• she/her

Still gay, avatar and banner by Skippy Lynn


nex3
@nex3

I think part of the reality around stochastic-model art that gets lost in a lot of the discussions is the materiality of the money behind it. One of the rehosts of my post from yesterday mentioned people using it as a "free art button", but I think it's really important to understand that it's only free because it's subsidized. Maintaining these massive probability databases isn't free, nor is scraping the entire internet to generate them, nor indeed is running an individual probability cascade to generate one image. And that's not even getting into the colossal number of engineer-hours invested to create the underlying technology—extremely expensive engineers who are a highly-specialized subset of the already-overpaid tech sector.

The companies that are allowing people to use these models are making a conscious business decision to underwrite randos on the internet using them for free. They're also making a decision not to try to enforce any kind of (dubious) copyright claim on the images their models generate. The interesting questions aren't "is this art" (imo it is bad art) or "is this intrinsically moral", they're "who are the capitalists exploiting with this" and "how does that exploitation function".

I hate and oppose this technology not because it's impossible to use it to create good art, but because the overwhelming actual use will be to harm artists and culture. As @tef likes to say, "the purpose of a system is what it does", and so far these stochastic models mostly seem to convince people with money to give less of it to people who make art. This is great for capitalists because it means they have to pay less for their art even if it cannot be made by these models, but more importantly because it turns the means of art production into capital. Suddenly whoever has the most money to invest in data centers and Ph.D engineers gets to charge rent on all the low-end commissions that would otherwise have gone to a bunch of different humans.

Technology is not neutral. If we fall into the trap of thinking about it as an object divorced of its material context, the capitalists have already won.



Danni
@Danni

I played Armored Core this past weekend and I recorded the 36 missions it took me to beat it. According to my footage, the whole experience was about six hours over two sessions, with plenty of breaks and pauses. I had played most of the game the previous week, so I was pretty familiar with many of the levels when I started this playthrough.

The majority of the time I was playing the game I was menuing between the Garage and Shop to tinker on my AC. The missions are generally quite short in comparison. I have some other Big Thoughts about the themes in Armored Core, the game's narrative, and the gameplay that happens when you're customizing your AC, but this isn't what this post is about. What follows is just one aspect of this playthrough: the missions and my thoughts about them.

For each mission I'll provide the title, employer and prompt. I'll then have my footage of the mission and any comments I have about that experience. I've edited out any pauses or save-state shenanigans (those were pretty rare, but I'll try to mention them in my comments.)

ckunzelman telling me i should have just made a video essay

This isn't a video essay. This is a really long chost. Click "read more" if you're interested.