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just painted an onion on a cutting board and i think it’s the peak of my artistic career
the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.
"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.
"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.
I’m sorry to be The Asshole That Adds To Posts but I also think that a part (not the whole picture, but a part) of why art (all the arts) are so devalued is how they’re viewed through talent rather than through skill.
Like you said, people don’t know how much artists study - because “artists have talent.” And that’s it. You wake up and make it. You’re talented. The implication is you were blessed by some art-god and it came naturally.
What artists (of all kinds, and honestly craftspeople too) actually have is skill. Skill is created, nurtured, and worked for. A lot of my favorite paintings were done by Ivan Aivazovsky, and even a quick scan of his bio shows that he worked for that. He was in school for it, he took so many classes, went all over Europe to learn how to paint from different schools of thought. He nurtured and grew his skill.
Talent is a myth to keep “normal” people from trying to create art, and to keep artists from receiving any kind of fair compensation (socially or financially) for their knowledge. Skill is what you have, and that’s even more impressive: you built it from scratch. You’ve been creating from the beginning.
BTW for anyone too lazy to do the math a wage of $125 a day works out to about $15/hour for an 8-hour workday so..... someone in 1923 definitely had a vision of the future
not "I hate it here" as in "I want to leave" but "I hate it here" as in "this is a list of the 50 counties in the whole united states with the lowest life expectancy and Kentucky is 14 of them"
this was jumping off from recent kentuckyposting, but if you're american this list should radicalize you. It's just a parade of the evils of this nation
The US county with the lowest average life expectancy (as of 2014) is Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota. It is a Native American reservation with a 92.9% Native American population. The average life expectancy there is 66.81 years.
If it were a country, it would rank below 150th in worldwide average life expectancy.
The second county on the list is Union County, Florida, at 67.57 years. It has a high prison population—one-third of the county's population is incarcerated.
The list is dominated from there on by Native American reservations, counties in Mississippi with a 70%+ Black population, and Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia coal country.
But what if it was all a dream
This is more unsettling. I know it's there. I know it should be there. I know this pristine landscape is hiding its horrors like teeth.
So I think the best strat here is for the users who did get the new layout to just stop using the desktop version of the site for a while, like a week or a month or however long their 'experiment' is supposed to last, while the users who didn't get the new layout should keep using the desktop version like normal or, perhaps, use it even more than usual.
My guess is that they're doing basic A/B testing on the new layout to see if it would boost engagement: the userbase is split roughly 50/50 between the 2 versions and they are going to be comparing the engagement data between the 2 groups of users to see if it's worth it switching everyone to the new layout or not.
Basically, if you got the new layout and don't like it - don't use it. If engagement metrics of group B (new layout) are lower than those of group A (no change), the experiment will be considered a failure and they will have to reverse the change.
If your tumblr suddenly looks like twitter - it's a sign to log off and go touch some grass! (or just use the mobile app since that engagement data isn't relevant to this particular experiment)
Don't just not use it, send feedback too!
There's a "contact us" option to send feedback about features being launched. GIVE FEEDBACK IN THE APPROPRIATE SPACE!
Not to "As a professional UX researcher" on this thread, but yeah, as a professional UX researcher, now is the exact time to provide clear (but kind!! the poor UX team is usually not responsible for these decisions) feedback on what your thoughts are in regards to this change.
In my job, if I were doing an AB test on a site layout and every person I interviewed said "I hate it, it looks like knockoff twitter, please put the old one back" then I would be very excited to include a nice little bullet point in my report that says "[x] number of participants disliked the new layout :)"
They want feedback? Give it to them.
Don’t be cruel. But tell the truth.
My take (for those who care): Make this particular change optional. New users can adopt it if they like. Me? I seriously dislike the way it’s abusing the screen real estate I prefer after years of use.
Making the new dash arrangement mandatory (if I’m any indication) is going to seriously annoy many longtime users.
it obviously makes sense, but one of my friend’s kids is going into swim class, and all the parents got an email today going, “when little ones are scared, they cling on to instructors. PLEASE trim their nails.”
i don’t know why that’s so funny to me, but just. the idea of this poor, scratched swim instructor having to make sure to email before each class as a reminder to please declaw the children SENT me.
When I taught swim lessons I remember trying to delicately ask parents not to cover their child in shea/coconut/olive oil before lessons.
“I understand your skincare regimen and wanting to protect their tender baby flesh from the pool chemicals, but COULD YOU NOT OIL YOUR CHILD LIKE A GREASED PIG before tossing them in the POOL? Thanks EVER so much!”
@nakimochiku i CACKLED
Love opened a mortal wound.
In agony, I worked the blade.
To make it deeper.
Maybe someday I’ll fully finish this sad little comic strip