brettworks

• An essay by Ted Chiang about why AI-generated art isn’t real art.

“Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.”

“An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.”

“The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.”

“Art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate ‘large-scale’ with ‘important’ when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.”

“[AI] is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”

• An essay by Paul Graham on the right kind of stubbornness.

“When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn’t resemble obstinacy at all. It’s so much more complex. Five distinct qualities—energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal—combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don’t give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you’re driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You’ll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.”

• Asics Superblast. If you run (or walk long) try these best-in-class running shoes. Superblasts are remarkably lightweight, cushioned, and dynamic. Wearing them you’ll move effortlessly, like a gazelle. You’re welcome.