As an early advocate for AI (Artificial Intelligence) I get some pushback from people who don’t know anything about the technology and who just want to persecute the entire idea of AI anything. They argue AI text responses are wrong; they bray that AI images are stolen. I have little patience for having a conversation with those types of Luddite deniers because, in the end, their arguments are both boring and wrong. Here’s why.
In the world of AI (Artificial Intelligence) Art, and NFT Art, there are some who believe that sort of machine-made Art is fakery, and it, therefore, does not quantify as an aesthetic effort, while others, like me, see the rise of AI in Art, and Writing, and Science, as only a good thing — at least for now, before AI inevitably becomes our Overlord — as our ability as a Human Race continues to find new ways extend our originality of imagination. Take, for example, the following set of images where I asked the Midjourney Bot V4, to create a “treehouse neighborhood in a big city.”
Continue reading → How AI Art Extends Our Originality of Imagination
Cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Artwork have been big in the news this week, and in many ways they are the path forward into the virtual future that shall become us. I love NFT Art, and I buy, and collect it, using the Ethereum cryptocurrency. Ethereum has become the standard currency for purchasing NFT Art because ETH hovers around $3k USD for one ETH coin while Bitcon hovers around $40k for a single coin. You can see below a mashup of five separate “Tokyo Punks” I purchased from the Sabet collection and then included them all in a single animated GIF.
Life is about letting go, starting over, and grief on the way to the grave. In between those monumental stations of human being, we endeavor to find contentment, discover joy, and save friendships from perishing. Here is how Vincent van Gogh drew to know sorrow in 1882.
The 2017 Oscars will be forever remembered as a debacle over naming the “Best Picture” in a mixup that was more human than mechanical, and for that pleasure, I’m grateful. We continue to prove, even in our dearest moments, we are not beyond the touch of the fallible, and that we are mortally are bound to fail — by proxy of The Gods — for even tempting to create beauty over form, and meaning over function.
We live in odd and curious times where politics are more performance than punditry and more perfunctory than professional. How did we get in such a mess of unequal consequences? We won’t just rise or fall and find the mean when this comet ride is over — we’re heading into a catastrophic tumble of immortal termination — just as the Gods before us fell from the temple and humankind stopped looking to the heavens for confirmation of the merits of their lives in the glow of the clouds and decided to forgive their own sins while skipping the punishments.
In critical moments, I turn to my training, and seek the greater mind, and the more universally sophisticated aesthetic for guidance and comfort. As, Aristotle wrote, in “Politics” —
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Continue reading → The Us of Us: Aristotelian Politics in the Age of Unreason
We are often confronted with the mandate of youth, and the conundrum of wisdom in the matter of — “Everything Goes!” — and I stand here to humbly submit that not everything must go. Sometimes, we need prescience and determination to realize the lack of self-restraint and that an untrained, unsavory, following can become profound enough to dangerously dismiss the best of us.
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