Real. I can’t stand fake things, especially fake nature. Wood veneers, marble painted plaster laminates, LVT, no no no. I’d sooner have no tree at all.

Depending on the social media in question, I’m not sure there’s much difference! I may be misinformed about the state of Tiktok and Instagram though, as I don’t use them myself. It’s just my observations from seeing others on them

This is definitely not true. Gooning usually means like multiple continuous hours of masturbation, usually with the purpose of entering some kind of zoned-out trance state. I think it is somewhat niche, as I’m pretty sure most people just masturbate for 5-15 minutes, just looking at porn but not by any means “entranced” by it. The term gooning has gotten so popular because the activity itself has gotten more popular. Personally I attribute it to people’s strong need to dissociate from the world in a way that isn’t expensive, and that isn’t so harmful that you can’t do it really frequently. It used to be that drugs would fill that void for the populace, but now people need more drugs to cope than they used to, and they can’t afford it anyways. Plus drugs fuck with your ability to stay employed, etc.

Another major contributor to it, imo, is the deluge of horny-bait content on Tiktok and Instagram. Even things that aren’t trying to market an onlyfans still are gonna feature people doing forced cleavage jiggles and whatnot. Sex sells, there’s nothing new there, but nowadays it’s almost like you NEED sex to sell. Basically anybody who is into vtubers or modern anime is an example of someone that just can’t really engage with something unless there’s constantly some ass or titties on screen, or some kind of horny undertone or subtext at the very least.

Ultimately I think gooning is a better form of “indulgence” and dissociation than the alternatives, but its popularity is a sad sign of the times. All humans like to turn their brain off once in awhile, but if a large subset of the population is basically crying out to have their brain off every day for hours at a time, and for it to be in every form of media and relaxation, I can only see that as a sad situation.

Probably not at all, it’s just that humans have a wide variety of beliefs

Yeah it really sucks. I was in the middle of developing an Android game and now I don’t really want to. Luckily I’m working with Unreal so I can just build it for desktop distribution anyways. But still, ugh.

How does this even matter if phone manufacturers block apps that aren’t approved by them? Forgive my ignorance, never done much mobile dev stuff

What is it that you go to Reddit for that you don’t get from Lemmy? To me, the only reason someone might look at Reddit instead is if Lemmy lacks the content they seek - do you think that’s the case for you? Or maybe it’s something else?

Whaaaaat. Unexpected fallout indeed. What a mess…

This is actually kinda crazy. It just goes to show how a lot of infrastructure we take for granted is a lot more fragile than one would believe. Kinda concerning. At least this isn’t technically critical infrastructure, I guess?

What an odd question. Why do you wanna know? Also, I don’t know.

While I agree with your conclusion about the garageband loops vs the Bach, I think that the skill was coincidental, not essential, in the superiority of the Bach piece. It’s not the fact that Bach was more skilled that makes his piece better. It’s simply the case that his skill made it easier for him to discover a better piece. It’s something useful for him, but as people who experience his art, it’s not what the art is about. If a toddler happened to accidentally mash out the same piece on the piano at home (yes this is unfathomably unlikely), it would still be an equally amazing and timeless piece - despite the fact that no skill whatsoever went into it. All that the artwork is, is contained in the artwork. Everything else is extraneous context that we may derive some other additional value from, but it is not essential to the art in itself.

Agreed. Obviously mega corporations suck, but AI as a technology does not NEED to be unethical. It sucks that because people want to hate on mega corps (rightfully so) they feel justified in tacking on any flawed argument they want to against AI.

People have issues separating out complex bundles of issues into their separate threads and dealing with them individually. It’s much easier to keep it all jumbled together and pass judgement on the whole lot. It’s lazy thinking, which is ironically contrary to the virtues so frequently espoused in these arguments.

Furthermore, like you said, many people have strong opinions on the issue despite not really having any understanding of the philosophy of art, history of art, or the technology itself. It boils down to the same sort of layperson’s gibberish that gives us other bad takes like “abstract art isn’t art, my dog could paint that!” or “this performance art is just a tax evasion scheme!”. It reveals the tastelessness of the accuser. It’s extremely frustrating that these people always present themselves as true art enjoyers, when in fact they are not.

It reminds me of a time I was at the symphony, and the opening piece was a very avant garde one. It displayed wonderful chromaticism, really emotional chaotic passages, clever balancing of orchestral timbres…I study and compose classical music, I know music theory quite deeply, and for me it was a lovely piece. When it was over, this old lady next to me, all dressed up, complained that “that was just noise, not even music”, and got all indignant about the bastardization of art. I’m sure she would have said the same thing at the debut of Rite of Spring, which she now undoubtedly “admires” and upholds as a masterwork. I would be surprised if she could name the notes of the key of C major. Yet it is precisely her lack of knowledge which gives her such a narrow view of the art she imagines herself to be a connoisseur of.

Same exact phenomenon as I’ve complained about before on Reddit, with its endless art-boner for any realistic “impressive” pencil sketch, over something that is equally technically impressive and more emotional, but in a way they are too unknowledgeable to appreciate.

It’s just the way of art, I suppose.

Here’s my reason for it. Let’s suppose that I have set a xylophone up outside near a rocky cliff face, and one day, some rocks fall loose from the top of the cliff and strike the xylophone in such a way as to coincidentally produce the melody of Bach’s Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Is this melody any less beautiful, less artistic, because it was not produced by a human? Does it really matter whether the xylophone event happened before or after Bach’s writing of the Prelude? If the xylophone event happened first, would we say Bach’s authoring of the melody was superfluous?

Consider this: there are 8 notes to a major scale, and so this means that there are only 32,768 possible 5-note sequences within one octave to make a melody out of (more if you count the timing of the notes, but the point remains). The possibility space of melodies is already implicitly formed by the medium. When Bach writes a 5 note melody, we say that he has created a melody - but we could just as well say that he discovered one of the pre-existing 32,768 melodies of 5 notes.

This paradigm is true in visual arts as well. We can start with a small example: imagine a community of pixel artists making black and white pixel art images on a canvas of 32x32 pixels. Or you could imagine them as weavers of rugs with up to 32 weaves in and out in both directions, if you’d rather a low-tech example. There are a HUGE number of possible ways to choose to color in these pixels even just black and white. But the number is still finite. Now let me ask you this. Have you ever made visual art before? If you have, you probably know how the blank canvas full of possibilities quickly narrows down to constraints as your composition comes along. “If my figure is posed like this, I can’t show both the elbow and wrist, unless I use a strange perspective…”, “if I give them black hair, it darkens the composition too much and doesn’t look as good, but maybe if I add more light it could work…” Etc. What is it that you’re doing as an artist? You’re narrowing down the possibilities, from the HUGE possibility space of the blank canvas, to narrower and narrower “acceptable” configurations according to the criteria of the goal you have in mind.

Now suppose instead that I was doing really constrained pixel art - black or white only on a 3x3 grid. In that case there are only 512 possible artworks to be made. In that case, we COULD lay out all 512 of them, and just pick the one we like best. But if we were not very smart people, maybe we couldn’t figure out this trick, and we’d have to use our artistry to explore the 512 possible canvases one by one. We can imagine an artist eventually choosing configuration #371 as their artwork. They probably won’t think of as though they’ve chosen configuration #371, they probably will think of it like “I have come up with this new arrangement of pixels on the 3x3 canvas” - but in reality all they did was discover a possibility that has already existed since the beginning of time. Either way, I hope you and I agree that this person’s pixel art, despite being small and likely pretty boring, is still ART. It’s a work of art, although maybe not a great one. Now if I have a computer do the same process - explore this latent possibility space according to some criteria, finally selecting one possible configuration - and let’s say the computer also selects #371. Are we going to say this is not art? But this would be paradoxical! It’s the same image the artist made! Anyone who is familiar with the notion of “the death of the author” will see this is quite the same sort of principle. And if the computer happened to select #371 before any human did, would we then accuse the human of having “copied” the computer? Clearly not. This line of thinking, to me, is a strong one to defend AI images as possibly being legitimate and original art.

As an artist, you cannot create a new possibility within the medium. You can only actualize a possibility that has always latently been implied by the constraints of that medium. This is why many musicians and artists often talk about “finding” a melody or “finding” a vision. They find it because they are searching. They are searching their own unique path through that massive possibility space. The possibility space is too large for us to just simply look at every possibility and pick the one we like best - so we have to explore it, choosing at every moment which direction is best to step towards next, based on what we’ve got so far, and what we think we’ve learned about the shape of this possibility landscape over our experiences as artists.

The skill that it takes to produce something is a horrible, horrible metric for what makes something good art or not. There are artworks that took tons of skill but are boring, bland, generic, emotionless - all the things you don’t like about AI art. There are artworks that took next to no skill but stand out as powerful, great works that resonate with everyone.

Skill is a proxy used to judge art in place of having developed taste. The purpose of art is not to show off, to flex your skill, or demonstrate technical superiority to others. This is a very sad, utilitarian, economic view of art that I beg you to reconsider.

I love how some people criticize Kojima for beating you over the head with unsubtle themes, but then the other half of people are like “this game made no sense so I deliver packages and then people talk about ropes a lot and why are there hands everywhere”

Edit: just adding this on, of course Kojima is trying to reach as many people as possible with his art, even those with poor media literacy. But it only just occurred to me how that in itself is so reminiscent of Sam pushing to connect people, even the ones who are remote or obstinate.

I know it’s popular to call conservatives dumb and while I don’t like to beat dead horses, I really think the explanation for this is that they’re dumb. The illiterate form of dumb, to be precise. The caps are a way of adding emphasis - which is something that can also be done by phrasing, word choice, sentence structure, and so on. But those techniques would require a beyond 4th grade level of writing and reading ability, so they do not succeed in the conservative communication marketplace.

I will add a disclaimer, my beloved Nietzsche also does all caps words sometimes, but I believe that since this is alongside his impressive eloquence, it is clearly not a sign of stupidity in that context. Likewise, it is not a sign of stupidity in many other contexts. That is to say:

Using that style of communication does not always make it a safer bet that someone is stupid, but being stupid does make it a safer bet that they use that style of communication.

homer patting Bart on the shoulder meme

The most successful method so far!

I don’t know if I like assuming that obedience is a genetically heritable trait. I’ve heard racists use this assumption to argue that racially Chinese people are more likely to be sneaky servile backstabbers because that’s what their genetics are selected for due to their political past.

Controversial statement incoming: I also don’t want to preemptively rule out the possibility of obedience, or anything else, being genetically heritable - even if it could lead to these uncomfortable conclusions. I think scientific studies should be done about such things to answer the questions of whether these personality traits are heritable, come what may of that knowledge. But to my relief, from the studies I’ve seen, personality traits heritability is on very shaky ground in most cases.

I was just yesterday talking to someone about how AI drones, specifically exactly AI drones, will be a pivotal piece of technology in a way I think even beyond nukes in some sense. With a decent AI drone swarm, it’s not hard to imagine a SINGLE person dominating an entire population. The dictator’s purest dream - none of those pesky military generals getting uppity.

Yeah, I ask because I’d really like to start moderating or contributing to some type of community that is very popular outside of Lemmy but not currently on Lemmy much. Art seems like a good one. Cooking too potentially. I wonder what would bring the most new visitors to Lemmy?