First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.

I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.

But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.

And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.

I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.

The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)

…pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.

18:30

[Reporter Dude] If you launch the coin, isn’t it unfair for you to snipe the coin?

[Shitcoin Wizard] ponders deeply I would say no.

[Reporter Dude] WTF did he just say that on the record?

For those who just can’t shake their Wordle habit:

Try https://duotrigordle.com/

32 times the Wordle and none of the NYT enshittification

While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.

We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.

The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison

That’s from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.

https://www.byom.de/trashmails/

Decent functionality, and it didn’t get flagged most of the time I used it.

can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.

The pivot-to-ai writeup is out, they did seed! I assume it’s documented then.

Multinational corporations can act ethically after all.

Did they seed at least?

Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!

Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I’d use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.

Fits a pattern I’ve seen before. Kinda critical of OpenAI and not buying their PR wholesale, but also accepting the framing that AI is some kind of critical foundational tech instead of another shitty magic trick.

I started liking https://izzys.casa/ after someone linked her meandering horror story on the C++ ecosystem on awful. All her posts seem to be written like that.

Dear god, my ribs are hurting after 2 paragraphs already.