Finished reading: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s a big book with diverse parts so I have big and diverse feelings about it. 📚
Finished reading: Saving Time by Jenny Odell 📚
Perhaps [‘the history of anarchism, almost alone among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure.’]; but its failures are different and less shameful than the failures of Marxism. There are many ways for a social movement to fail, and I prefer those that don’t result in the murder of tens of millions of human beings.
Maybe a good question for leaders of any social movement: how will you fail? Failure is guaranteed but not all failure is equal.
A great test for Large Language Model AI’s would be to remove some artist’s specific work and see if it could be anticipated based on the remaining work. I don’t think the nature of super large datasets would ever allow this, though.
Finished reading: Across the Everglades by Hugh Laussat Willoughby 📚
Finished reading: I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven 📚
The First Battleground of the Age of AI Is Art
Kottke says:
Like, just think about how powerful this is: normal people who have ideas but lack technical skills can now create imagery. Is it art? Perhaps not in most cases, but some of it will be.
My definition of art is “craft + courage.” I think it’s pretty clear that typing a prompt into a text box to make art isn’t an act of courage. So for now I’ll say that generating images using AI – especially in honing the prompts – is craft but not art.
Finished reading: The 2 Oz. Backpacker by Robert S. Wood 📚
Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚
Finished reading: The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry 📚