Imperfect

chatgpt's great wave

Inspired by Jeppe's What art means to me in this era of AI tools.

I think that AI-generated floods, particularly masterful renditions like The Great Wave off Studio Ghibli, impart more and not less meaning into the originals which they remix. Sharing art close enough to its predecessor, such that others and I can more accessibly (re)discover or segue to it, is awesome. Inspiring comparative discourse on what the original and remix do differently or better can also honor, if not improve, both works. Even remixes done or received very poorly can result in greatness when they are spun, subverted, or even gradually improved into a masterpiece. I find it funny how the outsized attention given to generative AI by lovers and haters alike not only amplifies it and AI-generated art appreciation but their human counterparts too.

Choosing to be lazy to your detriment with a tool is often a choice you have a say in. I think people don't realize how much choice they have when it comes to interfacing generative AI. You can afford to be critical of what you and the assistant puts out, as well as what you accept. Verify answers or gain the intrinsic knowledge or extrinsic contacts to. Incorporate complementary approaches such as sanity checks, success benchmarks, or other discovery methods entirely. Audit your process and progress regularly, AI-related or not, to see whether you have truly been working to get better since your last check-up.

Zoom in on your typical exchange with a chat-based AI. Regenerate answers that are nonsense. Rewrite prompts for more specificity. Rewrite the deficient parts of any assistant message. All the user interface abstractions are part of the context window text block anyway. Adjust the text such that it's further inline with what you think you want it to predict. Switch or tinker with your model, settings, provider, approach, or any other variable that enables poor results or harmful shortcuts. Rewrite, redraw, re-record, or otherwise remix the AI output entirely if you wish. You have more options than you realize. Take advantage of them.

Let's say that "the true meaning of art comes when it is observed and reflected upon by a(nother) human". An aside: sometimes, creators themselves don't profess to know the true meaning of their art. Whether or not an interpretation of art "might be something completely different than what was initially intended", I don't follow how having such a human-involved mechanism create it has to make it less real or meaningful. Thus, it follows that I don't understand the stance of considering AI-generated works as "art" strongly objectionable. Then again, everyone likely has a different definition of "art". Is it possible that there's more to the collective that is art than each of our frames can see alone or together?

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