#or like when i post something and its like ok some of that was good but u def gave up halfway thru one of those lol

[canmom]

This an interesting angle. I've never been particularly taken with trying to determine True Art from False Art on the basis of specific qualities of the piece.

(I did ok-ish but not exceptionally on the AI art quiz, probably with a slight bias for misattributing human pieces as AI ones - like many other respondees, I found the Impressionist pieces hardest to distinguish, since they very much play to the AI's strengths.)

There are many different ways you could describe "art" as a human activity, I'm sure there's a post somewhere where I make a list, but a really big one is its communicative function - one purpose of art is to somehow pass on some aspect of our 'inner world' to another person, through a lossy and limited channel.

That a signal can be easily imitated doesn't mean it doesn't carry contextual information. For example, I could ask a yes/no question of enormous emotional importance - "should I take the shot", "has the baby been born", "will you go out with me", "am I a good girl" - and be answered with either "yes" or "no". It would be trivial to generate a machine which randomly substitutes for this communication - that's basically all a magic eight-ball is.

The amount of information that can be contained in an image of a given size and colour depth can also be calculated. For example, the number of fullscreen images that would fill my current monitor at 8 bits per channel would be 2^(3440 × 1440 × 24) ≈ 3 × 10^35788372 - about 15 megabytes uncompressed. It's a number that seems astronomically huge, though effectively the amount of information is much less than you'd calculate since all the likely pixels are correlated. The same goes for other art forms, like novels (encoded as, say, UTF-8 strings or PDFs) or pieces of music (encoded as sound files, MIDI, MuseScore files, etc.). The exact number is complicated, you end up getting into Kolmogorov complexity and shit like that, but the point is that it's finite.

If we want to claim that all the information about a human life that Hofstadter describes (grief, despair etc.) is in there somehow, we're claiming that this finitely many bits is adequate to capture all the nuances of a human life. I don't know that that's true!

This, however, doesn't really seem to align with how we interact with art. Human production and exchange of "art" is a social act - I would describe it as being continuous with "play". When we observe a piece, we are opening a communications channel - at least a one-way channel. The person on the other side sends some information into the channel, and we process it somehow.

Since it is a lossy channel with limited information, we must infer various things about the other mind on the opposite side of it. If I show you an artwork that I made, we might have a conversation about how I did it, why I made the choices I did. If I feel something looking at the work, I might imagine that you felt something similar, and designed the piece to evoke it intentionally (a guess that will often be wrong but sometimes still productive). I might also look at what specific choices you have made, compare them to the choices others have made in the same medium, etc etc.

We form these inferences on the basis of experience - the more you learn about making art, the more you learn to appreciate other peoples' art and vice versa. And we project these experiences, usually plausibly, onto other artists.

(Perhaps I am saying all art is in a sense performance art? Seems like a tasty soundbite, though I'm not fully sure I wanna commit to it.)

I'm not meaning to claim that a computer couldn't simulate this kind of 'how did you make it' interaction too. This line of argument was anticipated by Turing in his original 1950 paper on the 'imitation game' that someone links in the comments above, where he describes a poet undergoing a viva voce test interrogating their word choices, and argues that a computer might be programmed to give convincing answers to such a test. I imagine he's right - for a paper written in 1950 he makes some surprisingly sharp predictions for how future AIs might be made, such as the idea that an AI could be built to be 'educated' like a child. (He also thought the evidence for ESP is 'overwhelming', but hey, can't win 'em all).

A lot of the context around art would be quite easy to forge, had you a mind to. For example, suppose I go to a film screening, and someone is introduced as the director so we can all clap them. Did they really direct it? I don't know! You could totally send an actor. Less conspiratorially, if someone says they made an artistic choice for x or y reason, they could be lying about it, or misremembering, or most likely oversimplifying a complex and inscrutable process down to a simpler story.

At some point you have to take something like that on trust, or else simply accept that being lied to about it is part of the game you're there to play! (c.f. Oshi no Ko.)

Anyway, the sudden arrival of a new process that can produce, at least sometimes, near-indistinguishable output to various types of communication, throws a spanner in the process. If we're feeling uncharitable, we could call it something like a DDOS attack, stuffing the channels with spurious inputs that don't fit our design assumptions. I think that goes too far, though. AI gen doesn't preclude communication, but it does need we need to think differently about what is being communicated.[1]

So to consider that last question, if art is like a game, could you train an AI art to produce art that is meaningful to humans only by 'playing against' itself, like AlphaGo Zero? I don't think this is so likely. The rules of Go are strict and well-defined; the rules of what humans find meaningful are inseparable from the history of interacting with other humans, which is why art constantly evolves. Training an AI on existing human artworks is training it to compress and interpolate/extrapolate that dataset; training it to optimise for "making novel art that expresses something in a form that its interlocutor could understand" requires it to be interacting with someone.

You could imagine a training process with an "artist" AI and a "critic" AI (a sort of more sophisticated GAN, where the adversary is optimising not to distinguish human/AI art but to judge it on aesthetic grounds) - but how would you get the "critic" AI? Whose taste would it express?

Admittedly, the developers of image generators are constantly refining their models in response to users, so they are being optimised to appeal to someone, not just interpolate existing artworks. But I think it would be very hard to remove humans from the equation entirely. And the present means of providing feedback to the AI are very crude.

For an AI to learn from interacting with other AI (and the world), I feel like you'd need a whole new process that isn't about minimising loss against input-output pairs. Romantically, I imagine it would be closer to how humans learn from life, but I don't really know what will 'work' in the end.

below: some other remarks that were excised from the main post.

[1] We can view AI image gen as another channel for communication between humans, with its own set of inferences to make. If someone shows me a picture they've generated with AI, there's no point asking why they painted this bit that way, but I might approach them more as a curator and ask why they chose this generation over others, or how they went about prompting it.

The AI artists who go to the trouble of finetuning their models with LoRAs for a specific end goal, or using more involved processes with multiple stages of generation, probably have most to 'say', either through the work they generate or how they'd discuss it. (I find it very endearing when someone trains an AI to serve up a hyperspecific fetish.) And the more I know about how AI images are generated, the more I can probably have a productive conversation.

In this light, the "problem" of AI is mostly one of deception, insofar as it tries to look like something else and thereby tell a misleading story. That's probably a big reason why why it brings the rancour it does, although it doesn't explain all of it. It's not (usually) a forgery of a specific human's work, but it is designed to forge spurious communications in this channel in general, so the channel is 'noisier' - and this could be thought to undermine many of the contexts, i.e. the operating narratives and social games, which are why we exchange art in the first place. Over time, we'll presumably end up renegotiating the 'games', and spawning new ones, as humans always have.

And of course, the issue of provenance and plagiarism in art - particularly when prestige and money get involved - long predates AI and is full of all sorts of bizarre contortions when you look at it closely.

More intriguing is whether there is some possibility for "real communication" between humans and AIs - that is, could there be an AI output that does respect the 'rules of the game' in some way. This is harder to imagine! Like, if you ask why we aren't solipsists, we could point to how much we resemble other humans and say, all things considered, seems very unlikely we aren't the same type of entity. But I only know 'what it's like to be' a human. Conversely, while I know a reasonable amount about how AIs work, the attention mechanism and latent-space vectors and so on (thanks 3blue1brown), the analogy isn't so clear anymore, so I don't even know how I'd determine whether there even is a 'what is it like to be' under all the 'noise' of communications aggressively optimised to fit the patterns of something a human might say. If there is, it's probably very alien to all of my experience.

Ironically I feel like the current model of 'AI', which teaches us to regard any generated output with suspicion of having 'nothing behind it', would make it harder for any 'real', agentive, subjective-experience-having AI to make itself known to us. But perhaps it's good that we're forced to sharpen our criteria of what we're looking for out of these things.

Anyway, all of this is probably just idle imaginings, because nobody can figure out how to make anything like enough money to justify the exorbitant costs of training and operating AIs, so at some point this whole speculative bubble will go up in smoke and whatever AIs continue to be in use will likely remain about as good as they are today, or stupider - at least until the next 'AI summer' when a new paradigm emerges.

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On it's own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[deoidesign]

Hello! I just discovered your blog and I immediately became captivated by your webcomic, but I'm unsure where to read all of it. I know it's on Webtoons, but I can see it hasn't been updated for a while, and you still post about it.

Are your physical novels just prints of the webcomic? Are they a continuation? Is the story complete? Thanks in advance!

Hi there!

Glad you found me and are enjoying my comic!

It's only on webtoons, and the story is not complete yet! We're 2/3 of the way through right now. It's currently on hiatus, and it's scheduled to come back in about 2 months!

I'll explain why it's been so long if you're curious, but also for my followers who might also be wondering about it under the cut. Sorry, it's pretty much just me complaining haha

I took a month off I took 2 months to get the books printed I took a month to prepare my next comic and I took 2 months to write the rest of the series (I knew the character arcs I wanted, but not the time periods or mysteries!!!) I've been working on actual episodes since then

I had to take some time off because of some pretty extreme burnout due to the sheer amount of work it was to draw over 800 pages and write 6 complete stories in a year and a half... I was getting sick almost weekly due to the overwork, it was really really bad honestly. I was having to work 60+ hours every week just to keep up...

The nature of the comic itself is also difficult... Each of the arcs is a complete, self contained story which can be read (ideally) without context, and my arcs need to be about 10-13 episodes each... And since I have an exact number of episodes to work with, it's even harder.

It takes a ton of planning and a ton of refinement, and working week to week with no breaks I was forced to put out second or even first drafts, so I just wasn't happy with the work I was doing... And to do that for the rest of the series? I wouldn't be proud of the work I did.

Plus... To be entirely honest, webtoon has treated me quite badly IN MY OPINION... They deprioritized me before I launched (I had to beg for more promotion, I'm not exaggerating), they outright denied me the opportunity to even ask for a raise, I don't make any money on fast pass and they pay me less than my partner makes working at trader joes. My first editor left me completely hanging, my second editor (who I loved) was fired... And they told me I wouldn't get a third season before my first season even finished. So it was just repeatedly completely demoralizing.

I'm sorry it has taken so long, it'll have been 10 months by the time I come back. But I realized... I won't get promotion either way. I won't get more episodes either way. I won't get more money either way. So to finish everything, to make it feel good, to make it something I'm proud of, I chose to take longer to make it better.

I am fully aware I will lose a significant amount of my readership for this and it might genuinely affect my career moving forward. But it's what I had to do! So I'm sticking to my guns on it, and I'm confident long term it'll be worth it. It never could have been this good if I didn't take this much time.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

"fandom discourse isnt that serious" yeah duh but i feel like i should be allowed to talk about things like people being misogynistic or justifying abuse without being told im complaining too much or something, when these are such extremely prevalent issues in fandom 😭

[formal-frog-shoes]

Twiststuck stuff i just wanna get out

Im a huge Cater multi-shipper

Normally this wouldn't be a problem

BUT I CAN'T HAVE ALMOST EVERYONE IN THIS AU HAVE A FLUSH OR PALE CRUSH ON HIM THAT'S ABSURD!!!

[glngrbred]

Ok, Reblog To wrap up this one, Thanks for the feedback, I apreciate it. If something I say is a based on feedback, it'll have 2** next to it. This is also a super long post, so TLDR, yall R right! and I don't disagree with you, but I am still changing counterspells for my game. Also if you only want some important informationa bout my game and exactly why some changes needed to be made, at the very end I talk about some important things specifically and only relevent when talking about MY GAME IM MAKING. the rest is a more broad look. First some clarifications,

I initially wanted to talk about My descision to remove counterspells from my card game, and the Way I did that was by talking about some issues with counterspells in MTG. Unfortunately I did not effectively convey that, which is MY B. **(thank you @ouraois). Right now, I have a descision to make about countermagic in my game, and the issues with them in magic are what I want to avoid for the design of my game

I was ranting about counterspells, because I wanted to talk about why I've decided to limit their function in my card game. I sort of rage-baited, and said things like "force all control decks" which is obviously false, the best deck, lantern control, is not about counterspells whatsoever.

I also said that counterspells are "bad design", but I don't really mean that.** Counterspells both "fix" and enable a design issue. The issue is uninteractive win-cons, and also combo decks. single cards that often straight up win the game should simply not be made, but they are really cool, and fun for whoever's using them so "just counter it" becomes the design solution. thats actually a problem in MTG, since not every color has access to removal on the stack. counterspells and uninteractive wincons become beat 'em or join 'em. (for slow formats, big costly win the game things dont work as well if agro is good)

But what else are you supposed to do when designing high-cost cards? (i actually have a fix for that in my game but its weird, so i'll get to that at the very end, it also explains some of the reasons why i CAN't have mtg style counterspells in my game specifically, even if i wanted to)

the same is true to a lesser extent with combos, which is why Legends of Runtera avoids combos. I don't think I'll be able to avoid combos, and I don't think I'll be able to patch out a combo, I'm a single person with no coding experience and some cardboard...

In either case, its sort of like an auriboros, where counterspells fix the issue of cards ending the game unsatasfyingly, but then counterspells are unsatasfying. Power creep makes creatures who are made to "interact" with hard-to-compete-with removal spells, and then those counterspells become more important to slow down those big guys. And since typical removal can't deal with those uninteractive win cons, Counters become necessary (kill spells vs counters triangle) ** (thank you @almaignismare) I could probably explain this better. Design space is freed by counterspells existing, but what is made available in the new design space isnt necissarily healthy for the game.

In magic, players expect both counterspells and things you have to counterspell. but in my game, there is not that expectation yet, I think that there is a more healthy space focused around damage, protection, and card disadvantage that I could create for my game, which would not necessitate counterspells.

before I talk about that tho, I want to finish talking about MTG with a little note. Counterspells are the only way blue has effective card removal, the other removal-like options that designers have attemptes with blue are bounce and stun counters. Both of these are not effectively removing a card, and as such are kind of just card disadvantage. Because of this, the only real way for a blue deck to have removal is to counter stuff ** (thank you @gcu-sovereign) But colors not having good access to removal isnt immidiately bad. black has a hard time with artifacts and enchantments, but fucks with creatures, white is great at alot removal but struggles with interaction, red has a hard time with straight up removing cards, green struggles with creatures, and blue doesn't really have a card type struggle, but it struggles with interacting with the board state. Blue just has to counter stuff, or it won't be able to remove things.

So what's the point? If I included countermagic as it is in MTG, it would not work with my game's ecosystem. The 2 mana counterspell that just straight up removes a card is overpowered for a game where interaction is normally based on doing the oposite of an effect to minimize the downside. At the moment, my game only exists as sets of precons, and in every one of them, the removal of cards is either A. expensive in order to be perfectly effective, like a 5 mana kill spell for any target. B. Able to be easily interacted with, like a 1 mana recuring ping that can only recur if something died (any buff on it's target neuters it) C. Technically temporary, bounce is actually really fun, since it slows down the victem without removing their plan. Or D. Sets up a little side quest that removes the effect. I have an effect called "root" which makes something kinda just die until whatever is rooting it is removed.

Counterspells don't easily fit into any category if they are MTG style. They cannot be expensive, or they would only be for late game. (or they would slow you down alot, not just your opponent) They cannot be easily interacted with, since there's a very limited variety of ways they can be prevented, You can actually make them temporary, but you have to change some rules to make it work (i'll get to that) Or you could make them set up a sidequest? like, you could reasonably have the countered card attach to a creature, and then when that creature dies the card goes back to its owner, This also enables some creative deckbuilding.

For my game, I've made counterspells either be temporary, by sending the card to "exile"the outlands", which cards can recur themselves from if enough cards enter the outlands, or counterspells just get rid of resources but not the card (an effect that just gets rid of the card would just be discard). Or finaly, the counter sets up a sidequest.

I also want to avoid limiting counterspells to one color, specifically as the engine of a control deck. When counterspells have limited effects, or are designed to specifically counter one meta game plan, they are a beutiful thing. I love "counter target ability" or whatever that one card does (I forgot its name.)

To avoid going too in depth, I do have colored mana as a core system of my game, I have 4 colors and a neutral. But I'm trying to avoid limiting gameplans to certain colors, I'm moreso limiting the color pie to different mechanics between each color. So hopefully all of the modes of operation will be available to each color, but the means will be very thematic. I also have a different wincon compared to MTG, which is a work in progress but enables this also.

The final thing I wanted to talk about was mana. Typically, a 10 cost card would have to justify spending 10 mana by getting you realy close to wining the game on its own, or somehow making it virtually impossible for you to lose. likeomnicience doesn't win on its own, but once its there you're golden.

This is the very last thing.

In my game, I started the design by making a cute little mana system that uses these physical tokens to permenently track mana, so you can just hold on to recources as long as you want, its like if spell mana from Legends of runeterra was extended to be the whole mana system. Because of this, high cost spells can be cast much earlier by sacrificing you early game plays in favour of savign up for a big thing. Becausse of this, you can budget your resources to play a big thing that enables a super stong game plan, without winning, without putting yourself behind, so long as the big card makes up for the 1, 2, 3, and 4 cost you didn't play in its place.

you might beable to notice that countermagic, and holding up interaction inherently break this system, since not spending your man is no longer a downside..... THIS is actually like the main, important, design restraint that forces me to look at counterspells very critically, but it doesn't make sense as an explanation of the issue on its own

Counterspells are a toxic game mechanic that manopolize interaction slots and force all control decks to play very similarly.

they also have the problem of being much easier to use than targeted discard and ""stax"" (the broadest possible term, and only 'harder' to an extent :/). I think the only times you should be able to effectively counter an effect on the stack/being played are to counter a literal spell, like instants and sorceries, since the only ways to have "spell removal" are hand interaction, which is obviously only ok when limited, and counterspells. I straight up think that no creature or artifact/enchantment counterspells should exist in a healthy card game, because those other mechanics should be inherently interactable-enough to not necessitate counterspells, and the shear dominance of counterspells as the vehicle of control decks in MTG is evidence enough that they aren't good for a game.

also the reason I care is because I'm making a card game, and effects like counterspells are something you have to choose to have at some point, since they MANOPOLIZE DESIGN SPACE >:()

if you want to see an example of counterspells used well, play the game "unstable unicorns" which is entirely Balanced around counterspells, exclusively. but even then, you have to entirely balance the game around counterspells, exclusively

Also this isn't to say "counterspells bad :(" they have a place, and that place is in games who have not balanced the power of "instantly accessible" effects (so that counterspells aren't necessary). like yeah, craterhoof behemoth and Ghalta often can't be interacted with outside of counterspells, cuz once they ETB you win the game

that is bad design and necessitates the creation, use, and frustration of counterspells. Also, designers only want to make cards like "that" if they can say "just counter it" its just an unhealthy system that necessitates itself existing the moment you let counterspells be anything more than the most simple and direct "spell removal" effects.

thats all

[nightmare8-420]

i feel like a part of my soul has been ripped from my chest and i dont know why.

[mbat]

i like my men terribly wounded to the point of needing help or else they wont recover. but in a way that isnt weird

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[strangerhands]

ohmygodddddd i am a fucking genius...👁️ the fic idea i just came up with. the Specific Line i thought up. its such a random idea but its so so cute and sweet and ugh its gonna plague me forever. kinda proud of myself to be honest so lets just hope i can Actually write it soon🧎

[makerscockandballs]

HELLO MAYBE DO NOT GLORIFY THE GDR JUST BECAUSE THE USA SUCK

[keeps-ache]

mmm metals,

[autistickfigure]

going to walmart tomorrow to get a bang IF I REMEMBER to do that.

[snekdood]

the stereotype of rwingers becoming trans and then trying to become leftists shouldnt be a "ewww you're morally impure and havent been a perfect progressive since you were a fetus like I have" type of thing, if anything it should open up a broader conversation on how a lot of people amab are basically from day one being indoctrinated into the right thus making it harder for people to accept themselves and thats very concerning and we need to do something to stop this.

[arolesbianism]

I love drawing Aris as sif so much she's so cutsies. It almost makes up for the horrors of having to draw her as sif. Almost.

[seakraitmessages]

ramble in the tags 🙈

[gibbearish]

reddit refuses to stop recommending me the antinatalist sub and i just saw a post from there saying "women who breastfeed in public or on streams are just doing it for male attention" like dude that's literally just Regular Old Misogyny. this isn't an antinatalist thing you're just misogynistic is all