The Colors of Her Coat

One of the critical differences about "this time" that is completely glossed over in this piece is that previous advances in "art technology" changed how one connects with an artist, but not the fact of connecting to an actual human artist. Art, for me, is about someone else sharing a piece of their soul with you through what they choose to express in their art. AI is a pile of linear algebra. I do not have any particular interest in communicating with matrices; I don't really feel they have much to add to my world. Perhaps you differ.

I do believe AI is a legitimate tool in a human artist's toolbox. I think it's one that's rather difficult to use well, but that isn't disqualifying per se.

What saddens me is how certain I am that nobody at OpenAI asked Hayao Miyazaki or anyone at Studio Ghibli for permission, not even to use their artwork to train their AI, but merely to use their signature art style as an example for demoing their technology.

Presumably if you're OpenAI and choosing showing that prompt as an example, it's because you have an appreciation for the artwork that created that style. Shouldn't you show those creators the respect of asking for permission? Not as a legal obligation, but a moral one, out of the very sense of appreciation for the source material that makes AI-Ghibli-homage artwork feel charming?

Hedonic adaptation seems destined to undo widespread appreciation for any progress, wonder, or joyful experience. That dampens the prospect that societies can become durably happier by banishing disease or poverty. But since hedonic adaptation is just perception, no more fundamentally real than an optical illusion, maybe other illusions can counter it.

A Shepard tone can produce the illusion of a sound that continually goes up in pitch, yet never goes beyond the range of human hearing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

Maybe there is some intervention that can produce a hedonic illusion along the same lines: rising joy every day as if you lived your best experiences for the first time, joy even if you are not socially elevated over others, joy that cannot be diminished by comparison or repetition. Since it's logically impossible for everyone to be The Cleverest, The Most Popular, or The Person With the Most Attractive Spouse, (much less to reach those pinnacles for the first time every day), improvements in quantifiable material conditions will not durably quell dissatisfaction at the population level. No more than better eyeglasses will end optical illusions. We need material improvements and we need perceptual counter-illusions against our natural illusion that things never really get better.

I think these highly-rational people are completely blind to the "soul"-like element of real art. (It doesn't help that 20th century art was full of people who were also blind to it.)

Roughly I would explain the way this works as: humans have actual phenomenological experiences as bodies in the physical world, which acts as the ground-truth for our subjective experiences.

Then, on top of this ground truth, accrue many layers of additional information—ideas, prejudices, labels, etc. LLMs, when they parrot human speech or artistic mediums, are able to reproduce many of the patterns in these higher layers. Fine.

We are especially attuned (as kids, say) to the physical presence of other humans, and to other living creatures and the natural world. And—if William James is to be believed—the experience of a sunset, say, when unobscured by these layers of ideas, is a nearly divine thing—seemingly alive in itself, or a gift bestowed by some will outside ourselves.

An artist, then who is very attuned with the subjective "ground truth", and capable in their medium, is able to make art which represents that ground truth such that our human nature recognizes as unmistakably human. This is not just a blob of information which accurately references the human experience, but is furthermore crafted just so that it strikes us as of the ground-truth-world itself, subverting or transcending those layers of ideas that obscure the fullness of feeling, by being perfectly tuned to human nature (by their own human nature).

Something like that, anyway. Perhaps an LLM could copy this too. That LLMs so far have failed to, though, is telling—every single LLM output (and many human outputs) read as cliche, kitsch, or mimicry.

Even if we assume an LLM could capture the latent "ground truth" in human art, there is additionally the element of "being in the room with the art". A painting simply does not equal the "information in the painting"—it is a physical object, itself part of the same world our bodies occupy, and this is part of its essence. Great art, we might say, is that which strikes our own human nature as a recognizable part of the "ground truth of reality", as opposed to a mere arrangement of information.

Generally this is most easily seen with live music. I've only ever felt the "ground truth" I'm describing around classical music, myself, because that's what I know, but I've seen enough to know that the thing all these AI art squabbles are about ain't it.

For more in this vein, from 90 years ago:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_o...

> And if instead you’re one of those people who constitutionally hates everything, then you spend eternity writing thinkpieces with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains?” or “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Crimson Seas Too Much?”, and God and the Devil both agree that this counts as sufficient punishment.

That's pretty much the reason why "salvation" is not merely synonymous with "a permit to enter Heaven" (even though this part seems to be often omitted in the teachings): you still need to untwist your soul and realign it with the Heaven's nature.

It's been weird going a year or two without really following astralcodexten and suddenly it's pivoted to All AI All The Time.

> Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications.

Claude? Claude as in the LLM Claude? You couldn’t find good numbers and then choose to source an LLM for this information? My god, if you can’t find certain information and an AI magically can it could very very well be that it’s just making it up.

"Do not worry about the rain. It is a part of nature and can be beautiful. If you learn to accept it, maybe you too will find its beauty", he says, while he is stealing the tiles from your roof.

TL;DR: By sheer force of will it is possible to ignore whatever socioeconomic forces have destroyed the previous generation’s great cultural works.

Well sure, it’s possible. But the dominant market & cultural forces win out in the long run. There are modern oil painters doing art that is technically better than “the masters”, but nobody knows their names because they’re orders of magnitude short of critical mass.

Always strange to see an author (I think Unsong was self-published? I don’t recall) act so callous towards the copyright of another artist. Perhaps it’s the change in media that makes it feel okay to him.

I think this article entirely misses the mark and misrepresent the article it itself quotes by Erik Hoel re: Ghibli.

It's not about making something that used to be difficult and scarce (obtaining lapis lazuli for creating the ultramarine pigment) into something that is readily available (synthetic ultramarine), but about saturation and cheaping of semantic meaning.

Studio Ghibli's movies are not valuable because they are scarce, they are valuable because there's meaning and joy in them that is not for instant gratification or cheap meme-making. Flooding the internet discourse with Ghibli memes is not "making the scarce more available", it's producing knock-offs that have the potential to saturate our collective minds and make them "inured" against the real Ghibli.

It's not about being a luddite or rejecting technological progress, it's about not wishing to see our culture destroyed with noise that drowns everything else. And yes, pop culture IS culture.

By the way, it's not about Ghibli, TFA-within-TFA also mentions Nabokov, just in case someone goes "I didn't like Ghibli to begin with, so what?".

The post claims that AIs will make helping people pointless because it will "end poverty and cure cancer without your help".