Forbes Magazine ran an article last week proclaiming the following: “AI art is boring.”
A snippet: “Have you ever seen generative AI create anything even remotely interesting, beyond grotesquely amusing memes?”
For Cheese and Glory’s editorial staff responds ...
This disaster of a newsletter is not boring. Ruthlessly stupid at times, cryptic, even esoteric … but boring?
Most art is boring, whether or not its creation involved a machine. I attended a “Master of Fine Arts” program. At least 90 percent of the “art” presented there stunk, full stop. As in attracting flies stink. Art schools peddle dreams. Many pay to pursue them, unwisely. I sure did.
A quick tour around the visual mayhem known as “Instagram” would confirm that #2 applies to the rest of online humanity. Boring photography, photo edits, drawings, selfies, webtoons, collage. IG has been boring us for years due to prevalence of cameras and digital artmakers. The AI sea-change is the public got the technology first, not later. Democratization!
This post (meanwhile) is a story and/or essay that uses visuals to create a new totality. There’s an artistic process behind how this post came to be, even if it involves copycat surrogate instincts. What we think of as “media” is changing, coalescing. We therefore launched ourselves into “picturestory” — for lack of a better word.
In the process of discovering this process, we have stumbled upon delight and wonder. Genre of one, genre of none — as stated on our welcome page. Images help tell the story, like text. Together, they make whoopee. This has been our angle all along.
Will “Buff Conan O’Brien with blue bear” one day fetch billions as this era’s “Mona Lisa”? Who can say.
Or maybe strung-out Conan crossed with bear stands a better chance …
Anyway. A well-reported Forbes piece demonstrating the lameness of *most* AI generation might have been well received. Instead, we get a “culture expert” reeling off generalities based on tweets cherry-picked by the writer. TWEETS!
Tweets (or X’es) (whatever) aren’t sources. If you’re so convinced humans are valuable, irreplaceable … STOP QUOTING TWEETS.
Talk to humans with a certain degree of authority about _____ . Ask hard questions. Take notes. Distill their wisdom. Insert the best comments into your story. That’s how reporting works.
Example: Say I’m reporting an article on whether XYZ legislation has a chance in the U.S. Senate. I ask a senator. The senator offers a quote. I report it. Because I got this quote in person, it’s more likely to prove worthwhile. People have a harder time lying face to face. They lie quite easily on the internet.
That interaction will have provided more value than asking anyone else. That’s why Senate reporters hang out close to senators. Quoting tweets, on the other hand, lets an opinionator find and plant the quotes he wants.
Using tweets also means the Forbes article was aided by a machine (the internet) all the way. Forbes: “SHORTCUTS SUCK (unless they’re our shortcuts) (amen).”
Besides, news-junk like BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Guardian, People and the Daily Mirror (etc.) killed the internet with grotesque hogwash well before AI arrived. They were scraping for (stupid) data well before anyone thought of Midjourney or ChatGPT. That’s how they acquire their (stupid) news bits about the latest cat with three fictional heads; they scrape.
In response, we made a vertical comicstrip with the help of machines (style “Stickman in Hell”) (i.e., my style). Warning: It’s boring as hell.
Shit. Maybe we are boring.
— Colin Sullivan
Kicker: As a source of mine points out, the Forbes piece didn’t bother to explore what happens when “the artistically inclined” use generative technologies. That’s the future: tools that assist. This makes them no different than green screens, cameras, microphones, digital pens, Procreate. We seem to need a crash course in an essential truth: media represents and remixes. It has never been real or purely original. Even these words — let’s say they’re part of “an alphabet” — are tools for feelings and thoughts I hope to convey. I have remixed letters into sentences and paragraphs. A nerdy, linguistic DJ. Shall I name my source? Nah. He’s a tech expert, an entrepreneur, but I see no need to use his name. Instead, we’ll use his image, boring though it may be. He looks like this:
I would argue that image is less boring than his name. Either way, neither the name nor the image are him. He’s not really here. He’s not really a Sasquatch in the Tour de Sasquatch. This was a representation. It was only a representation.
Xoxo.