Categories
Philosophy

Automating Creativity?

Does generative AI art limit or unleash our creative potential as artists, as human beings? If you consider our relationship to the visual data of the historical corpus of human creativity, the ability to automate creativity does not remove a discerning aesthetic choice from the this process. If nothing else, the sheer volume and diversity […]

Categories
Philosophy

Generative Art is Old

Generative AI is changing the world but it doesn’t really take much imagination to understand the transformative cultural shift invoked by this new technology is really only the revisitation of what has come before. Creativity in the visual arts has almost exclusively been a process defined by the endless revisitation and evolution of prior representational […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conceptual Creativity and Large Language Models

The waffling, meandering text more closely associated with stream of consciousness and creative thinking has been slowly bludgeoned into a relatively colourless glue-like soup for corporate, scientific and institutional communication. I mention this because these text-weaving AI tools are now quite rapidly taking the center of generative gravity in regards to the production of such […]

Categories
culture

Academic Stasis

Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological […]

Categories
art

Shocking AI Art is actually Nothing New

It’s certainly an interesting faultline, the arrival of all this AI-generated creative material. I suspect that, rather than devalue human creativity, and once the dust settles from the first few waves of grossly over-used generative AI design, an authenticated artist’s work will actually acquire more – not less – value. The general arc and trajectory […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Wrong Words

Have you ever found yourself quite eloquently incapable of cutting through the purely intractable boundaries which condense between concept and utterance? The efferevescing liminalities between the images in your mind and the words with which you speak (and write) them sediment themselves between the structured experience of lived memory and the barren skeletons of orchestrated […]

Categories
culture

Starry, Starry Night: an Artist’s Burden

The artist’s burden as unbounded, unrecognised arc and trajectory is really a microcosm of the resistance to change and insight (as individuality, creativity, compassion) that we all face in life. An irony of this is that, not only is an artist’s message so rarely understood or acknowledged during their own lifetimes, but this obscurity is […]

Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]

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Uncategorized

The Purpose of Neurodiversity

Context: Research on Recognizing Facial Emotion Expressions Could Change Our Understanding of Autism Interesting. The subtle irony here is that the historical (and plausibly paradigmatic) misunderstanding of human aptitude under one target variable reveals more about the science and the underlying cultural assumptions than it does about the experimental subjects. I love a good inversion […]

Categories
creativity

Creative Cognitive Semantics

From the article: “participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient”. So, creative utility is a function of a globally-distributed semantic potential (as memory, encoding, storage). The more semantic combinatorial possibility, the greater the potential creative “depth” of a cognitive system. If “creative cognition involves […]

Categories
creativity ignorance imagination

On the value of not stealing ideas…

…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Appetite for Destruction: the Aesthetics of War

As a species, we seem positively bound to cyclical, constructive inflation and reinvention of the artefacts, entities and cultural systems that quite naturally sediment in and as shared memory around such catastrophic historical episodes. The essence of history has been this headlong rush into cataclysmic violence, followed as denouement by much gentler growth and cultural […]