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Reposted by #BruceSterling

Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 1d

White House staff should just make and show him an AI-generated video where he wins, fly him to Duluth and tell him it’s Oslo, and dare the New York Times to say anything more than “Experts disagree about whether Mr Trump was awarded the Nobel Prize”.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*I think that newer image is a minor improvement, because it's got more of the "LLM-WTF cognitive dissonance" thing going on, but for some reason I hate to nag them to do-any-better

*It always feels like retouching a spontaneous photo with white-out

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

"The background is too vague and out of focus. Put all the urban people in Victorian costumes, and sharpen up every detail in the obsessive William Holman Hunt style of PreRaphaelite realism. Also, put some brush-stroke texture in it so that it looks more like an oil painting."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

"Remake this image so that it is hand-painted by William Holman Hunt in a very meticulous PreRaphaelite style. Make the model into a Victorian PreRaphaelite "stunner" model, with huge flowing hair in the PreRaphaelite style. Make sure that the T-shirt logo is visible."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*"That's very nice. Now please show the same photograph, with the same identical T-shirt, but taken in the black and white Pictorialist style of Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. Also, transform the woman into the young Georgia O'Keeffe, who is modelling for Stieglitz."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

"Please show this stencil image as a popular image printed on a black decorative T-shirt, as T-shirt band merchandise being worn by a female techno-music fan in the city of Cologne, Germany."

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*But Mr Sterling! Is that even an 'artwork'?! That's more like a far-fetched cyberpunk hack, isn't it? What the heck is even going on with an off-the-wall scheme like that

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*What can you actually DO with a "useless" AI-generated pseudo-stencil that can't possibly ever work as a stencil

*Well, maybe you cut it out of sticky-tape (so that the broken parts hold together) and then you screen-print a T-shirt using wood-glue as substitute vinyl

youtu.be/-KMe4nW40Os?...

The Absolute Easiest Way to Screenprint (no chemicals, no burning needed)

YouTube video by Laura Kampf

youtu.be

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*What can you actually DO with a "useless" AI-generated pseudo-stencil that can't possibly ever work as a stencil

*Well, maybe you cut it out of sticky-tape (so that the broken parts hold together) and then you screen-print a T-shirt using wood-glue as substitute vinyl

youtu.be/-KMe4nW40Os?...

The Absolute Easiest Way to Screenprint (no chemicals, no burning needed)

YouTube video by Laura Kampf

youtu.be

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*But if you already ARE a Processing guy and you're looking at the advent of LLMs, you're just as startled and horrified as everybody else, and maybe more so

*In your world, "being generative" was FUN, it wasn't like Apple violently crushing everybody's easels and pianos into a wafer-thin iPhone

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Do you need, maybe, a pet open-source LLM like "Processing" code, like a quasi-academic user-group goldfish-bowl built and intended for the expressive purposes of code-artists

"Since 2001!" etc etc

processing.org

Welcome to Processing!

Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology...

processing.org

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*It's much harder to point out the artistic *merits* of LLM, like, what these systems can do in the art-world that's novel and interesting and engaging, and might represent some kind of "advancement"

*Like: how to get artistically better at prompting a system that's better-designed

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*In the case of "LLM art," it's been difficult to point out the natures of its "mistakes" are and what it "doesn't understand"

*Until there's some obvious seven-fingered freaky blowout, then everybody points at it and laughs

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*In point of fact I do endlessly spool Chopin mazurkas, but if you do that, eventually you start hearing it and you can tell when Frederic is having an off day

*You can't just say, "Hey magical genius, charm me indefinitely"

*Kind of a George Sand Syndrome, like: enough is too much

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

"Hey Mr Technology-Art Critic, why do you struggle so much with images and music that no sane person should actually like"

"Why don't you just endlessly spool Chopin mazurkas

zefirrecords.bandcamp.com/album/57-maz...

57 Mazurki, by Maurice Lammerts van Bueren, piano - Frédéric Chopin, composer

57 track album

zefirrecords.bandcamp.com

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Eventually Ruskin has to pick a major public fight with Whistler because *Whistler's not putting in the work hours." Whistler, you're not even "painting," you're just lazily slopping colored pigments on the canvas and expecting the rest of us to pay you for that #slop

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*While actual PreRaphaelite pics *aren't* phony replications. Instead they're doing all kinds of sweaty, laborious Ruskinian Christian-Socialist stuff about getting hand-painted textures of dried mud and goat-hair "exactly right"

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Here's a "Pictorialist" pic. It's sweet to look at and it's really easy on the eyes, but it's basically a PreRaphaelite oil-painting rendered in black-and-white photographic grain

*It's pretty, but unfortunately, it also has that Midjourney phoniness about it

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictori...

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*I don't like mashups. However, I do like DJ sets, which are more-or-less extended slow-motion mashups where one track blends into the next

youtu.be/KnPUqeVLWlg?...

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Well, yeah, because it's "glitch art." I get it about the merits of glitch art, but it's limiting because it's more of an intervention than an expression

*You have to understand the context of its production for the image to make any sense to the viewer

Marius Loots @mariusloots.bsky.social · 1d

You might enjoy this Welsh story...?

bsky.app/profile/avk....

AVK @avk.bsky.social · 1d

2/9

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Personally, I'm in the Man Ray school where you wanna take the camera apart and drop pins and needles right on the naked film, but I understand that this stark-naked truth about the medium-per-se is always gonna be a minority taste

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*It's like photographic "Pictorialism," where you're an artsy photographer who understands the manual techniques of oil-painting. So you're busy in your darkroom with the development-fluids making the negative look more "painterly"

*So that it's clearly seen as "art"

100asa.com/blog/ten-of-...

Ten of the Most Influential Movements in the History of Photography | 100ASA

Throughout the history of Photography, many photographers and artists came together, creating movements from their mindset and work.

100asa.com

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*You might "fix it," by hooking up a corrective physics agent that leaps into action when it hears the tokens for "stencil," but that's the aesthetics of a generative system

*It's like "correcting" a watercolor because it's "too watery"

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*This generated pseudo-stencil is going to fall apart because a system of tokens and pixels has no direct connection to the physics of cutting shaped holes in cardboard

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*What does illustrated AI-slop prompted by an 1830 Bulwer-Lytton novel have to do with a semicomical mashup of Enya with The Prodigy

*A whole lot. They both have an aesthetic uncanny-valley thing going on

*It takes a more exhausting effort to "appreciate" them than it does to create them

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 1d

*Everybody quotes Bulwer-Lytton's "It was a dark and stormy night," but have you ever seen it fully illustrated in the pseudo-style of the year 1830 and also quoted really badly. #slop #GoogleAI

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