Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.
There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.
What you’re talking about is found object art so I’m confused. These objects are not created by the artist at all. In fact, they were created in a factory by machines. You’re responding to the story behind it, which is also something a LLM could’ve created. I understand if you’d feel betrayed if someone put a found object piece in a museum with a fake story created by an LLM, but let’s not pretend like a LLM is not capable of doing exactly that and getting the exact same response out of you provided that they can convince you it’s real. You might be tempted to argue that what’s real matters and what’s not doesn’t, but now you’re just stuck having to figure out what the hell is real or not. A lot of human biography is arguably fake already.
I fw found object art in general, but let’s be clear: found object art is a great example of exactly what I’m talking about. It argues that art doesn’t need to be handmade with intention by an artist. Instead, it can be a random object, created by an environmental process that the artist has little control over
No, sorry, a lot of the original post I was responding to was my bafflement that artists are supposed to be gatekeeping their strategies or techniques when it’s very evident to me that the art that moves me the most really didn’t gatekeep anything, and in fact the opposite. I’m not particularly anti LLM being involved in the creative process, I just had no idea wtf you were talking about with gatekeeping artistic intent. I also think these pieces fundamentally don’t work if the story they were telling was fiction. There are fictional stories like Pose that speak to very similar cultural moments but Pose is not Paris is Burning and that distinction is fundamentally important to the place of art in society. I’m very baffled that you’re seemingly saying as long as I am lied to about what I think is true, thats the same as a real work existing.
Iirc this is an attorney who cannot quit his job because he’s actually a military lawyer, and subject to military law (quitting is a dereliction of duty and comes with criminal consequences). It’s likely he was voluntold and is now stuck in an unwinnable situation.
Trick is to not get into the unwinnable situation. I think the correct response is to not shield clients from blame when they refuse or are unable to comply with court orders and throw them under the bus. Which is what Julie Le did when she informed the court the violation was intentional, and was fired for.
"Julie Le, was removed from her post in Minnesota after she told Judge Jerry Blackwell the violations were the result of both a personnel shortage and lackluster procedures intended to ensure orders are followed." “And, yes, procedure in place right now sucks. I’m trying to fix it,” she said. “The system sucks. This job sucks.”
If he's held in contempt, it's an excuse to stop doing the things he probably personally disagrees with anyway (since the government is essentially a rogue actor). At least the poor overworked soul will get some rest
He's not going to get any rest, he is just being fined $500 per day until the petitioner's personal effects are returned to him. His caseload hasn't changed.
It’s more like, millennials got older and started drinking less (as happens), and Gen Z drinks different things like hard seltzer, and also drinks a bit less overall. Plus there were just way too many craft brewers making hoppy ipa to begin with.
Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.
Interesting, where I live in Brooklyn it seems this is no longer an issue. Tons of non-hoppy craft options like pilsners, stouts, lagers, etc at ~every craft brewery or gastropub.
The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).
The people in charge have a pathological hatred for the IRS. AI is just an excuse to continue destroying the capabilities of the IRS. In the meantime, they’ll keep borrowing to fund the government while telling everyone it’s ok because they slashed programs that make up a tiny portion of the budget. This can go on until there is a major economic shock related to US debt, but honestly, most of them will be dead by the time that happens.
I thought I would give the Treasury the benefit of the doubt for a moment and check whether they meant LLMs like we're all assuming, or possibly a more specific finance-focused type of AI. Like how we have specialist neural net AI helping with radiology.
Looking at their official info document[1]... "a secure AI-based chat solution"... "AI-assisted code development"...
1. Rich cheats for whom complexity is the goal. Reduced enforcement benefits them without the guilt. They can construct nonsensical schemes but if no one ever audits them they get to feel like they are paying what they owe despite being freeloaders.
2. Strangle the baby types: they hate the federal government. They deliberately want to reduce its income to force cuts to government spending (programs and staff). If they can they will cut other parts of the government then use that to justify reducing taxes. Nothing else matters except shrinking the federal government as much as possible via any means possible. These types also enjoy taking any government service that works and people like and making it as terrible as possible to kill popular support thus making it easier to cut the program entirely.
Most tax returns these days are prepared and submitted electronically so the basic work of the arithmetic involved should be as close as possible to perfect already. Evaluating that is going to be pretty mathematically intensive though and LLMs have been pretty bad at that. Tool usage has gotten it better so maybe they'll just hand off the validation to the existing traditional computing and mostly be vibes based, 'does this return look legit?' evaluation.
I think if I produced inappropriate images that are identifiable as a specific child victim, who obviously cannot consent to have inappropriate images generated of their likeness, I believe images and photos are a distinction without a difference.
I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.
So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.
I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…
On average and in total, we pay more to teach children than we do on podcasts.
US podcasts have a total valuation of $8-9B with a revenue of $1.9B; total K-12 spending is $950B a year (about 500x higher). Education receives nearly three orders of magnitude more money per year.
Most people sitting on a couch smoking weed on camera make little to nothing, while 3.8M teachers are paid an average of $65,000 per year.
You’re comparing one-in-a-million outlier podcasts to the average case teacher in order to reverse the overwhelming amount more we put into education, both in total and on average.
Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet.
Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it.
Attention is where capital is applied because the demand is so high for it. Society can control supply and demand about as well as it can control the weather.
Can you name a few topics that you feel benefit from taking an abhorrent position as a way to understand the truth? I also deeply seek open ended conversations about incredibly thorny subjects but I almost never purposefully take a position to I consider abhorrent in order to do so. For example while I am curious about and want to understand antisemitism as a political movement, I don’t see how actually adopting antisemitic beliefs even as a thought exercise would make me understand them more. I find I much more benefit from trying to develop a framework of analysis based on a mix of books from experts (which help as a kind of a meta study crystallized into a person with deep expertise in a subject) and witnessing individual antisemetic acts to see if they fit into the metanarrative by the experts— if they don’t, why not, etc.
In my experience honestly this isn’t common. People really hate disagreeing IRL and can often sniff out when a disagreement is happening that’s just a form of trying to control the environment unnecessarily due to one’s personal issues. However it is important not to be too tolerant to straight up antisocial behavior that uses “don’t be political” as a form of self defense too. I’ve definitely had to kick out guys who did shit like treat women in the group like unwilling romantic targets even after being turned down, or guys who take being turned down personally and then tried to call the woman a fat cow over it who then also tried to use “stop being sensitive and political” as a cover for just being a poorly socialized male.
Have you considered pro-AI proponents all do these things also? It’s an ugly culture war but from a relatively neutral observer I am seeing gross behavior on both sides. (Eg. Making disgusting porn of real people, mocking the dead’s art and likeness…)
There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.
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