AI effectively understands how to make poignant works (i.e. interesting poetry, funny memes all by generation) because each token has a “learned relation” to other tokens, and fulfilling or subverting those relationships is itself found as meaningful by observers
The blackpill here is that we are therefore absolutely swamped with potential symbolic relations posited as consumption or as “art”, and the current de facto nihilism considers all relations to be worthwhile for consumption
In fact I’d say that when you’re learning about movements, modes, genre or history of art — especially literature — the navigation is done by introducing meta-level relations, and then from there meta-meta-level relations. And of course, since this is based on the same mechanics that produces art to begin with, I expect that we’ll be able to spoof that too
So how do you choose what you consume? And what is found “most meaningful”? This used to be a moral distinction, until it seemed most worthwhile to shock — and then most worthwhile to represent the self in the artifice like a mirror, instead of changing the world — but it is often on my mind how to weigh things higher or lower, and not to just get lost looking up GAN art or ASMR or YouTube garbage the rest of my life
When I first saw this I felt like “it’s so weird to see how often we make these affiliations, name them, then watch them come apart so easily; nothing lasts more than a few years” — but then I discovered that they’re still around and I actually feel like it’s really cool that they’ve managed to create space for art in Malaysia for several decades
