#communicative intent

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why I don’t like AI art

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2, and in BLOOMINGTON at MORGENSTERN BOOKS on Apr 4. More tour dates here.

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

Now, I'm not much of a visual artist. I can't draw, though I really enjoy creating collages, which you can see here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I'm matting into a modern backdrop, I'm making a communicative decision. The goal isn't "perfection" or "photorealism." I'm not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato's cave. I am making communicative choices.

What's more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of Puck magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights means that I'm touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience – but it's also quite a communicative one. Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I'm going over with my cursor.

Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence's worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. Like the five paragraphs of nonsense generated from three bullet points from a law prof, the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can't be art.

If my thesis is right, then the more you work with the AI, the more art-like its output becomes. If the AI generates 50 variations from your prompt and you choose one, that's one more microdecision infused into the work. If you re-prompt and re-re-prompt the AI to generate refinements, then each of those prompts is a new payload of microdecisions that the AI can spread out across all the words of pixels, increasing the amount of communicative intent in each one.

Finally: not all art is verbose. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" – a urinal signed "R. Mutt" – has very few communicative choices. Duchamp chose the urinal, chose the paint, painted the signature, came up with a title (probably some other choices went into it, too). It's a significant work of art. I know because when I look at it I feel a big, numinous irreducible feeling that Duchamp infused in the work so that I could experience a facsimile of Duchamp's artistic impulse.

There are individual sentences, brushstrokes, single dance-steps that initiate the upload of the creator's numinous, irreducible feeling directly into my brain. It's possible that a single very good prompt could produce text or an image that had artistic meaning. But it's not likely, in just the same way that scribbling three words on a sheet of paper or painting a single brushstroke will produce a meaningful work of art. Most art is somewhat verbose (but not all of it).

So there you have it: the reason I don't like AI art. It's not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[madohomurat]

trans women are everywhere and are so eager to be seen and heard but only if they feel safe around you. if you hardly ever have trans women interacting with you, especially online, then consider there might be a reason for that and you should address it

[outofa-mirage]

i think he wants to cuddle maybe

evil closeups 😏

wild animal (affectionate)

[oysters-aint-for-me]

my (very queer) friend is pregnant for the first time and she’s been on all the baby message boards (eg tiktok, facebook) and she found this tag that was like “ftm pregnancy” and she was like “oh cool! there’s whole tag for pregnant transmen!” and then was extremely confused as to why the tag was full of what appeared to be cisgender women. she was like “i mean i don’t wanna judge, maybe they are transmen but they don’t look how i expected them to, that’s okay, if they say they’re trans then they are” except she kept looking through the tag and literally NONE of them were transmen, ALL of them appeared to be ciswomen. she was VERY confused, seriously questioning what she knew about trans people (and not to be like “she has trans friends!” but literally her partner is trans, her sibling in law is trans, many of her friends are trans/nb, hell i think she’s a bit nonbinary herself, idk, we haven’t actually talked about that recently lol) and doubting reality in general.

and then she found out that, amongst a huge section of the internet to which she had never been exposed before, “ftm” stands for First Time Mom.

there’s no moral to this story i just thought it was funny

[arthursfuckinghat]

I forget that Arthur canonically has his own camera in his satchel so here's some portraits I took of some of the guys with Arthur's lil camera :)

[a-path-by-the-moon]

[confused-canid]

Allo peeps need to understand being aromantic isn't just "Ewww, romance". It's "I will follow you to the ends of the Earth and beyond, regardless of where that would lead me." Platonically, of course."

(But please keep in mind that for some it IS "Ewww, romance" And they don't need to be treated like they're not a part of this community, btw. This is an objective fact, btw. Aros are awesome, btw)

(This post is about QPRs and my experiences being aro, I just wanted to make a silly little post about that, aplatonics are valid and real this post was about me and maybe for people who relate)

[poplarbark]

this image givbes me so much euphoria. i don t know where it comes from or what the original is but its one of my favourite images

[traneva0]

Hit me up for meet up and crazy content 🤪 I'm always available feel free to ask me anything

[shifting4cake]

The only thing you need to shift is intent

These other things people say to do will help with intent, because your shifting journey might need that push. Letting go is optional, Getting into a better mindset is optional, K-Psych is option, Reprogramming is optional, Detaching from the 3d is optional. But these things HELP with setting intent. Detaching from the 3d helps put intention that you are in your DR. Letting go will help you with your intention of not being in this reality. Reprogramming will help remove those belief blockages so you can better set intent.

But in the end intent is all you‘ll ever need, and without it you will not shift. Its plain and simple.

[heartless-aro]

I see a lot of people in the aroace community on here talk about how we should have a pride gradient aroace tag, but I rarely see people bring up the possibility of other aspec pride gradient tags for identities of similar levels of specificity to aroace, like alloaro or alloace. As much as I would love to have an aroace colored tag, I think we’re setting our sights too low here.

[arievanille]

SOME OF YOU LIKE THE IDEA OF SHIFTING/LOA INSTEAD OF THE SUCCESS OF IT.

If we’re being completely honest, some of you like the idea that you can live the life you want or shift to where you want but you don’t actually want to see the success of it.

You sit up and make posts about what you want and what dr you’re shifting to but the next following posts are ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘I’m feeling burnt out’ and that’s odd because????

I’m not saying you don’t have a right to feel exhausted upon not seeing any progress or improvement but you’re using the LOA just by saying you can’t do something.

Some of you truly only listen to the negativity because that’s what you’re used too and trust me I’m not judging anyone bc we’re human and I do it too but you cannot keep writing things like ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘it’ll take me years’

Shifting is a practice yes, but how many times are you going to keep saying it’s a practice instead of actually practicing it.

Slow progress ≠ no progress.

[shriimpcandle]

This was funnier in my head

[wandoffire]