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John Carter's avatar

The contrast with the technically dazzling but spiritually empty and emotionally flat imagery produced by generative AI is highlighted by implication here, drawn as an unspoken negative image. Skillfully done.

I suppose one might argue that the human touch may be found in the engineering of prompts, which requires a degree of technical mastery and imaginative intuition, in much the same way that a skilled photographer combines filter, lighting, timing, perspective, development, and post-production flourishes to raise photography to an art form in its own right. Yet for all that this is possible in theory I've yet to see such works emerge in practice. By offloading the technical skill set entirely to a machine, the development of an organic unity of imagination and hand from which the most powerful art emerges is inhibited.

There's an analogy here with the offshoring of production - it was imagined that we could do the innovation ourselves, and let the Chinese handle the manufacturing, but in practice the innovation moved to China along with the factories. Engineering innovation relies to a large degree on the intimate relationship between factory floor and the engineer's lab; introducing barriers of language and distance slows this process, makes the engineers less capable, and eventually the engineers are mostly in China too. It may prove to be just so with the artificial separation of mind and hand, imagination and technique ... with the difference that machines have no mind.

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David T's avatar

Thought-provoking! Please mind the typos throughout. Took me slightly out of reading it.

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