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the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.
"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.
"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.
Modern day Katherine Plumber who went through the experience of trying on fake nails one time because she saw other girls in her class wearing them, but when she actually put them on, she tore them off almost immediately because she didn't like how clunky they felt, and how she could barely pick up a pen with them on, let alone write with them.
Let’s talk about the Watch What Happens (reprise) and why Only Davey could’ve sang it.
Like at this point they’re pushing the Katherine and Jack agenda, why shouldn’t she be his inspiration to keep going in this moment???
And the answer is cause she can’t grasp the situation fully!!!
Let me make it very clear that this is Not Katherine slander. I love her. I think this scene highlights the differences in their struggles and upbringing in a really brilliant way.
When she sees Jack wants to quit in this scene she’s so harsh with him. Doesn’t try to empathize with his situation at all, wants him to just buck up and keep going! Because for her, in her situation, with her upbringing, that’s the only way to get anywhere! She wants to be a reporter? Well she can’t listen when she’s told no. She has to push ahead no matter what. She can’t show fear and she can’t show weakness cause she’ll be called a girl like it’s a bad thing and have it used against her. But she doesn’t see her privilege in this! That in coming from a rich powerful family her physical safety can not be put in jeopardy! Her worst case scenario is moving back home and having to deal with her family’s idea of what it means to be a women in this time period. And don’t get me wrong that’s horrible, it would be a terrible and unfair outcome.
But it doesn’t threaten her physical safety!! (Not to say this is true for all women in her position but the show paints a picture that her dad does genuinely love her in his extremely misguided way and we never see him threaten her physical well being or even to stop bank rolling her). She can’t understand that sometimes you need to let a fight pass you by to survive. She doesn’t understand what it really means for Crutchie to be in the Refuge until later. So she pushes hard and it would’ve just ended in a fight where her and Jack miss each other’s points entirely.
But Davey gets it. Maybe not to the extent Jack does, but Jack said it himself Davey’s dads physical safety being jeopardized at work has threatened his whole family’s housing and food security. Something that could’ve been prevented with a union. He knows that this isn’t safe, he fully grasps the danger they’re in, to an extent that Katherine can’t because she’s never threatened by it. Not really. For her and her rich friends she involves this could just be a pet project (she would never view it that way of course) but if this all goes pear shaped all she has to live with is the guilt not the consequences. Her life continues with maybe some delays depending how long her blacklisting lasts.
But for Davey this could be the choice that means they can’t afford food or can’t pay rent. This could be the choice that means Les can’t go to school and his dad doesn’t have a safe place to recover. He gets it, he matches Jack’s fear, but he can’t backdown when they’re making real changes that Jack is having a hard time seeing in the wake of losing Crutchie to an institution that is a large source of his trauma. He needed empathy and hope not an ass kicking and Davey delivered.
Without him that scene would’ve ended with Jack running away a lot sooner and a lot more permanently. Rant over. Hopefully this is semi-well articulated it’s late and I couldn’t sleep til I got this out.
I love how, not only does Psychonauts justify the convention of having you go through quirky themed levels by having you explore different people's mindscapes, it forgoes the standard "grasslands, desert, ice world fire world" themes in favour of suburban paranoia world, reverse kaiju world, black velvet painting world
This new wave of young women who romanticize blue collar men to an extreme are so interesting lmao you can tell when they didn’t grow up with that brand of man in their family at all