The statement in quote is word for word the rethoric I'm seeing from Netanyahu fans in Israel, and probably Trump fans as well.
Framing a topic as a love/hate binaric identity war is used to prevent all rational discussion.
It might be me, but just reading this gaslighting statement fires my amygdala.
Trolls, wether intentionally or subconsciouslly found perfect tactics to destroy rational debate on the internet and the public sphere in general.
When rational discussion is suffocated, those who use agressive and toxic language with no inhibitions or restraint can win and impose their ideas.
We need to disengage from these kinds of conversations and create some forums or platforms that penalize the use of such language.
I'm pretty sure the original commentor is not dumb enough to actually think everybody who disagrees with him is a brainwashed idiot who "hates Musk".
Or at least, they wouldn't dare to claim it in a civil discussion if they didn't knew they can get away with it and enjoy spewing bullshit while causing undue distress to anyone who tries to argue in good faith.
> I'm pretty sure the original commentor is not dumb enough
That's a pretty big leap of faith, knowing myself. I would say the ratio of people who have decided "Musk is great / Musk is the devil" vs "He's a human being therefore he's not all good or bad and should be analyzed with nuance" is about 100:1 at least preselecting for the personalities that can't keep themselves from populating a comment box, which apparently includes myself.
Just an anecdote but i'll put it here:
A friend of mine insisted that her ex was slowly driven somewhat mad by finasteride, not in the typical crazy ex way, but obsessive somewhat delusional thoughts and moods, like he was getting stuck in a loop over some idea.
She later dated another guy who was taking it for a very long time, and said he had the same type of delusional quirks.
The value of art is in meaning and context.
Purely generative art is as meaningful as a pretty rock.
Think of the models as a camera.
If you take shots from a car's dash cam in a city at random you might fall upon some really beautiful photos. But this is chance, the camera didn't create the city or its scenes.
A photographer can choose or create meaningful scenes because he has a mind, consciousness and life experience.
Pretty rocks (e.g. mountains, gems, etc.) are frequently ascribed substantial meaning, despite the fact that no consciousness had a hand in creating them.
Raw gemstones are generally uninteresting until people shape them. Diamonds worth thousands may not even qualify as interesting enough to pickup in the raw state, assuming you don’t know what it is.
Mountains get meaning as aspects of our environment, but try and name the your top 10 most aesthetically pleasing mountains. At least for me, I may appreciate a scenic view but I just don’t think of them in that kind of context.
> A photographer can choose or create meaningful scenes because he has a mind, consciousness and life experience.
But so does a user. Users don't prompt "draw a dog" but give 3 lines of intricate details and iterate a dozen times until it looks right. It's not like these models work all on their own.
There are people who define art that way, and there are those who define it as beautiful things. I'd personally own and display something beautiful made by algorithm than much post modern art, which is frequently visually unpleasant in spite of being rich in some message.
Our brains are drawn to some things visually for instinctive reasons, and I don't need a big message when I'm decorating or wanting to please the eye.
That's a very reductive and limited way to look at art. You're right in stating it as decoration but I would not conflate the two. Different things, both valuable in its own right.
A rose is beautiful, a painting of a rose less so, its two dimensional and lacks many aspects of the true rose. But it has more value because there are millions of roses, while the painting captures a unique experience of viewing the rose by the painter and transmits it to the other person viewing the painting.
Unless there are ghosts in the shell, MidJourney gives an aproximation of how a painting of a rose looks like. Its like an aggrregate function that averages a million artists.
Its a weird concept.
So is it still art if a photographer is driving the car with a dash cam and they drive it with the intention of capturing great images, and then goes over all the captured frames to find the best ones?
I would say yes, this dash cam technique can be an artistic method. Reminds me of Jon Rafman's wonderful Nine Eyes project - he captures screenshots from Google Streetview, see
https://9-eyes.com
Since all kinds of companies are getting a lot of money from the generative AI business, I think they can handle being sued for plagiarism if thats the content they produce.
Framing a topic as a love/hate binaric identity war is used to prevent all rational discussion.
It might be me, but just reading this gaslighting statement fires my amygdala.
Trolls, wether intentionally or subconsciouslly found perfect tactics to destroy rational debate on the internet and the public sphere in general.
When rational discussion is suffocated, those who use agressive and toxic language with no inhibitions or restraint can win and impose their ideas.
We need to disengage from these kinds of conversations and create some forums or platforms that penalize the use of such language.
I'm pretty sure the original commentor is not dumb enough to actually think everybody who disagrees with him is a brainwashed idiot who "hates Musk". Or at least, they wouldn't dare to claim it in a civil discussion if they didn't knew they can get away with it and enjoy spewing bullshit while causing undue distress to anyone who tries to argue in good faith.