Beauty, Porn and AI
Big Titty Anime Girl
No “AI” generated picture can ever be art and the best thing we could do about this whole situation is to try to think up a slur for it. AI in general and “AI art” in particular. No amount of detail will ever be as good as just some stick figure you made in 5 seconds in ms paint.
The whole thing is an attempt to replicate collective high IQ group creativity. And it’s impossible. The very idea that you would attempt to do so only betrays a sterile anti-social mind, that perceives such a thing as merely a mechanical, mathematical, dead, progression of random variations.
The concept of AI art is based on the assumption that creativity can be fully represented as a mathematical equation. As a (large) set of raw random variation. As a 2-dimensional cross reference schema, a logical proposition. A truth table. “If you generate every possible combination of variables across a 2-dimensional spreadsheet you will eventually have a combination that is the collected works of Shakespeare, and the real art is a process of sorting the faulty combinations out.”
“AI” generated “art” can never be “original content”, because it has no content. It is fundamentally a directionless empty approximation - like when a joke between you and your friends suddenly spreads out and is repeated by people not in your inner circle. They can repeat the joke, but they don’t really get it.
Real art can elicit every emotion. AI can only produce one emotional response, which is, “eerie”. It can elicit only one emotion: the uncanny. Because that is what is in the heart of the people who are making that ai – they are by definition trying to create something uncanny: an inhuman intelligence, which is a fundamental contradiction.
It can trick a bunch of people, but make no mistake – they are getting tricked. This is not a relativist situation. They are genuinely getting tricked.
The reason it is seemingly similar to art, seemingly “close”, now, is not because it is close, but because modern art is shit. And postmodern art is very preoccupied with the uncanny and ugly. You don't know what beauty is and they want to obscure it even further and remove you even further from it, by drowning you in an ocean of shit. Modern art is a money laundering operation and nothing else.
People like Zero HP Lovecraft can use it to great effect, because he is deliberately trying to write horror, which is, the uncanny. He aims for the eerie. It fits. Horror is explicitly about the uncanny. It can make two things effectively: horror and porn.
It can make porn. This is however not really the claim of success that some people tremblingly take it to be. You know who else makes really good porn? Disgusting perverts.
Porn is itself deeply within the uncanny. To harmonize with sexual fantasy it must by definition be uncanny, because sexual fantasy is a realm of horror: fetishism is the formalization of the distance to the object of desire that is safe.
If you think that an AI can generate beauty, then you don't believe in beauty. You believe beauty is a trick of the light, a relativist human projection. You believe beauty is an arbitrary hallucination, that can be replicated in a lab and forcefully induced.
All art works by/cause it lets you sense another human’s Being. Another soul, in which you see yourself as a soul in mutual re-recognition. If you believe this can be replicated by a non-souled machine, then you don't believe you have a soul in the first place. Or if you don’t like the word soul, a sentience. You are a nihilist and a solipsist. And if that's the case, then you have bigger fish to fry than whether a robot can make good big titty anime girls or not.
To fear it is one thing. We all fear it. That's part of what makes us human.
The "best" you can hope for, in the sense of achieving this insane pipe-dream, is sensing the remnants of the soul of the person who wrote the code. If that is multiple people, it will by necessity be / feel like a schizophrenic nightmare, and be eerie and uncanny. This bridge can never be crossed.
A human connection is not arbitrary delusion, it is a historical event. It is unique in ultimate terms. There has never been something quite like it. When you are exposed to art that resonates with you, that is a unique historical event. Beauty is the infinitely particular.
What makes beauty beauty and truth truth is the fact that they are transcendental. They connect to something outside themselves, and are not merely tautological and circular. They are not replicable, let alone infinitely replicable. To be replicable is in contradiction with the fundamental core of infinitely particularity.
The problem as always here is that all representative language is circles within circles, all names are tautology. Words can only point to the world, not contain it. Expressing it fully is impossible, but that is a weakness of language, not of beauty and truth. We can only point to it, and then leave it to the reader to choose whether to look at our fingertip, or, to where it points.
>You believe beauty is a trick of the light, a relativist human projection. You believe beauty is an arbitrary hallucination, that can be replicated in a lab and forcefully induced.
It was very shocking to me when I found out so many of my friends believe this. Coincidentally usually the ones who don't lift too.
> The problem as always here is that all representative language is circles within circles, all names are tautology. Words can only point to the world, not contain it. Expressing it fully is impossible, but that is a weakness of language, not of beauty and truth. We can only point to it, and then leave it to the reader to choose whether to look at our fingertip, or, to where it points.
For me, it has helped to conceive of this in terms of marriage. The sign is the feminine, the thing signified is the masculine. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — I think an alternate way of expressing this is to say that marriage is a profound mystery and cannot be articulated in language, because it itself underpins language. To articulate the union between a sign and a thing it signifies is to introduce other signs-things signified into the environment — that is, to divorce them.
In the case of AI-generated imagery, there is no masculine underlying reality anchoring the feminine appearance and image. (All sin could be conceived of as some kind of divorce in this way.) Porn is like that to an extent — the woman on the viewer’s phone isn’t real, doesn’t love the viewer, and won’t have the viewer’s kids. The one redeeming fact about “normal” porn is that the woman on the phone is at least the image of a real woman. But the image posted here isn’t even that. It’s not even a woman — that’s not a word that can be used to describe that. Because that’s not what it is; that’s only what it looks like, to the viewer. The viewer projects womanhood onto that thing. The viewer becomes God. And yet not God, but a copy of a God who is now dead. A simulacrum.
If signs aren’t anchored in some kind of objective reality, they very quickly become simulacra of themselves. They become copies without originals. They lose a couple fingers or their eyes look weird — they touched up the eyes but forgot about the hands. Or…they take photos with filters. They apply crazy amounts of makeup. They selectively display parts of their lives on social media. Etc. Because none of it is directed at anything real anymore — only the appearance of reality. Only the appearance of beauty.
ZHP wrote that “It is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear.” The marriage does happen eventually, when enough of the accidents are set in stone. It’s just a really horrifically bad marriage.