#Also second and third pictures are human versions of her and pAInter-

[just-a-joey]

no cause like- Hear me out on Navi Ai from the new pressure update. Like, Hello? Hi ma’am, it’s me, your true love.

[ruminativerabbi]

Machines and People

Art is the medium that allows an artist to communicate something profound and meaningful to his or her audience in a way that does not merely inform but truly inspires…and which also allows the artist to transcend the brevity of human life to speak not solely to contemporaries, but to countless future generations as well. When put that way, the underlying concept sounds fairly abstruse. But when considered in the context of real life, it feels almost natural: when we sit in the audience and watch King Lear talking to his daughters on stage as the curtain goes up and the play begins, it’s not at all difficult to understand that it’s only him talking to them in a certain sense, but—and far more profoundly—it’s really the playwright talking to us. Indeed, the difference between a great artist and a hack lies precisely in his or her ability to communicate deeply and movingly with an audience in a way that merely telling them that same information would not even slightly accomplish: what we learn in a few minutes of King Lear about parent-child relations and the degree to which greed can poison even the most natural kind of love couldn’t possibly ever be conveyed as deeply or as effectively by even the most talented university lecturer giving a public talk about the ins and outs of childrearing. Or about the nature of love. Or about greed.

That all being the case, art requires three things (or feels as though it must): an artist, an audience, and an artistic medium of some sort. The first and the second absent the third is just two (or more) people standing in a room. The first and third absent the second is the artistic version of a tree falling in a forest with no ear drum present to vibrate sympathetically when the tree hits the earth. The second and third is, at best, unrealized potential, a batter at the plate and a ball resting on the pitcher’s mound…but no pitcher in sight actually to throw the ball and, as such, no game to watch and either to enjoy or not to enjoy. And, of course, also no winner or loser.

So that’s two living, breathing people and one artistic medium that feel requisite. But now that we live in a new world in which machines can think—if not quite in the way human begins do, then at least to an extent that even a quarter century ago would have been unimaginable—the time may have come to revisit that those requirements.

Take, for example, these eyes:

They are expressive, thoughtful, fully human. It is a man or a woman? Is that the hint of a moustache under his nose or just a shadow? These eyes suggest a certain sadness to me, a certain world-weariness born of insight into the way that people are so often their own worst enemies. Without being able to see the rest of the face, this person seems to exist outside of time. If the rest of the picture depicted him or her dressed like an Italian aristocrat of the sixteenth century, I could believe it. But if the rest of the picture portrayed him as a cowboy or her as an astronaut, I could believe that too.

Here’s the rest of him:

So, not a cowboy or a doge, but a Dutchman. And this, I can hear you thinking, must surely be a work of Rembrandt, the greatest of all portrait painters and (of course) a Dutchman himself. But this painting is neither a Rembrandt nor a work by any of his contemporaries or students. It was created by a 3-D Printer that was programed over the course of an eighteen-month experiment by a team of art historians, computer scientists, and engineers brought together by Microsoft, the Delft University of Technology in Holland, and two Dutch art museums, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. Bringing together digital data culled from 346 of Rembrandt’s real paintings created between 1632 and 1642, the idea was to create a portrait of a man not only dressed in the style of the time and with facial features similar to the men in Rembrandt’s real paintings, but to use the finest gradations of shading, texture, perspective, brush usage, pigmentation, and lighting to create a new portrait, one of no one at all but that surely feels as though it could be of someone whom Rembrandt could easily have known.

Is that art? It’s hard to say. The work has an audience and it exists…but does it have an artist? Clearly, a 3-D printer is not an artist, just a machine that does its programmers’ bidding. But are its programmers then the artists? I want to say no, that this project was just some digital silliness dreamt up by people because they had the technical skill to pull it off. But then I look again at the man’s eyes…and I feel a certain sense of kinship with this non-man who never existed. Does that make me a crazy person? Or does that make this a work of art?

Christie’s is about to auction off a portrait called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy,” a work created by an algorithm (whatever that means exactly) and thus a product solely of its machine-creator’s artificial intelligence. The bidding is going to begin at $10,000. The creators, if that’s the right word (since they specifically did not create the painting), are a trio of French businessmen with degrees in business and computer technology who call themselves Obvious. No artistic implement was used to create the picture—no pencils, no paints, and no drawing tools of any sort. Nor was human creativity involved other than tangentially: what the members of Obvious did, almost simply, was to feed thousands of portraits from the 14th to the 20th centuries into a computer that had been programmed to analyze the images in a dozen different ways and then attempt to mimic them as best it could. And here is, so to speak, Edmond de Bellamy himself:

Is this art? Most of me still wants to say no. But I find myself unexpectedly unsure as I look carefully at the painting and allow it to speak to me in precisely the way great works of art communicate outside of language and without being themselves animate.

I saw Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie, and came away unconvinced that a man could truly love a machine, even one possessed of as intelligent and enticing an operating system as the one whose voice in the movie is Scarlett Johansson’s. Machines are not people. They cannot love. They cannot reproduce. But can they create? That is the question the portraits pasted in above awakens in me.

These questions lead to others. Can machines make music? Can they write books? Can they make scientific discoveries other than by processing huge amounts of data that their human masters have programmed into them? All these views have their proponents. Listen, for example, to Drew Silverstein, the CEO and co-founder of Amper, a company eponymously named after its sole product, an artificial-intelligence music composer.  Touted as the ultimate in artificial creativity, the program, so claims its founder, can create “unique, professional music tailored to any context in seconds” once you’ve provided it with the style of music you wish it to create, the mood you’d like to convey, and the length of the piece of music you wish to end up with. It’s beyond impressive. (To hear the whole spiel, click here.) And the product is certainly something like music. Maybe even it is music…at least in the sense that what they market as “cheese food” is some version of cheese. But what it lacks is the inner quality that, at least for me, defines what music—and what art itself—is: the ability to transcend the temporal and physical boundaries of the universe to communicate deeply moving ideas and emotions through the medium of human creativity. And that is what is lacking in all of the above. If there is no human artist, then there simply is no one for me to commune with through the medium of his or her art, no one to speak to me either deeply or superficially. Or at all. And without that psychic bridge between one human heart and another, all that’s left is technique and content.

Coming closer to my own turf, I find myself wondering if machines can write books. You may recall reading in George Orwell’s 1984 about a world in which the “proles” of a dystopian future solely read books written by machines. You may also be aware that amazon.com features over 10,000 books by one Phillip Parker, each of which is computer-generated and so, at least in some sense, “written” by a machine—but those books are merely compendia of facts and data, so hardly literary works other than in the sense that tax returns are or that telephone books would be if there still was any such thing. But other efforts are more intriguing. A Russian computer scientist, Alexander Prokopovitch, programmed a computer to produce his (or do I mean, its) 2008 novel, TrueLove, an attempt to tell the story of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the style of one of my own favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. It was, however, not deemed a particularly successful undertaking and is no longer in print. (For a fairly dismal appraisal of Prokopovich’s efforts, click here.) Others will do better, I’m sure: to teach a computer to produce a text that retells a story that it has been programmed to regurgitate on command using a specific set of literary quirks and tendencies it has also been programmed to bring to bear in its effort to recast the story in different words doesn’t sound anywhere near impossible. But we’re back to the tree in the forest: if there is no beating heart inside an actual human breast with which I am being invited personally to commune through the medium of that person’s art, then there is—at best—a document, a story, or a book…but not literature. An image but not a painting. Sound, but not music.

The bottom line, at least for me, is that art should be defined first and foremost as a mode of communication, as a way for two souls to meet even if their possessors never will or even could. If there is no other person involved, then even the most sophisticated effort to mimic art is just so much unrealized potential. Art, like love, requires two.

[serpensthesia]

The first rule of the ever-evolving 11-question meme is that you must always post the rules! The second rule is you must answer the questions given by the person who tagged you. The third rule is you must then write 11 questions of your own and tag 11 people (or however many, you do you, bb) to answer them!

(If it is your first time at the ever-evolving 11-question meme, you do not have to fight though.)

I was tagged by @silveredglass and @devinesis, who are both amazing like whoa. Please go check them out right this instant, you will not regret it! (Very long) Answers below the cut! My questions at the very, very bottom... just keep scrolling, just keep scrolling...

Answers to @silveredglass's questions:

1. Have you ever had something happen to yourself (not as a baby) that you didn’t remember until someone else told you about it?

Oh my goodness, all the time? I could truly be a living, breathing version of that psychology experiment given how often people remind me of things I have done but have no memory of them. A good example is that I do not remember reading Hamlet in high school, but bestfran, who was in the same class as me, swears up and down that we did. And not only that we did, but that it was like... a thing. Like parts were given out. People got into it. It's possible that costumes were worn? And I had no memory of this until she started talking about it. I very seriously thought she was lying to me, that's how much I had forgotten this happened. It was only after she started talking about it and telling me that it definitely happened that I was like "oh shit, you are right... you are so right." (Or she has some weird thing about wanting to implant false memories about Hamlet, which I guess I would also be okay with.)

2. Best food combination that shouldn’t work but does that you have ‘invented’?

This is actually really tough. I have made some pretty odd cupcakes in my day, but the one that is most often requested is my pear, feta and hefeweizen cupcake, which I am told is a pretty strange combination? But I guess not that strange because people want them all the time?

3. Do you like live theatre? Art exhibits? If so tell me about something you’ve seen that made an impact.

Very much so! We have a free museum here that houses many of my most favorite surrealist paintings, but it is also associated with the Rothko chapel, which is one of the most peaceful places I think I have ever been? The picture does not do those monolithic paintings justice, either... they are easily 3 or 4 times my height and truly overpowering to see up close. They look just all black, but they are filled with so much movement. Rothko is certainly a difficult painter to capture in photography. I could (and have) stared at them, lost in the shades and hidden colors, for moments that seemed very long. It's just silent in a loud way. 10/10, do recommend.

4. Do you have an accessory or jewellery or makeup that you wear almost always?

I have a silver ring with a little cross on it that my mother gave me, I think right before I started college? I wear it on my left ring finger, but it is neither a ~*purity ring*~ (because I am not religious and also purity rings are creepy) nor is it meant to signal any sort of message... it's just the most comfortable finger. Fun story. Not long after HGD and I started dating, he had my ring in his mouth (I don't know?) and bit (yes, with his teeth) it out of shape. He didn't think it was real silver? I don't know what he was thinking. But I was so angry. We took it to the place where it is from and they were not sure they would be able to reshape it because it looked like HGD had fucking bitten a stress fracture into my ring?! But it was fine (HGD got so lucky). So now it has little tiny teeth indents, which is dumb but also kind of wonderful. HGD isn't allowed to touch the ring anymore, though.

5. What is your strongest olfactory memory?

Any time I smell Chrome (the terrible, cheap cologne that every teenage boy seems to own?), I am transported back to being 16 years old in the early evening heat of August, and a boy is handing me his Pink Floyd shirt that is many sizes too big and saying "I heard a rumor that you liked me?" and kissing me on the cheek.

6. What album that has been released in the past two years should I go buy?

Okay. If I had to pick just one album, and it doesn't even matter if you like rap, it would be DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar. It is undeniable how good it is. But I am bad at picking one, so I might also recommend World Eater by Blanck Mass, Humanz by Gorillaz, or Dirty Projectors by (you guessed it) Dirty Projectors!

7. When you were a kid did you have a favourite make believe game you’d play? Or dress up you’d wear?

When I was a little girl, my cousins and I all very much liked to play with my grandfather's wife's square dancing skirts. We would just twirl around in them for hours, pretending that we were all beautiful dancers!

8. Tell me something that made you feel proper chuffed with yourself. In a nice quietly contented way.

Oh, any time I corral my team into agreement, or really even any time I get them to go *a* direction, I feel very quietly content with myself! Or! And god, this is so dumb, but any time that I put a lot of things in my queue for this blog so that it doesn't seem like I'm dead for days on end!

9. IS MISSING. Is this one of those things where I am supposed to notice? I will take this chance to tell you all that you should go read Silv's first lines meme answer, then.

10. Have you ever had a scary or very odd animal encounter?

Well... this is more about an animal encounter that I didn't have, but when I was a kid, my family stayed the night in Yosemite National Park in a canvas tent (which was surprisingly nice... or 10-year-old me had lower standards than current me, maybe). When you park, you watch this TERRIFYING video of bears just RIPPING CARS APART if they smell food in your car so you have to throw away EVERYTHING that might attract bears. And I mean everything, even gum wrappers. So you can imagine what they would do if they smelled food inside your tent, right? I slept surprisingly well that night for being terrified that I might be mauled to death in my sleep by a hungry bear, though.

11. Share a link to a fic or fan art that you love?

Oh... oh, so tough. Wildfire by abbycadabra makes me feel things everytime I read it. And I really, really love atalienart's "Spell Series"!

Answers to @devinesis's questions:

1. What’s something in this world that you just don’t understand and wish you could?

I very sincerely wish that I could understand the conservative mindset of putting businesses or profits or churches before actual human lives. I mean I wish I could understand it in the way that they must feel it, because I jokingly say that Ted Cruz is obviously the Zodiac Killer in a Lizard Person's body (*cough* he is *cough*), but I can also (begrudingly) admit that he is maybe also a human bean (even if a v bad one)... and how does he, or any person that voted for him, or any person that votes along beside him in Congress... well, how do they justify their own seeming lack of humanity? It's a mystery to me.

2. What show or movie does everyone love and tell you to watch but you just hate no matter how many times you try?

I'm probably about to lose so many followers but THE HARRY POTTER MOVIES?!?! Like I disagree with nearly all of the casting, I will never forgive them for not making Harry's eyes fucking green, and even the movies that I watched... it felt like they glossed over all of the most magical parts? 

They are irredeemable trash in my opinion and even though we got some cool actors out of it, I have no interest in even trying to love them. AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON SIRIUS BLACK, OKAY.

3. The first book you ever really loved? (If it’s HP, cool, but you have to say something else, too. LOL)

Oh. Anything by Francesca lia Block... I devoured her books when I was younger. I wanted so desperately to be one of those manic pixie shangri-la fairy girls that she wrote about. Or To Kill A Mockingbird because... well, Atticus.

4. If you were going to be in a relationship (platonic or sexual) for the rest of your life with a character from the Harry Potter universe, who would you choose?

Sorry, Draco, but I'm going with Hermione Granger. Helpful for studying? Check. Sometimes problematic but woke af? Check (better than most other characters in the book). Will be down to sometimes do girly things? Check. Is good at keeses because most girls are? Check. Likes to know things? Check. Is a badass? Check. Knows muggle AND magical shit? Check. Is def a ride or die, and down for adventuring without being a baby (looking at you, Ron)? CHECK.

5. Your most hated book you were ever assigned to read in school?

Tess of the D'Ubervilles. *rolls eyes* She should have just killed everyone and rolled out of there with two middle fingers up in the air instead of complaining about everything for the whole book (I realize this is not a very nuanced look at this novel, but lord, did I hate this when I had to read it in school... we also had some nightmare-level assignments related to this book, which is probably part of the reason I hated it so much).

6. If you had a personal uniform like a cartoon character, what would it be?

All black everything (which is not far off from what I usually wear now), except, like a cartoon character, everything would fit perfectly and never fade and always look cool and I would also never have to actually put on eyeliner, I would just rock the perfect cat-eye all the time.

7. Where is your “happy place”?

Any place where I can get a (good) vanilla latte or listen to music very loud and just dance around like an idiot.

8. Favorite form of exercise?

I really enjoy yoga, but I certainly don't do it often enough. I also kind of like the monotony of elliptical machines?

9. If you had a crush when you were, like, 12–14—looking back, is it embarrassing, or do you nod at your younger self in approval?

Mostly I am embarrassed but I did crush hard for a few hours on a total stranger at a battle of the bands when I was probably 14. He had long black hair and weird tall shoes and was defintely wearing eyeliner and looked like the closest thing I might ever see to Davey Havok in person and I just wanted to talk to him because he was so pretty (but also clearly much older than me). I still approve of that one, 4-hour crush on a dreamy goth stranger. Other than that, 12-14 year old me definitely had trash taste.

10. What, for you, are the most hated and most enjoyable tasks of adulthood?

Most hated? Having to ever wake up early and be somewhere on time while knowing that if I'm late I have no one to blame but myself? Most enjoyable: Being able to decide when I want to do things, if at all (within reason).

11. What small-talk question do you most hate answering from strangers at a party?

In high school it was, "where do you want to go to college" because I did not know where I wanted to go to college, or even if I wanted to go to college. In college it was "what's your major?" as if there are not a million other things you could say to a perfect stranger that would be more interesting. In grad school it was "oh, so why did you want to study this"... we all have the same answer, guys. We aren't here for the money. We're all here because we want to help. Come on. Currently, it's "oh, what do you do?" because my job is sort of difficult to explain and I always get "the look" of like "oh, that sounds like it must be really sad" and I know it's not necessarily what I should be doing, but it's what I'm doing right now, damn it. Also because we could talk about literally anything else, why does it always have to be work?

Okay... so I'm just going to do 22 questions and you can pick your favorite 11 to answer (if you decide you want to do this).

1. What are some of your favorite song lyrics and why do you love them so much? 2. If you could live in a fictional reality from a novel (or show, or whatever), where would you live? (Hard mode: you can't choose Hogwarts, or anything from the HP universe... womp womp) 3. What will you FIGHT a person about (in the internet sense of the word)(or also in the literal sense of the word)? 4. What was your first fandom and how did you find yourself there? 5. Not a question but post a picture of whatever you want. 6. What is something not enough people understand and you want to explain to me right now? 7. What is your favorite thing that you have ever studied (doesn't have to be in school, or even studied formally)? 8. You are suddenly allowed to keep one real, wild animal as a pet and it's not going to kill you or hurt you, it's just going to be sweet and awesome... what animal do you choose? 9. Least favorite activity that you have grown to bedrudingly accept as necessary (and maybe even a little fun)? 10. Give past-you a cryptic message - no context, just the message: 11. Who is your problematic fave and why do you love them so much? 12. What is the last thing that someone radically changed your mind about? How did they do it? 13. You are trapped on a desert island. There is no escape. No one is coming to save you. You are going to die. What 3 things do you bring with you so that you can die happy? 14. What 3 dumb as hell things make you stupidly, infectiously happy? 15. What do you create? 16. You've gone down the YouTube k-hole and have been binge watching nonsense for the past 2 hours. Where did you start? 17. If you could have a magical tattoo a la moving tattoos in HP fanon, that would appear when you wanted it and disappear when you didn't, what would it be of? 18. What stereotype actually pretty accurately describes you? 19. You have a kid in your possession, that does not belong to you, that you get return at the end of the day. What do you teach that child that is going to make their parents hate you? 20. What is the last fic you read that you would recommend everyone read? 21. What do you love about yourself? 22. Send a message using only emojis. Let your readers guess what it means!

Okay, tagging (only if you want to!): @deadsdemona, @sprout2012, @fleetofshippyships, @oceaxereturns, @ourloveislegendrarry, @o0o-chibaken-o0o, @fizzingwhizweezes, @goldentruth813, @phd-mama, @acciotomriddle, @synonym-for-life (and @silveredglass and @devinesis, if you guys want to answer more questions, lol!) Or if I didn’t tag you and want to do it, consider yourself tagged! 

[ryomaandgundhamkin]

YES 💖❤️❤️💖❤️❤️‼️❤️🙏🙏🙏

no cause like- Hear me out on Navi Ai from the new pressure update. Like, Hello? Hi ma’am, it’s me, your true love.

[sebastiansvertebrae]

Yes yes I love this I love this so much I love these two so much keep up the good work

no cause like- Hear me out on Navi Ai from the new pressure update. Like, Hello? Hi ma’am, it’s me, your true love.