Tag: pontificating

Brandon Sanderson offers his view on why AI art is not art. I highly recommend watching the whole video, it’s very entertaining and he makes a lot of good points from the perspective of those who make art.

I’m more of a consumer than a creator (although I do play guitar which scratches the itch), and my view on art and AI is that what makes art valuable to me is the context in which the art is made. It’s why I can hear the same song played by two different musicians and one version moves you more than another.

My example of this is listening to Townes Van Zandt play covers of songs, and they hit different. Knowing who he was as a person and the struggles he had throughout life really change how you experience a song. The pain is something you can hear in a raspy voice that is the result of years of smoking and hard living.

To echo, but slightly modify, Brandon’s point here, no matter how good AI gets at making art, it won’t have the same impact on me as a consumer because it’s completely void of any context that would give it meaning. 

Something happened to me a couple of weeks ago that gave me pause. I found a bright, green leaf in the middle of my driveway. This might not sound like a notable event, but it's the end of winter, and all the trees around me are barren, awaiting spring to create their buds.

To me, this looks like a full, summertime leaf, maybe from a maple tree. It really disoriented me, I had to stop what I was doing and ponder what was going on. Is reality breaking? Is the simulation throwing exceptions? Is the increase in compute usage in our world (due to increases in usage of AI and crypto) causing our host reality to lag out and add sprites in the wrong places? These are the thoughts that flooded my brain.

I've been thinking about that leaf for a while. I finally realized I live in the 21st century and can identity the leaf with my phone, and maybe that would offer a clue to my mystery. And yeah, it's Common Ivy, an evergreen plant. Mystery solved.

While this was a silly, and to me, quite funny little freak out, it has me wondering what things other people have stumbled across in the world that seemed so completely out of place, that it could only be by some non-natural means. I'm sure this happens to every one at some point in their lives.

Fell in love with brown rice today.. It tastes so good, is much healthier.. Why have I avoided it my whole life? Going forward I think it will become my main driver.

Only con I can think of is it does take a while longer to cook.