The artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.
AI Artists Have No Role Models
Prompt Engineers Lack Any Canon, Don't You? AI artists have an existential problem: they consume only their own work, severing the dialogue of culture that…
AI's aesthetics of failure
On the demise of Sora and our enduring revulsion to AI slop
AI Slop is Killing Online Communities
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art
From the cinematograph to the "noematograph," the Hugh-winning author explores how technology has, and may still, breed new artistic forms.
The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism
A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called "The phony comforts of AI skepticism," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated on the things [AI] can't do." I am not going to focus too hard on this
Inside the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Era of AI in Music
From juicing demos to cloning vocals, AI music tools are creeping into the workflows of top producers, songwriters and artists. It’s mostly happening behind closed doors — for now
The AI Aesthetic
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
choosing friction
In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.
The Omg Lol Times · We have to talk about AI “art”
Note: In this post I’m going to use the term “AI” as a lazy shorthand for “generative content creation via large-scale pre-trained models” because time is tight and I’ve got arthritis. I know it’s not really “AI”, but please, let me give my typing fingers a break here.
The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix
How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI
“The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.” — Ted Chiang
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
www.newyorker.comI‘m far from an AI doomer, but it is amazing how many serious voices — on LinkedIn, no less! — are sharing stories about how AI slop is quickly becoming one of the top problems they see in academic writing and research “AI will 10x our research!” doesn’t seem to be surviving encounters with reality
I‘m far from an AI doomer, but it is amazing how many serious voices — on LinkedIn, no less! — are sharing stories about how AI slop is quickly becoming one of the top problems they see in academic writing and research “AI will 10x our research!” doesn’t seem to be surviving encounters with reality
There is starting to be some genuinely interesting AI-created film stuff (among a flood of slop), and I suspect this will only accelerate. The “is it art?” debate will grow Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” already argued it’s likely the wrong question.
