A day when the gods can’t see me…friend project…trashing AI art and artists
Adventures du jour!
Today is a day of errands; at the time I wrote this, I was sitting at a tire shop waiting for tires and oil change. After that I did groceries. Now I’m home and getting ready to write fiction.
Goth Girl just figured something critical out and is planning…something. She didn’t tell me what it was yesterday but when I last saw her she had just stirred up a bunch of shit. Should be an interesting night.
Tomorrow: Bok Tower, a botanic garden about an hour and a half from Tampa. I’m hoping to find a replacement for the Denver Botanic Garden and Chatfield Farm, which I used to go to quite often.
Tomorrow is a day “where the gods can’t see me.”
Practically speaking, this is a day without obligations, a day of doing nothing, but doing it somewhere out in public where nobody knows me, with a notebook to jot down thoughts. I got the idea from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, an issue where Julius Caesar plans the end of his empire, while disguised as a beggar.
I try to do these once a (cross-) quarter but I missed several.
I feel like I’ve made the major decisions that need to be made this year already, during that last kayak trip. So this is going to be just letting my mind wander, to see where it takes me.
The last few days have been a push to get to a certain point with the friend project, which is where the therapy-type stuff gets dumped. The stuff that I thought would get darker did indeed get darker, but at this point I’m okay enough that it didn’t throw me into disruption.–I say that, but I also feel like the fiction WIP was stuck on waiting for me to write that particular stuff down, so I know it was deeply important.
Once I got it down, I was promptly unstuck on the WIP and got good scenes and a nice plot twist out of it. And set up Goth Girl to incite chaos, apparently.
But now I feel like I’ve written all the stuff I know for certain, and I’m walking out in the dark from here on out, making a new pattern that doesn’t quite exist yet. About a third of the way to go, I think?
I wrote the first section of the new part this morning and feel very proud of it.–I also tried to type out part of it here several times and ended up deleting it. It’s probably just too triggery to write down and throw out in public, even in a limited way, unless I’m able to make sure I can support anyone who gets triggered. And I don’t have the resources for it. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to filter it down and make it fit for human consumption. Until then: it’ll be safe where it’s going, to the friend.
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One last thing, on AI.
There’s a new post going around implying that people who are working with AI “art” (there are almost always quotation marks involved) are doing so in order to avoid having to learn artistic skills.
Given that I’m me, and I know the kinds of people that I know, I’m not unbiased, but: the majority of people I know who are working with AI “art” are artists and creative types of some stripe or other, exploring the possibilities of what they can do in a new creative medium. We’re sinking valuable time in learning new techniques and approaches; we’re sharing info behind the scenes; we’re wailing and gnashing our damn teeth.
I really don’t mind the questions being raised about AI and the arts. A lot of this stuff IS dodgy, even if it’s not exactly dodgy for the reasons that most people think it is.
But I respectfully request that all y’all don’t suggest that it’s not work.
It’s the same kind of work that learning to use a camera was in the 1850s; it’s the same kind of work that learning to use a digital camera and an image editor is now.
For someone who knows how to draw (however poorly), getting an AI to behave itself is a fucking pain in the ass and has required huge mental shifts, a ton of research into existing artistic and photographic techniques, and often decoding and hacking racism, sexism, and other types of bullshit social crap to disenfuck images that aren’t coming out right. As well as research into how AI works so I can reverse engineer a reasonable process for building prompts in the face of evolving algorithms.
I’m not mad at those of you who are reposting that post–and there will be other posts like it–in order to start discussions, hear opinions, etc. You’re doing your right work and I’ve felt heard.
But: some you are not extending respect in what you’re posting and your commentary about it. And I hear that lack of respect coming through.
You are not standing up for artists by saying that working with AI art isn’t work. You mocking AI art doesn’t create a world in which hard work in the arts is rewarded; it just creates a perception that people working in the new medium have even *less* value than the other artists before them.
The people you’re tearing down as not wanting to work hard are working their asses off.
Raise up all artists. Thank you.
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It would be easier to make magic with our creative works if the world could be relied upon to inspire us…but no. Sit with me a minute and commiserate.
Granny <3 Chihuahua!
Guy headed in for the night at a local park at sunset. I love the light in this one.