"It’s frivolous to invoke classism and ableism and the like to talk about using AI tools for literary work, but it’s equally frivolous to dismiss the possibility of using such tools for serious artistic purposes, like someone saying in 1895 that there will be no legitimate artistic use for photography." —On of the most promising directions seems to be the use of AI art as a randomizer in the manner of the surrealists, who would often use techniques such as frottage, dream imagery, strange juxtapositions, etc. AI image generators could be the ideal way to bring randomness into an artists' working practice; in this regard, I kind of wish we could jump back to the AI image engines of a few years ago, which were much more wildly random and not as stylistically calcified as they are today.
Do you think the experience of beauty-in-nature is meaningfully different than that of beauty-in-art? Or more pertinently, is 'being-moved-by-the-beauty-of-nature' meaningfully different than 'being-moved-by-the-beauty-of-art'? Personally, I am not really sure there is a difference, and I'm at least unconvinced that many artists would choose the beauty-of-art over the beauty-of-nature (that is, if you had to choose between a semi-Edenic planet in which art-creation was punished by death (and all pre-existing art was destroyed) versus a 6ft by 6ft cell in which 'all hitherto existing art was accessible' in the original (that is, the actual, concrete, individual Cezannes, etc) and you were paid to be relentlessly inspired by it. Or rather, doesn't the argument above play into the idea that 'nature is more beautiful when you know it has an author,' an idea which I think most contemporary artists would reject? I suppose my point is something like this: art-beauty is a version of nature which follows from the rupture of subjectivity, nature-beauty is simply a part of nature (no such rupture). The products of AI fall clearly into the former category, to the extent that they are beautiful, and there is no particular reason to say things like 'I value Don Quixote more than this sparrow which, all ruptures in subjectivity aside, suddenly alighted, on my window sill this morning.' One only need to say this if a certain political agent put the sparrow on your shelf for the purpose of undermining your valuation of Don Quixote, and to the extent that AI is such a political agent, I agree with you. But I find it hard to see, in a more fundamental sense, how AI is less natural than a sparrow, etc, and how can, conceptually, it can plausible be included with art except to the extent that what it is is systematically misunderstood (I mean, I think the argument you give is ultimately pedagogical).
The beauty of art and the beauty of nature are meaningless without each other. Nature when not enframed by the inherent aestheticizing eye of the human being would only appear to us as a chaos—there is no "nature" before the rupture of subjectivity—while an art not based upon the aestheticization of the natural or at least of the real is similarly empty. "Nature is more beautiful when you know it has an author" is true (I never promised I wouldn't make such an argument), but the author is us, and through us nature's own way of having an experience of itself. The art itself is nature. Because we made AI, its art is a further step in this dance of nature-becoming-art and art-becoming-nature.
"Nature's own way of having an experience of itself" is a cute phrase, but is it so different from the idea that God created humans so he can boast of His Creation? ("Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.") The fact that AI (like everything else) is ultimately part of Nature doesn't tell us much: so are tuberculosis and the hydrogen bomb. Will AI make it any easier to absorb nature's wisdom channelled through artistic genius?
I stole the phrase from the YouTube/TikTok mystics, who stole it (I think) from Alan Watts, but it seems like a good gloss on Romantic metaphysics too, pretty Hegelian. No, you're right, it's still a bad "answer to Job," but maybe there are no good answers to Job.
I'm implicitly betting that neither the utopian nor the dystopian scenarios will come to pass and that AI will be more like photography (to repeat my analogy from the post) than like the H-bomb—and photography (especially via cinema etc.) probably did add to our ability "to absorb nature's wisdom channelled through artistic genius." But we'll see!
Yes, I remember the phrase from Watts, which when I heard it years ago, did help to keep my eyes on the horizon.
The analogy with photography is apt, noting Sontag's critique of how the medium has indeed in some ways degraded our experience of the world. But what is the alternative? Butlerian Jihad? The cut worm forgives the plow.
You read my mind...I was thinking about Sontag's move from the dystopian and deterministic view in On Photography to the more moderate "it depends how you use it" view in Regarding the Pain of Others
Could you elaborate on "the rupture of subjectivity" being constitutive of art-beauty, but not nature-beauty? I find it difficult to reconcile with the experience of beauty-in-nature not being meaningfully different from the experience of beauty-in-art.
Hello! I think I meant that in the experience of art-beauty versus nature-beauty, there's not much meaningful difference (as far as I can tell), like the beauty of a poem registers to me in the same type of way the beauty of a rock formation does, but in the ontology of art-beauty versus nature-beauty, there is (or seems to be) a striking difference (one containing the rupture, the other not). I think there's no point trying to define things from experience, so in a sense its not conceptually relevant that my experience of the two is the same, so definitionally/conceptually, it's more relevant that there is this subjective rupture, even if it is never experienced, or is unexperiencable. To be honest I don't know what I think about AI yet / ever..!
Re that tyson duffy essay I'm reading the last sally rooney book right now and I'm surprised at how much the style feels like an explicit riposte to the kind of standard "lyrical" twee-cutesy metaphoric MFA prose. It's almost completely descriptive and flat, it feels a bit like watching Netflix but as far as big contemporary novels go I suppose I prefer it to the nauseating Doerr style. Apparently her new one has a bit more joyce and woolf in the mix though, maybe she will find a good middle ground.
Re re-reading: I’m totally in favor of it (like Nabokov, who I just did a series on). I don’t care if it’s related to “conservative cultural consolidation” or “the fear of death” or whatever. If a book is any good, re-reading reveals new things about it. If a book gets better on a re-read, that’s a sign of quality.
Partly I think this is just a matter of what you’re looking for. You can only do a thing for the first time once, so if you want to preserve a certain memory in its pristine form, it makes no sense to do it again. I tend to regard reading as a quest to find favorites, books I can keep going back to, with more discoveries to be made as I get to know them better. Therefore re-reading is necessary.
Also, I do like that quote from Karl Kraus: “You must read all writers twice, the good and the bad. You will recognize the former and unmask the latter.”
Yes, totally agree about the irrelevance of the Freudo-Marxian guilt trip, and about seeking new favorites to return to. I just think there's a tension in the novel as a form between motion and stasis and that it's possible to go too far in either direction—unless you go so far that, as in Ulysses, the novel becomes almost pure poetry and the distinction irrelevant. Below that particular level, though, I probably prefer Dostoevsky to Flaubert.
Thanks! Seems too artificially abbreviated to bear that weight of style, a lot of rhetorical insistence on what isn't developed and can't be in the space, and very under the spell of Bellow. Considering the incident narrated, I might have let it breathe, Dubliners-style. It could have been a poem or a chapter in a novel, but what it is is awkwardly caught between these two, in my no doubt too fastidious judgment.
"It’s frivolous to invoke classism and ableism and the like to talk about using AI tools for literary work, but it’s equally frivolous to dismiss the possibility of using such tools for serious artistic purposes, like someone saying in 1895 that there will be no legitimate artistic use for photography." —On of the most promising directions seems to be the use of AI art as a randomizer in the manner of the surrealists, who would often use techniques such as frottage, dream imagery, strange juxtapositions, etc. AI image generators could be the ideal way to bring randomness into an artists' working practice; in this regard, I kind of wish we could jump back to the AI image engines of a few years ago, which were much more wildly random and not as stylistically calcified as they are today.
Thanks, I very much agree with this idea.
Do you think the experience of beauty-in-nature is meaningfully different than that of beauty-in-art? Or more pertinently, is 'being-moved-by-the-beauty-of-nature' meaningfully different than 'being-moved-by-the-beauty-of-art'? Personally, I am not really sure there is a difference, and I'm at least unconvinced that many artists would choose the beauty-of-art over the beauty-of-nature (that is, if you had to choose between a semi-Edenic planet in which art-creation was punished by death (and all pre-existing art was destroyed) versus a 6ft by 6ft cell in which 'all hitherto existing art was accessible' in the original (that is, the actual, concrete, individual Cezannes, etc) and you were paid to be relentlessly inspired by it. Or rather, doesn't the argument above play into the idea that 'nature is more beautiful when you know it has an author,' an idea which I think most contemporary artists would reject? I suppose my point is something like this: art-beauty is a version of nature which follows from the rupture of subjectivity, nature-beauty is simply a part of nature (no such rupture). The products of AI fall clearly into the former category, to the extent that they are beautiful, and there is no particular reason to say things like 'I value Don Quixote more than this sparrow which, all ruptures in subjectivity aside, suddenly alighted, on my window sill this morning.' One only need to say this if a certain political agent put the sparrow on your shelf for the purpose of undermining your valuation of Don Quixote, and to the extent that AI is such a political agent, I agree with you. But I find it hard to see, in a more fundamental sense, how AI is less natural than a sparrow, etc, and how can, conceptually, it can plausible be included with art except to the extent that what it is is systematically misunderstood (I mean, I think the argument you give is ultimately pedagogical).
The beauty of art and the beauty of nature are meaningless without each other. Nature when not enframed by the inherent aestheticizing eye of the human being would only appear to us as a chaos—there is no "nature" before the rupture of subjectivity—while an art not based upon the aestheticization of the natural or at least of the real is similarly empty. "Nature is more beautiful when you know it has an author" is true (I never promised I wouldn't make such an argument), but the author is us, and through us nature's own way of having an experience of itself. The art itself is nature. Because we made AI, its art is a further step in this dance of nature-becoming-art and art-becoming-nature.
"Nature's own way of having an experience of itself" is a cute phrase, but is it so different from the idea that God created humans so he can boast of His Creation? ("Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand.") The fact that AI (like everything else) is ultimately part of Nature doesn't tell us much: so are tuberculosis and the hydrogen bomb. Will AI make it any easier to absorb nature's wisdom channelled through artistic genius?
I stole the phrase from the YouTube/TikTok mystics, who stole it (I think) from Alan Watts, but it seems like a good gloss on Romantic metaphysics too, pretty Hegelian. No, you're right, it's still a bad "answer to Job," but maybe there are no good answers to Job.
I'm implicitly betting that neither the utopian nor the dystopian scenarios will come to pass and that AI will be more like photography (to repeat my analogy from the post) than like the H-bomb—and photography (especially via cinema etc.) probably did add to our ability "to absorb nature's wisdom channelled through artistic genius." But we'll see!
Yes, I remember the phrase from Watts, which when I heard it years ago, did help to keep my eyes on the horizon.
The analogy with photography is apt, noting Sontag's critique of how the medium has indeed in some ways degraded our experience of the world. But what is the alternative? Butlerian Jihad? The cut worm forgives the plow.
You read my mind...I was thinking about Sontag's move from the dystopian and deterministic view in On Photography to the more moderate "it depends how you use it" view in Regarding the Pain of Others
Could you elaborate on "the rupture of subjectivity" being constitutive of art-beauty, but not nature-beauty? I find it difficult to reconcile with the experience of beauty-in-nature not being meaningfully different from the experience of beauty-in-art.
Hello! I think I meant that in the experience of art-beauty versus nature-beauty, there's not much meaningful difference (as far as I can tell), like the beauty of a poem registers to me in the same type of way the beauty of a rock formation does, but in the ontology of art-beauty versus nature-beauty, there is (or seems to be) a striking difference (one containing the rupture, the other not). I think there's no point trying to define things from experience, so in a sense its not conceptually relevant that my experience of the two is the same, so definitionally/conceptually, it's more relevant that there is this subjective rupture, even if it is never experienced, or is unexperiencable. To be honest I don't know what I think about AI yet / ever..!
Re that tyson duffy essay I'm reading the last sally rooney book right now and I'm surprised at how much the style feels like an explicit riposte to the kind of standard "lyrical" twee-cutesy metaphoric MFA prose. It's almost completely descriptive and flat, it feels a bit like watching Netflix but as far as big contemporary novels go I suppose I prefer it to the nauseating Doerr style. Apparently her new one has a bit more joyce and woolf in the mix though, maybe she will find a good middle ground.
Yes, flat clarity is better than bad lyricism, but that seems like a false choice. What about good lyricism?
Yes it’s not my favorite for that reason, goes down too smooth. She does have talent though and for all her leftist views can clearly read the market.
Re re-reading: I’m totally in favor of it (like Nabokov, who I just did a series on). I don’t care if it’s related to “conservative cultural consolidation” or “the fear of death” or whatever. If a book is any good, re-reading reveals new things about it. If a book gets better on a re-read, that’s a sign of quality.
Partly I think this is just a matter of what you’re looking for. You can only do a thing for the first time once, so if you want to preserve a certain memory in its pristine form, it makes no sense to do it again. I tend to regard reading as a quest to find favorites, books I can keep going back to, with more discoveries to be made as I get to know them better. Therefore re-reading is necessary.
Also, I do like that quote from Karl Kraus: “You must read all writers twice, the good and the bad. You will recognize the former and unmask the latter.”
Yes, totally agree about the irrelevance of the Freudo-Marxian guilt trip, and about seeking new favorites to return to. I just think there's a tension in the novel as a form between motion and stasis and that it's possible to go too far in either direction—unless you go so far that, as in Ulysses, the novel becomes almost pure poetry and the distinction irrelevant. Below that particular level, though, I probably prefer Dostoevsky to Flaubert.
re: Leonard Michaels, a good test case might be his (very) short story "Murderers" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1znuwJN1nAPIO_LQ972Pf1eafYjk58h2nz4QKz_xfVpw/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks! Seems too artificially abbreviated to bear that weight of style, a lot of rhetorical insistence on what isn't developed and can't be in the space, and very under the spell of Bellow. Considering the incident narrated, I might have let it breathe, Dubliners-style. It could have been a poem or a chapter in a novel, but what it is is awkwardly caught between these two, in my no doubt too fastidious judgment.