wanderingmindthoughts

[wanderingmindthoughts]

on top of that, I think that panicking about how genAI is this uniquely devastating threat that will destroy art and literacy makes us less able to adequately fight its actual dangers, because absolutely NONE of the threats that generators pose are unique.

if you're worried about the commodification of art and what happens to art and artists once you separate one from the other; if you think that automated art processes are creating a wave of passive consummerism that will wash out the creative pulsion out of the human spirit in favour of effortless passive consumption; then you should know that player pianos already raised all of these questions at the beginning of the 20th century. today, fully-automated player pianos still exist (and, maybe ironically, their main users are piano professionals), but their popularity is nowhere near that of 1924, when there were three player pianos being sold for each two conventional piano sales.

if you're worried about companies using new technology to skirt around the laws that force them to pay artists for their work, you should know that the popularization of radio and recorded sound threatened to put musicians out of work, back around a hundred years ago. the past century is full of musicians unionising, organising and striking, and we all know how internet streaming has affected both musicians and actors' royalties.

and this isn't new at all in education, which has been under the threat of new technologies my whole life. I still remember how worried adults were about people "unlearning" how to write because of mobile phones (not smartphones. not texting, the way we do today. in my country at least, adults in the mid-2000s were worried that teenagers sending *SMS* to each other were actively destroying our language)

TL;DR: genAI has many, many problems regarding privacy, reliability, fair use and ecological responsability. my main argument of why I don't use nor recommend using generators it that the ecological impact is not worth their usefulness, and I don't think companies will change anything about that unless we force them to. but letting yourself think that this "has never happened before", or "similar things have happened before, but now it's uniquely worse", you're missing out on gaining some perspective and learning how people have fought in the past.

and if every new technology over the last hundred years has unfalingly caused artists to fear for their livelihoods and teachers to fear over their pupils' skills, then maybe the problem is less that technology changes and more that financial insecurity and a lack of writing/reading skills are not bugs, but features of capitalism and the school system

listen. please. I say this as someone who personally does not like AI art and hates reading AI-written content, but also as someone who earned my PhD studying cultural politics and technology: not once in the history of ever has a moral panic about how a new tech thing is totally irredeemably evil and destined to destroy society turned out to be correct. the chances that you've latched on to the one panic that will buck this trend are pretty small.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

damn, generative art is like golf, isn't it? it may be as much art as golf is a sport, but that doesn't justify the water they consume

I have been watching tutorials for making art with automatic generators, because I'm working on a zine about that, and I did not want to actually use a generator at any point so I figured that was the best next thing. and I was actually kind of surprised by it!

I suspected that the entire process of making art with generators can't be just "write a description in a box and get a sick picture" because some of these tutorials are over an *hour* long. and while the process is based on that, there's also a lot of image editing, converting and moving files between programs, and in general just a lot of software tinkering. generator-assisted processes are creative processes, even if the author is never drawing, nor animating.

and that's kind of the point of this post: the people using generators don't want to draw. what they want is to learn how to use and tinker with several software programs.

I think that's completely fair (drawing is not for everybody!), but it also means that telling "ai artists" to pick up a pen and draw is a fundamental misunderstanding of why they do what they do. if we want to offer them an alternative as a means to get them to stop using image generators it can't be to "actually draw"; it needs to appeal to their editing and software skills. something like pulling stock pictures from a public bank, rather than generating them.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I have been watching tutorials for making art with automatic generators, because I'm working on a zine about that, and I did not want to actually use a generator at any point so I figured that was the best next thing. and I was actually kind of surprised by it!

I suspected that the entire process of making art with generators can't be just "write a description in a box and get a sick picture" because some of these tutorials are over an *hour* long. and while the process is based on that, there's also a lot of image editing, converting and moving files between programs, and in general just a lot of software tinkering. generator-assisted processes are creative processes, even if the author is never drawing, nor animating.

and that's kind of the point of this post: the people using generators don't want to draw. what they want is to learn how to use and tinker with several software programs.

I think that's completely fair (drawing is not for everybody!), but it also means that telling "ai artists" to pick up a pen and draw is a fundamental misunderstanding of why they do what they do. if we want to offer them an alternative as a means to get them to stop using image generators it can't be to "actually draw"; it needs to appeal to their editing and software skills. something like pulling stock pictures from a public bank, rather than generating them.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

now that I am an adult with a "real" job I, get more acceptance for my tiredness, but it the idea that I can get too tired to work still seems to boggle people. I guess that, since I do quite a bit of sport and I am not visibly disabled, people simply don't think that I have a very cognitively-demanding job that regularly leaves me mentally exhausted by the time I arrive home in the afternoon

so it looks that I can get around 3 weeks of useful work and after that I need a week of holidays before I can do work stuff at work. rinse and repeat each quarter 🙃

[wanderingmindthoughts]

so it looks that I can get around 3 weeks of useful work and after that I need a week of holidays before I can do work stuff at work. rinse and repeat each quarter 🙃

[wanderingmindthoughts]

me, after watching a video with a robotic piano that plays MIDI songs by itself: what an interesting video to mention on my zine about generative art, let's see who made that piano

me, three hours later, halfway into a book about player pianos: I had work to do today

[wanderingmindthoughts]

how is writing so hard??

[wanderingmindthoughts]

how's PhD going?

it's going well, thank you! I'm already halfway with it, and I'm mostly happy with the work I'm doing. I'm learning a lot of things and participating in several cool projects, which I love

[wanderingmindthoughts]

it looks like I've abandoned this but I haven't, I've just been busy ;__; in fact, I have been wanting to write about the fall of twitter.

I liked twitter. unlike many people who seemed to only be there under threat of death, I actively enjoyed being there. however, I knew that I needed to start building an alternative back in 2022 when it got bought by musk. and I knew it was time to leave for good when he did a fucking nazi salute.

a lot of the work about information flows that I've been writing about in here has been in relation with this, with detangling myself from twitter. I hope I'll have the time to write a proper post about it soon

[wanderingmindthoughts]

Me: *Currently talking to one of my severely ill Palestinian friends stuck in Gaza trying very hard to walk a fine line between talking him out of his intense suicidality vs not invalidating his very justifiable feelings of hopelessness and dread.*

Some random fuck who tooOooOootally cares about Palestinians: We can't be exposed to the suffering of your """""friend""""" (if he's even real!) 24/7, or else WE will be the ones running on fumes!!!! No, I won't donate to him btw. I'm a good person and the real victim in all of this, just so you know.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

all my family members who are teachers agree (and I agree too) that teaching in schools and highschools is very hard, yet somehow the majority opinion is that *attending* those very same classes as a youth is the easiest time of your life

[wanderingmindthoughts]

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

[wanderingmindthoughts]

the "you guys can't do anything" joke is really starting to grate on me.

I do struggle with emails. writing a polite email takes more effort out of me than spitting out code for my lab. you don't get to decide that writing emails is categorically a bottom-of-the-barrel easy task, and therefore struggling with that means that you're useless and skill-less.

like, do I have to point out the ableism of the thing? I feel like a lot of people who are normally mindful about ableism have happily jumped onto this joke to shit on ai generators, but regardless of how justified criticism of generators is, the butt of that joke are still the people who need machines to do stuff for them. the joke only works if you accept that struggling with tasks that abled people consider easy is a pathetic state, a weakness deserving of mockery.

this doesn't meant that generators are fundamental for us (I'm personally doing ok with email templates), but writing superfluous emails is probably the most logical use case for text generators, and if someone notices they struggle with that task, it's neither weird nor pathetic to use them for that.

the better argument would be to point out that things like email templates and automatic replies have existed for decades, are just as good as the emails that generators write, and don't come with nearly the same environmental cost

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I have been reading research on learning to prepare a workshop and it's not only a genuinely fascinating topic to read about, it's also that the more I read the more I realise how inadequate the school system is. the way normative school systems work sometimes comes in direct opposition to how human brains learn, and when it doesn't it is still very inefficient.

you only have to make a quick read on the literature to realise that we (humans, academics) have been aware of how learning works for decades, but schools are doing nothing about it. and I find it extremely telling that people who study to be teachers also aren't taught about any of this. like, there exist "educational research", which is the field that attempts to observe schools, how they work and what is more conducive to better learning, and from the looks of it, all of that research is done as if cognitive science has not spent the last hundred years studying how humans learn.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

Chef’s kiss

[wanderingmindthoughts]

just had the realisation that my boss is nicer to me when I mess up than my mother was during my day-to-day tasks as a teenager. like... none of my bosses has ever yelled at me

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I'm preparing a workshop about how to study to learn better and I fear that I won't be able to properly explain it without getting tangled into the hurdles that the educational system will put in their way