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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?

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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?

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

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

Replying to

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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@oneironautical

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Or everything is dreaming. Every computer, rock, shoe, tree, rubber duck. Dreams nested within dreams.

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"bits and pieces of the souls of human" same can be said of Google translate

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grasshopper friends

Replying to

it's a reflection of a collective dream, right? i've been thinking recently about laws as collective speech -- i get really angry at the speech itself, sometimes, but there isn't a person to direct the anger to. it comes from us. a messy, distorted, us.

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grasshopper friends

so in the same way when I ask "why did this law get passed" "what does this law mean about the world," the answer is -- it meant different things to different people, it was echoing these desires and fears. the bowl of soup is the same. we're just not used to collective art yet

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you seem to be struggling with something; you seem like you have tension about something here. is something lacking for you?