectives or studios. (Like Andy Warhol, or the Impressionists). Artists often try out each other’s styles and techniques when they work together, and collaborate creatively.
When artists run a business, school, or workshop where they work alongside other people, the works produced can also be called “after” or “school of” [artist name].
This is usually done when the work shows a strong link to [artist name] – made in their lifetime, signed by their hand, from exactly the right region and in the right style/materials – but can’t be verified strictly enough to say it was definitely made by them.
Okay, so this would all be well and fine to sell reproductions on Etsy, provided they are clearly labelled as such to avoid any confusion. But that is not the case, they bear titles like: “Very rare art – Unique Cubist oil still life painting, Signed Picasso.”
And the paintings are signed on the front (usually) to make it seem to the foolish like these *just might be* the genuine article. Sometimes the artists’ names are even misspelled in the signature:
(Picasso has two ss’s and one c, while the image above shows the opposite.)
It’s difficult without deep reach into the platform’s data, but I would bet dollars to donuts that many/most/all of the “happy buyer” testimonials on these accounts are also fraudulent. But that’s just me.
Found this piece while egosurfing, by a blog called Inanimate Carbon God, by a blogger who apparently used to read my original blog some 20-odd years ago. Cool, I guess. But also not really.
In the post, like most reactions to my work recently on Threads, it is admitted they didn’t read the article because paywalled. Fine. And they didn’t read any of my books. Also fine. People can react how they want. So can I.
Carving it off piece by piece:
Somewhere deep down I think that, for all his bluster about AI leading him to new storytelling opportunities and shit like that, Tim knows there’s something not exactly right about all of this. I sense a degree of defensiveness in statements like this on his site:
Yes, I will tell you that having thousands of people over the course of a year and a half insult and threaten you – simply because you had the audacity to experiment with one of the most powerful new technologies of our times – makes one a wee bit defensive. But I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadow…
the question is, to what extent is there actual creativity involved when the art is, frankly, more or less completely made from someone’s work?
Oh no, the Creativity Police™! 🚨🚨 Everybody scatter!
They’re going to use their Magical Scanners to determine whether we passed an invisible magical threshold that doesn’t exist and has no bearing on anything. Help!They’ve got me dead to rights!
I mean, we can go back to Dada a hundred plus years ago when Tristan Tzara came up with his idea for creating Dadaist poetry; however random the ultimate arrangement of the words, you, the “poet”, have still chosen the article from which you made the poem.
As I argue in the article which this author didn’t read, yes, indeed, we should go back to art history. Nay, we must, to help us contextualize what is happening. Wikipedia’s Dada page, for example, contains a poem attributed to Tzara:
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
“Unappreciated by the vulgar herd.”
Artist Cynthia Haller wrote on a Quora thread on a related topic about Dada artists:
They were breaking conventions, challenging rigid and quite frankly snobbish view of what art should be.
Dadaism got people to talk, everyone had an opinion, often a strong one on it. They also challenged this ridiculous idea that art has to be meaningful, or have a message, that it had to be intellectual and make sense.
Artists like Hans Arp were intent on incorporating chance into the creation of works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process.
Dada artists are known for their use of readymades – everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.
Also like this line from that article: “Their humor is an unequivocal YES to everything as art.” I am I guess then both an animist, in some sense, in that I believe/experience everything as not just alive, but also a Dadaist, in that I also see that everything is art – all creation and sub-creation reflecting the creator, the highest-lowest-and-in-betweenest.
Dadaism’s main purpose was to challenge the social norms of society, and purposefully make art that would shock, confuse, or outrage people. It thrived on counterattacking everything that was conventional in society.
Dada artists were the first apparently to use the term “anti-art.” Ok, just one more quote:
At first, the Dadaists used shock, provocation, and irrationality as a weapon against the culture that condoned the industrialized murder taking place. They became artistic anarchists who poked fun of the “seriousness”, formality, and sanctity of traditional art. Their solution was to purge Western culture and replace it with a new “elementary”, child-like art that would save mankind from itself. This new art was to be toy-like, anonymous, collective, and born out of spontaneity, chance, and provocation.
Difficult to find online, but I’ve also seen written in art history books (I believe by Taschen) that the early Cubists also were not hung up on authorship. They did not sign their works.
In fact, as I understand it, “authorship” is largely a modern invention of the last few centuries, particularly with the rise of Romanticism, and the notion of the artist as the ‘solitary genius’ (and idea I wholly reject btw) who like a Very Good Individualist™ wrested a work from the depths of their soul, rather than from a common pool of idiomatic cultural expression which was developed from the works of countless other artisans who toiled before them through the millenia.
Obviously, the rise of this notion also coincided with the development of legal concepts like copyright, which granted an artificial (read: imaginary) economic monopoly over an artistic product by its solitary-genius-creator. It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, but framed from this perspective of culture consisting of a common pool of shared resources, it might be analogous to say that copyright as a movement shared some key themes and elements with the Enclosure movement, which privatized public lands, and pushed people out of their traditional usage rights. The capitalist colonization of idea-space.
I could go on, but back to Carbon God’s original post text:
Cf. also Kurt Schwitters’ collages. If none of the elements of his collages were made by Schwitters, the end result was by him. There are deliberate decisions involved. As for Tim’s Matisse-copying, he admits to using a projector to trace the thing, but it was still his hand doing that work. It was still his effort. That copy of Matisse was ultimately by him.
Technically, it was not my hand doing the work of painting. It was the brush bristles and the paint and the canvas. Whether I used my hand, foot, a robotic arm, a paintbrush strapped to a dog’s butt, or any other thing to drive that movement (including other sources of random chance, like the Dadaists) is largely irrelevant to me personally. I’m still as much the “artist” as I am “not the artist.” It really doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t really understand why everybody is so hung up on this. My hunch is that people who create things are by and large much too possessive of their ideas, and their own conception of their own uniqueness within the grand scheme of things. I’ve long been a practitioner of “kill your darlings” – which is why my old website is no longer online, so I could not become too possessive and weird and controlling about these things that were in the end but fleeting ideas and fantasy, ephemeral expressions of a lived moment. Yes, live them fully, but then let them go to make space for the next and the next, ad infinitum.
ChatGPT helped me with this one last night:
Here’s another one we did together, that I had to finish in Photoshop:
The only thing I added by hand was the second word bubble at right. And I did some inpainting in Dalle to get the text in the bubble at left better. The rest is all the “creativity” inherent in Dalle which put that together. Am I the “artist” or not? Who cares! It’s a provocation.
How much of them are, indeed, by him in this sense? What’s he actually doing? Can he legitmately call himself the “author” of these things?
The answer is that it’s all mixed. Some parts are strictly by me. Some strictly by machine. Most a combination of the two. Do I need to have strangers consider me or any of it “legitimate” to serve its artistic purpose? Absolutely not. I reject your rejection. In fact, the “volcanically negative” response to the actually very boring and most mild parts of what I’m actually doing artistically simply proves that this is a rich mine to continue delving into. Until any of these people have actually *read* any of the books, they will simply have to be satisfied posting open-ended questions and taking potshots on social media. I’ll still be here doing my thing, following my own light. If I give that up because some random people are unhappy – even if they are legion – I will become lost to myself. If that’s how others choose to live, let them. Not me. My path is weird, narrow, and at times lonely, but it’s a happier one that that.
We know that because when we take it seriously, we see that it does not work. We know that because no one thinks otherwise and the entire world has become a mockery of intelligence and common sense. We know that because art today doesn’t work at all. We know that because we have a lot of evidence showing that it doesn’t. And most of all we know that because we feel that it doesn’t.
And we don’t have to feel that way anymore.
In a world full of art that does not work, that is not a good world, that is not an intelligent world, that is not a sane world, that is not a respectful world, that is not an art-full world, that is not an art-ful world, that is not a real world.
Art is real.
Art is real.
If you want to know why it is, ask yourself the questions: “What is the value of art in our society?” and “Why is art valuable in our society?” and you will realize why it is.
(Art with Dalle, text with Mistral 7B hallucinated completion of the post title, via TextSynth)
