Art and Artifice

https://archive.ph/PPvGF

the question to me is, if art is a way for people to scratch out a bit of dignity and meaning in this life by finding and expressing something essential, what is it about AI that is so obviously in opposition to that value?

we don't like to talk about dignity because it shows some materialist beliefs as hollow artifacts of narrative that we can now simulate with some python scripts- but it's becoming suddenly urgent. What is still Art in an age of AI will likely form the map of what is still essential human dignity and experience vs. simulated experiences.

It sounds handwavy, but consider that if AI persuades people nothing is essential, then nothing is true or actually means anything, then there is no ethical backstop against atrocities and "state of nature," stuff. "Real Art" is the canary for that, imo. I'm not against AI or anything, but I do think it is suddenly on artists to get their shit together and demonstrate some essential humanity, or they will just be consumed by those with the reins of AI who would seek to deprive us all of it.

> Following Stephen Dedalus’s theory of art in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Martel draws a sharp distinction between art and artifice, and breaks down artifice into two categories. At one end of the continuum are advertising and pornography—works engineered to create desire for the thing one sees—and at the other end are propaganda and rhetoric—works engineered to inflame people’s emotions and to steer them toward acting or thinking or voting a certain way.

Okay but who is that and why do we care - and crucially, at which ends of that continuum lie Art and Artifice respectively? Is art pornography? Is artifice propaganda? Or vice versa? Does it even make sense to place pornography and propaganda on opposite ends of a spectrum?

Who cares, the article doesn’t explain and has already moved on to whatever’s next.

> Martel tells us that, according to Joyce

This is so unsatisfying. tell me what you mean, don’t just reference things at me!

This seems like it’s missing the point. Art deconstructs communication and therefore both creates the illusion of truth and represents the illusion of truth, showing us that it’s an illusion. Art can easily use political and moral interests to seduce its audience and does so often.

“Instead, the Real that art helps us come into contact with is something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter Benjamin called the “true surrealist face of existence.” This is not the surrealism of predictive AI—endlessly recircling within its own sidewindings and elisions—but the bizarre wide-open Real out on the edges of experience, which has a good deal less to do with the measurable, quantifiable, empirical world than with the unseen possible: whether hidden aspects of the future simmering invisibly in the present, or mysteries so giant and unpredictable that science can’t begin to approach them.”

And what makes you think this is different than AI? Seems kinda like the author almost came to a valuable conclusion and then shook it off because they didn’t like the implications.

“But if true art is an instrument for transcendence and cognitive freedom, then artifice—art’s look-alike—is a homogenizing force that blocks off possibilities and alternate modes of being”

Now we get to the most boring and annoying tendencies of pretty much every piece of philosophy or criticism from the 18th/19th century: “hey guys I have a new philosophy. There is something that’s perfect and wonderful but it’s difference from this new thing I’m gonna define that looks the exact same but is actually evil and terrible. There’s no way to differentiate between the two except by vibes. It’s kinda just like God and Satan… almost like I just took my weird puritan religious values and recreated them in this other field of study for no reason. Also you know all those questions about my previous definition of art? All of them are answered because I’ll just classify any exceptions as this evil and terrible thing.”

There's more to do with this great seeing than to create art and rage that apes won't give you the respect you deserve. The seeing can free you too. You don't need them.