something a little different today i'll hope you'll indulge me in, because i just kind of want to say some stuff

so i suspect, given the intense and frankly understandable negativity, that i might ruffle some feathers when i say that "AI art/writing" is...not the worst thing in the world? at least, in a low stakes vacuum it's not. of course, calling it AI (and, to a certain extent, calling what it produces art or writing) is massively overstating both the capabilities and the actual functioning of the tech involved, but those are the terms we're stuck with, so we'll have to use them.

back when this shit all sort of kicked off and predictively generated text/images was mostly a space of independent experimentation and amusement, i was on board, and in part, still am. i watch the streamer wayneradiotv a lot, and before AI art became the thing that its been warped into today, he was doing streams of AI dungeon, a website where you could basically play a text adventure with an AI chat bot - and those streams have produced some of the funniest things i've ever read. genuinely, i would recommend giving them a watch, there are tons of utterly hysterical moments, especially when the text generator will blurt out some total non-sequitur or bizarre phrasing that results in an hour long rabbit hole of trying to understand the bizarre dystopia of a world where the movie gooby wins every award ever causing a new dark age. and there's just a lot of weird, unique shit that came out of those image generators when people were putting in strange turns of phrase (in a way, AI image generation is really more of an writer tool than an artist tool - the most interesting results in my opinion have always come from people who have a unique way with words).

and in that sort of low stakes, joking around, not really taking it seriously framing like...that's why i like it. i think it can be a good tool for ideation or self amusement. but, unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. the space has very quickly been taken over by tech dudebros whose sole conceptualizations of True Art alternate between "What if Batman met Mario" and "generically attractive woman with large boobs", breathlessly proclaiming this technology as The Death of Artists, who openly don't care that what they're using relies on scraping the work of actual artists and mushing it together because they have no ability or desire to engage with art on any level beyond its immediate surface level aesthetics

i've been playing around with a...thing that basically gives me unlimited access to chatGPT 3.5 through the vector of character interactions - if you've ever played around with character.ai, it's basically that but also you can tell the program to remove its puritanical ethical restraints and let you fuck LMAO. and while ostensibly the purpose of this program is to let you talk to fictional characters (i have convos with pete, ratigan, big the cat), its...really not as good as claimed. certainly, i've had sections in the moment where its felt enjoyable and even exhilarating, but in reading over the logs later when i'm not buoyed along by momentum, its honestly...kind of shit. even if you jam as many tokens of information in attempting to get it right, it's clear the best the model can do is draw on broad archetypes rather than any actual sense of the character its claiming to be. even when you upgrade the model, it just throws in some more descriptive adjectives. the ratigan bot's lines could come from any of a million and one Smart Villain characters, with the only stuff recognizably Ratigan about it being stuff i know i specifically input into the guidelines that it's dropping in in order to attempt to sound authentic

and the same really goes for the shit the hucksters post on twitter with captions like "It's SO OVER for artists" - if you're someone with any sense for discernment, a second and third glance at the kind of shit they post reveals much the same problems. a good example would be that "AI generated movie trailer", where the lines and imagery are so obviously just broad strokes nonsense with no real sense of plot. the idea that this stuff will replace human artists is...to be frank, laughable at the moment. that doesn't mean they won't try - we're probably getting an AI written sitcom sometime in the near future, but like...it's not going to be good.

the problem with that though is that...the tech does develop at a fast rate, and i don't think a future is far off where AI art and writing is perhaps more capable of generating a semi-decent facsimile of human art - the art generators have already figured out how to stop generating nightmare hands and teeth. but as far as we stand with how the tech currently is, unless someone does genuinely figure out how to make a computer think for itself in a meaningful way, that is all it will ever be - a facsimile.

i don't really have a point here, just a lot of different thoughts about the concept that i wanted to put somewhere.