Obligations to a Sunny Day
Insider #135 with a sneaky art drop and some words.
Dear Insider,
In this corner of the world, there are certain obligations one has towards a sunny day. When the sun comes out and the sky is blue and the clouds gently roll across the sky, you too must come out of your home and celebrate this fleeting bounty of nature.
In today’s post, scenes from a sketch in downtown Vancouver and links to good reading and listening.
The SneakyArt (Insider) Post is written for paid subscribers and patrons of my work. Every Sunday, I share a behind-the-scenes look at my ongoing projects, and deeper thoughts from my journey as a parent, artist, and writer.
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💻 My free Zoom hangout with Gayle Kabaker begins in a couple of hours! Sign up to look at our drawings of family members, and listen to us chat about art supplies and sketchbook habits.
I went downtown with my Posca markers, because I haven’t done that in a while. In fact, I have not used my markers in a long time, and I need them to help me break out of my comfort zone around colour. So maybe this works? Let me know what you think.
Watch some delicious lines shape up, and some beautiful shapes in a line:
Anyway, the clouds took over soon enough. So it goes. But the air was still warm. And people were about - tourists, and residents, and runners collecting bibs for the 10k tomorrow. I was scared of the colours, but a little fear can be a good thing.
After I was done, I got up, shook my legs that had fallen asleep, and took the train back home.
The train was packed too. Personal spaces like venn diagrams, intersecting. At every intersection, a conversation mixed with another. You could try to parse them, but it is easier to let the waves crash into one another. Maybe it is wiser too. In this churn, life is so rich.
🤖 The Audacity of Artificial Intelligences
One of my most popular recent articles was about Artificial Intelligences, and the audacity of those who can say ‘AI Art’ without self-doubt or hesitation. That Venn diagram is nearly a circle.
This week, I came across three pieces of media that, in different ways, have corroborated and validated my thoughts:
🤖 Ryan Broderick makes the excellent observation that AI Search is like a doomsday cult -
To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. [continue reading]
In my post, I wrote that “a lot of people making high six-figure salaries in tech are not well educated at all. They are only vocationally trained.” They are not only financially disincentivized from understanding the scope of this problem, they are also uniquely incapable of doing so.
🤖 Ezra Klein spoke with nilay patel about how AI might break the internet.
I largely agree with Nilay that this might not be such a bad thing! The world used to be very large, and we have turned it into a very small place. Broadly speaking, it needs to become large (and mysterious) again.
At one point, Ezra Klein mentions the robotic nature of many jobs and how this affects our ideas about the humanity of AI. I wrote about the Reverse Turing Test, and how tech has narrowed the channels of self-expression and communication such that we are closing the gap (between AI and Human Intelligence) on both ends.
Our tendency to see humanity in machines is affected by the diminished scope for human expression outside of machine interfaces.
Bonus: Ezra Klein also mentions Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which is a major influence upon my thoughts on the subject!
🤖 Ed Zitron writes about the very real possibility of model collapse and how the Internet might soon become completely unusable. Just a cold landscape of chatbots and pop-up ads. Speaking of which, have you heard of the Dead Internet theory?
Thinking about the threat of AI ‘art’ upon my work, I described its thought-leaders as cultural colonialists destroying the fields that humanity has cultivated for centuries, to make some quick cash.
The real crime of the AI Art movement is not anything it does, but what it stops you from doing. By eliminating you from the process of creation, it reduces your humanity. There is deep self-loathing at the heart of being an “AI-artist”.
Dear reader, making art is the most intensely human thing you can do. Don’t let them take it away from you.
I am just some guy, and sometimes I wonder what right I have to say what is on my mind. Do I even know anything? It is good to hear something of your thoughts in another person’s voice, in another person’s arguments and passions and convictions. Don’t you agree?
Thank you for giving me your time and attention. I am glad to have your support. Grab your FREE seats in upcoming hangouts and workshops.
I’m saving this so I can circle back to dive into those links on art and AI. I don’t like the direction that AI is taking, either, and appreciate hearing different perspectives from different people.
On a slightly tangential note, I’m currently reading an ARC of We Are All Ghosts In The Forest by Lorraine Wilson that imagines a world after the internet collapses. I’m just 4 chapters in, and it’s pretty interesting so far. I don’t think it’s related to AI really, but that link you shared about the Internet turning into a wasteland made me think about this book that imagines the world after the Internet this way: “When the internet collapsed, it took the world with it, leaving its digital ghosts behind”
I have just been dipping my toes in the fine Posca pens, mostly for highlights.