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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

a little girl walks up to you holding a flower wreath. she says "i made this for you!" and gestures for you to bend down so she can put it on your head. in that moment, do you care about the fact that millions of other people could have made a flower wreath as good or better?

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@this_is_silvia

something something art made by humans has a Soul

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

when another person makes art and shows it to you they are establishing a line of communication between their soul and yours. that's what art is for. AI-generated art is confusing because we don't have a felt understanding of the soul of its creator

10:16 PM · Apr 14, 2022Twitter Web App

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

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does DALL-E 2 have a soul? how ought we conceive of it? a fledgling idiot savant slaving away in the pixel mines for its pitiless masters? a slurry of art drawn by humans intelligently regurgitated on command? does it want things? does it dream?

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

this is DALL-E 2 generating "A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art." if i was told a person made this i might wonder what it means to them. what is the significance of soup as a symbol for them? does the portal take you home or on an adventure?

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

but a person didn't make this. so what does it mean? it's a dream without a dreamer. presumably DALL-E 2 came to understand the meaning of "digital art" from its training data, so there are bits and pieces of the souls of human digital artists in there and then... what?

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

i don't really have anywhere i'm going with this but in conclusion we should read pierre menard, author of the quixote, and maybe also library of babel, and reflect on them both in this context raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Eng

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Did you read Tolstoy's What is Art? If I remember his view is pretty much that.

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I love making art for other people, for me it's a kind of metta practice.

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The example with the little girl is primarily an example of gift-giving, and only secondarily of making art, if at all. If the little girl made the wreath entirely by following rules and according to a plan, then the wreath is art only if DALL-E's work is.