SkyNet: Your Friendly Touring Lighting Designer, Appendix Of Additional Thoughts

Some thoughts that I wrote down during the writing of the previous two articles that didn’t really fit into the articles as written, so I’ll put them here as sort of…an appendix. These aren’t really edited or in any sort of order, and they're not in "narrative order", they're just thing I scribbled down as I wrote but that that might be nonetheless interesting.

But! Robots have not taken all our jobs that they could, today. Service jobs: bartenders, servers. Logo design is a good example of lots of poor quality human and automated services.

Good content is hard. Good YouTube channels, for instance, take lots of time, research, and thinking up interesting topics to cover.

There are political solutions here, but these are beyond what is appropriate to advocate here. Except perhaps Strickland’s “industry association” idea?

Video isn’t really on some downward spiral. We need lots of types of video, and AI is bad at some of them. Milkdrop didn’t replace video houses, nor should we expect it to.

Is this art?

• Artists have always used visual aids in the creation of their art
• Artists are technicians, not only imagineers – the creation of the thing itself is important; the act of creation is only half the job of a good artist
• Artists repurpose – Duchamp’s “Fountain” for instance, and artists represent, and not every medium is visual

Notch didn’t put video houses out of work, either – it created more programmers. And additional creativity was made possible by people pushing the limits of Notch – hacker mindset can be a powerful tool for creative processes.

The AI synthesizes from experience, but then, so do we. If there is nothing new under the sun, is anyone truly an artist? Or is everyone an artist, and AI massively democratizes “art”? Sez I: new ideas are created, but are rare and incremental. Nevertheless, I feel the latter is correct, and this need not engender existential art dread. Ultimately, what is there but to enjoy the time we have and make things that others might like?

If something makes you think, was it art? Or does art require intention? If so, there’s no way to know the intent by looking at it, so what does it matter anyway? But, if I take something incidental – a leaf, or a careless photo – and attach a meaning, and present it as art, is it?

The market will have to adjust – the right way to deal with this politically to make sure that governments care for their people – mine is bad at this – because you really cannot control commercial tech like this. You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. AI tech is here to stay. Learn to live with it.