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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

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

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?

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

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

Replying to

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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Jonny in New Zealand

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My first thought when I saw this was that because you came up with the prompt, you're artist, the ai is just a brush or similar?

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Perhaps somebody commissioned a work on the basis of "a bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art" for $100 or something and they sort of dialled it in. Your assumptions about art and meaning aren't necessarily correct, just not so wrong that you find out.

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(Except in this instance everybody is telling you it was machine generated, instead of concealing it, so you find out.)

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You prompted DALL-E 2 and chose this image, you are the artist and so I think about you. No machine is ever fully autonomous, someone has to put it into motion and choose outputs and they take part in the creative process

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Bro, all I know is that that bowl of portal soup looks amazing. The rest is details.