My favourite commentary of specific art pieces comes from Patrick MacGoohan who said (of a piece of modern art) "it means what it is."
Were John Berger here, I'm sure he would remind us all that art does not exist in a vacuum, but lives in a social context.
The most meaningful (to me) critique of AI generated works are that they deprive the artist of the benefit of the investigation. As media become more disconnected (intermediated), the reasoning path between urge and resolution is obscured for the artist.
Generative models are highly intermediated.
The purpose of art may be thought of as the effort to produce artifacts. But at a societal level it is a process to reveal "truths" embedded in commonly held "lies."
I like this specific piece in the same way I liked Duchamp's urinal. It makes a statement about art more than being art. And in concretizing that statement raises itself to the status of "art."
But if Duchamp (or anyone else) tried to pass off a second urinal as a second fountain, the impact would not be there and it would not be art.
Which is to say... I think the Bedminster piece IS art because of its context. But subsequent AI generated pieces would need to be judged on different merits.
If the Bedminster piece is indicative of the quality of output of generative AI, human artists have nothing new to fear.
There has always been the danger of art patrons subsidizing substandard public art because of budget concerns. This is just the next chapter in that story.
Bedminster is not known for its patronage, and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Though yes, to the degree that generative models rip off existing artists, whirl it around in a convolutional neural network and barf up something... Yes, this is a prime example of what Massimo Vignelli called "visual pollution."
Chewbacca is a Wookie, therefore my story about meaning embedded in the syntax of language from 1989 is prior art and has precedence over all recent work in LLMs.
Sure, but they're still requiring you to be in the office. I'm in middle america because of family reasons, have a remote job and couldn't consider returning to AWS unless I could work remotely.
The article says Amazon is not looking to change its "Back to the Office" policy.
I agree... They realize they laid off the wrong mix of people, but they still haven't figured out one way of hiring qualified former employees is to allow people to work remotely.
Oh man. I was just reminded of ClearCase and Perforce and sort of threw up a little in the back of my mouth. You young whipper-snappers who didn't have to use ClearCase and have only used hg or git don't know how bad it could be. When ClearCase was properly configured, it was fine. But having used it at IBM, DSCCC and Bell Canada, only IBM managed it properly. At DSCCC, we had 40 Sun workstations on a single thin-net segment, each of them trying to mount an NFS share from ClearCase. You had to get there at 6AM to be one of the first five people to log in because if you didn't it was unlikely you COULD even log in. I kept a copy of the part of the code I was working with on a tape and would go into the lab and restore it from tape, do some work, then back it up to tape at the end of the day (the lab machines were reformatted at midnight every day.)
But... yes... this is just using NFS locally to see what's already in GIT, which is perfectly find and as Julia says, allows you to appreciate the structure of the git repo. Ignore this old man yelling at clouds.
ClearCase was the main system at Altitude Software in Portugal, and at Nokia, eventually replaced by Subversion.
Yes, it was, is, quite complex and requires a dedicated team, however there are plenty of features that are still to be made available as easyly.
I loved my view configurations, there were some tricks we could do for mix and match what code to see, and the build caches to this day is still not as integrated as sharing object and library files was back then.
GE moved off Clearcase in 2019 because even IBM didn’t want to use or support it anymore. Wasn’t set up as bad as you had but wouldn’t describe it as pleasant. Lot of alias cheatsheets. Now we’re on perforce transitioning to git.
That being said... it's actually somewhat uncommon for humans to drive into flooded streets. To the degree that people think it's notable enough to take videos and post them to social media. I don't have the data, but would be interested to see how many times per passenger mile travelled human-directed and remotely-operated vehicles like Weymos drove into flooded streets.
I can appreciate the cameras and lidar on the Weymos don't give their remote operators a lot of good data about the depth of water on the road-way. As you point out, humans in cars often don't get this right. I think the humans that don't drive into deep water are the ones who a) give any amount of water on the roadway a big NOPE and b) people familiar with the local environment and use multiple visual clues to judge the true depth of the flooding.
It shows up on social media when it’s a rare event for that area. It’s uncommon but “happens all the time” here in California in the deserts every heavy rain either because locals forget how deep the flood control washes are, or because tourists just drive into them thinking its a straight road, despite all the signs and warnings posted around them.
As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.
I thought Weymo's were supposed to be "supervised" by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn't want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?
Natalie mentions the Newman & Nagel's text "Gödel's Proof," a
(//the//?) 1958 classic on the subject. [[ 1 ]] Having left IBM
in December 1990, I spent a month with the text, dipping into
mild insanity, taking to strange wines to relieve myself of the
fear that my previous years long study of Whitehead & Russell's
"Principia Mathematica" [[ 2 ]] was useless.
I really appreciate the inclusion of Alvir's statement on
whether or not Gödel thought he proved all logical systems
undecidable and incomplete. About 80% into the article is her
quote:
>> Often people will speak as if the CH is the smoking gun that
>> shows sometimes mathematical questions have no answer. But
>> in my opinion, this situation provides very little evidence
>> that there are “absolutely undecidable” mathematical
>> problems, relative to any given permissible framework.
Though I would have added a reference to Infinitary Logic
[[ 3 ]] after dropping the reference to L-omega-1-omega. I
suspect most readers would find discussion of higher-order and
modern logic a bit confusing without a pause for further study.
But a guide post pointing in the appropriate direction would be
good.
That this is the only critique I have of the article speaks to
Wolchover's skill in communicating complex ideas for a lay
audience. I really liked this article, so thank you @baruchel
for posting the reference to it.
:: References
1. https://search.worldcat.org/title/1543160023
2. https://search.worldcat.org/title/933122838
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitary_logic
Were John Berger here, I'm sure he would remind us all that art does not exist in a vacuum, but lives in a social context.
The most meaningful (to me) critique of AI generated works are that they deprive the artist of the benefit of the investigation. As media become more disconnected (intermediated), the reasoning path between urge and resolution is obscured for the artist.
Generative models are highly intermediated.
The purpose of art may be thought of as the effort to produce artifacts. But at a societal level it is a process to reveal "truths" embedded in commonly held "lies."
I like this specific piece in the same way I liked Duchamp's urinal. It makes a statement about art more than being art. And in concretizing that statement raises itself to the status of "art."
But if Duchamp (or anyone else) tried to pass off a second urinal as a second fountain, the impact would not be there and it would not be art.
Which is to say... I think the Bedminster piece IS art because of its context. But subsequent AI generated pieces would need to be judged on different merits.
If the Bedminster piece is indicative of the quality of output of generative AI, human artists have nothing new to fear.
There has always been the danger of art patrons subsidizing substandard public art because of budget concerns. This is just the next chapter in that story.
Bedminster is not known for its patronage, and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Though yes, to the degree that generative models rip off existing artists, whirl it around in a convolutional neural network and barf up something... Yes, this is a prime example of what Massimo Vignelli called "visual pollution."
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