LLMs Will Never Make Art With Caleb Wilson and Arif Hasan

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1:57Caleb Wilson:Bonjour, I am Ed Zitron and welcome to this week's Better Offline.

2:13Caleb Wilson:I'm back at it. Download the newsletter, subscribe to the premium. God damn, I need the money. After all, I need to make a big gold anvil to drop on my head at the end of the AI bubble And of course, if you're not on YouTube, please subscribe on the YouTube Please, I need you to do that immediately Give me some Imodium because I have the diarrhea of a CEO And today I am joined by Kill the Computers' Caleb Wilson How are you doing, Caleb? Doing fantastic, thanks for having me My pleasure, and how are you doing? Arif Hassan of White Left Doing terribly, as always Wonderful for. Today we have two illustrious subjects because Caleb delivered us a paper.

2:51Caleb Wilson:I was going to say, I'd call it that. It's literally an academic paper called Why Slop Matters. And these are some of the names. Cody Commerce, Ye Mon Du, Julia Gordon, Normal, Ari Holtzman, Normal, Tess McNulty, Spencer Stewart, Lindsay Thomas, Richard Jean Sohn, Hoit Long. A bunch of people who work at university. Hoit Long, we love Hoit. And it's this, it's a fascinating paper that I'll link to in the notes because it's very academic but it's also the single most accommodating piece I've ever read about slop. It loves slop. It's like genuine, it's like in defense of slop.

3:28Arif Hasan:It does seem like that. I read it pretty briefly and I we'll talk about it more in depth but it definitely just takes some things as a given in order to mount its defense of AI slop.

3:41Caleb Wilson:yeah ai slop has aesthetic value cultural critics of history of initially dismissing low culture only to later admit its significance this is very fucking stupid but i think it's like trying to use like the uh example like kitsch uh in in the paper is like a an aesthetic form that eventually did have value for example like the famous dogs playing poker uh painting that people you know famously love and don't make fun of right but that so and i get what they're saying they're saying it has like a social function it's fulfilling a need for more content and it makes the argument that human beings want to make more and consume more but also assumes that slop is the actual thing filling that rather than just spraying so much slop out there that it eventually

4:31Arif Hasan:does so right i think for me it the paper is is is engaging in a couple of like rhetorical tricks one i think is to try and accuse people who disagree with it subtly of like being elitist when any anybody who does any social analysis of of pop culture will take pop culture uh seriously in its analysis but that doesn't mean like they'll argue that it you know matters right so the title works but they'll they'll try to extract what it is telling us about the people who produce and consume this content the culture that allows or encourages this content to exist and that could be a critical eye could be a supportive eye but it tells us a lot about the culture that we're in which is what sociologists do and the idea that the paper is presenting that like sure like in in culture broadly we dismiss it i don't think there are many academics who are quote dismissing ai slop i think it is an object of quote-unquote serious study because it says a lot about where we are you know for whatever reason however it says it and it's mainly just making the argument that like if it's so bad why does it exist which is the stupidest fucking

5:48Caleb Wilson:argument you could make i love that as well because there is actually a valid discussion to be had here which is and this is going to sound mean and this is dismissive i don't think most people using slop and making slop should actually should be allowed to create stuff like they don't want to make the effort to make something good so they just they're like oh every idea i have must be brought to life i don't think that that should be the case i don't think everyone should be able to have every idea and it's interesting because it goes to like painstaking efforts to sort of like define what slop is in that way, right?

6:28It's asymmetrical by their own admission because of how easy it is to make and how fast you can kind of crank it out. Yeah. And one of the examples that they use was kind of strange. I can remember if this was in this one of the responses, but it was like, well, slop only matters to the person who makes it in the sense that it's like hyper-personalized or whatever. Right. So like it kind of discredits itself in that sense because like, you know, being able to hyper personalize your content doesn't necessarily matter. The amount that you can crank out doesn't matter if the whole point is to hyper personalize it, I guess.

7:01You know what I mean? Yeah. It's also probably worth noting if you haven't heard of this paper, I don't know why you would if you're listening to this. These are not computer scientists. These are humanities people. So they're having a humanities dork conversation about this, you know, this subject.

7:16Caleb Wilson:well it's also it's customized for the user based on the ai slop and i must repeat i don't get ai slop on facebook i it's either that i have someone in facebook who is like we can't let him see this we can't let him see it we must mask the slop or there's someone in facebook who's like my man i'm gonna make sure you have facebook premium where you don't have to be subjected it's like uh in C.S. Lewis, the demon screw tape. You have your own screw tape demon that's hand-sorting your algorithm for you to torment you. But the slop I see is bad. It's just slop-slop. It's not like someone has lovingly put together something using these tools.

7:57Caleb Wilson:Not to even say that that would be super valid, but it's not the things I see are not the creation of someone thinking. It's a Grammy who's like, I'm going to make King Kong fight my husband.

8:09Arif Hasan:And I think in order for this kind of personalization argument to really have any sway in terms of like the way we should primarily understand slop's aesthetic or cultural value is they would have to make the argument that most of the AI slop people consume is curated or created by them with that personalization in mind instead of fed to them through an algorithm like through social media. like Facebook or TikTok, right? Like if more people are consuming Fruit Love Island, then people are consuming like fan fiction where they get to insert themselves into the Hunger Games or whatever. Like if it's more Fruit Love Island consumption than self-insert fanfic, then the personalization argument doesn't really matter.

9:01Arif Hasan:And it's really a conversation about, like you said earlier, the sheer volume of content that is being blasted onto these platforms and the algorithmic biases that put this type of content in front of people unless hey we get to create this thing i i don't know if anybody follows uh the youtuber sean but at one point he says this is the only uh human created uh endeavor that i would deny the title art um yeah and and i think i think we're at that point here um but for the purposes of like talking about this content as content, we would have to separate out kind of our ability to personalize it versus what ends up getting fed to us through these systems.

9:53Arif Hasan:And that changes the conversation about the cultural or aesthetic value. Because I think in this part is not unique to AI slop. The thing that AI has done has, it has turned down the quality, it has turned up the volume that's being produced but what it effectively does is it recreates the scenario where people mistake aesthetics for message right or uh they they consume or intention that they want right uh and so they're very enamored with the aesthetic of you know and and by aesthetic i don't just mean like the exact picture otherwise you know advertising with like gross looking food wouldn't work but it looks like what a graphic what you think a graphic designer will put together for an advertisement of food.

10:39Arif Hasan:This reality show has the trappings of what we would call a reality show, which is like a very funny reflection on the fact that reality shows are scripted, right? Yes. That they're not really reality shows in the sense that we think of them anymore. Very kind of like a somaliacrome has consumed itself sort of thing. I'm probably mixing academic terms here. but um but like it feels like a reality show and so i'm consuming it because i enjoy the feeling or the genre of reality in the same way that if you were like really into i don't know like 10 years ago if you're really into like ya dystopic fiction you'd start consuming a bunch of really shitty books because you like the hunger games and you like the feeling that you got reading it a genuinely good series of books and then you start reading like divergent or whatever and it has the trappings of it and you get and you remove yourself further and further from like what we think of as what art transmits to us and what what kind of effect it has uh and closer to the comfort of of the familiarity of the form that we enjoy yeah and i think the

11:48Caleb Wilson:the thing is people the vacuous argument of like can ai make art the only way i think i could ever consider AI are is if someone was just doing it a billion, like they were doing a very, very, very specific thing on device with a real understanding of like the underlying weights of the model. Like it was, there's something, I think that that's where it really lies. Like if they actually have a hand over the technology, because if you think of it as like a thing with a billion brushes, if you're not the ones tweaking the brushes, then who gives a shit? And the paper even does make this kind of point that this has the aesthetics of art, of what you expect art to be, but is not art itself.

12:30Caleb Wilson:And I think that, I still get back to my point, that there are lots of people that believe that they are denied access to making art because they're incapable of it, when what they actually mean is they don't want to learn. And it may be more difficult for them to learn. because like, Gallup, you can play music. I can't play music. I'm not sitting here being like, I'm not allowed to play guitar. I'm not allowed to be in the secondary of the Seattle Seahawks. It's not fair because I'm 5 '10". Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not allowed to play quarterback for the Raiders because somehow I'm not good enough.

13:07Caleb Wilson:I mean, look at the current fucking guy. It's not a good time, fellas. It's just, it's interesting watching and also kind of exhausting watching an academic look at this stuff because it suggests there's so much more thought behind all of it as in like the the literal creation of the models and the image models themselves rather than just

13:29Arif Hasan:making things that can resemble other things yeah i i think that um one of the problems in this often happens in in my understanding of academia mind you i'm a college dropout so like take what i say with a grain of salt. But one thing that seems to hang up a lot of people in academia is when they take a bunch of arguments like at face value, which is like kind of the whole point of academia is to be a critical thinker and to take a look at underlying systems and what might be motivating things that are not on the surface. But you often get caught up. And I think this is exactly speaks to what you were saying earlier about people talking about like when they use the phrase democratizing access to art or whatever um and it's like look i have um acquired somehow a bunch of wes anderson films and uh the really early stuff is low budget um what and it there was not a ton of barrier to access for wes anderson to start putting together some truly remarkable art and through that he ended up getting access to more resources and all that And certainly we're not in a meritocratic system when it comes to rewarding art.

14:44Arif Hasan:But in the same way that I strongly believe that there should be democratic access to the tools, the materials that we use to make some of our greatest works of art, I also think that the people making the argument are not actually honestly making the argument. We have to understand that they're not making good faith because when you take a look at the people who are like tweeting out or putting together videos about like, hey, we're going to replace film studios with AI or whatever. And you see this like shitty movie that like there's like three heads and whatever you they you they never answer the question of what they're attempting to communicate, like what message value their film has.

15:32Arif Hasan:has right a lot of times it's just meme slop right where they where they paste together a bunch of memes and and want everyone to jump on like reference humor like we're all living in a family guy episode or something yeah and and there's nothing that they're trying to say and so it's very by virtue of the fact that we know that there's nothing they're trying to say we also know that their arguments about democratizing art are bullshit they don't care about that because they don't actually care about art. They care about monetizing content.

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18:50Caleb Wilson:Yes, they want to make a job making content. That's actually a really good way of putting anyone who says democratizing art is just saying, I want to be able to become an influence. I want to get paid for pressing buttons on the computer. Yeah. I will say this. I think that there's an almost neo-Dadaist quality to some of the Italian brain rot stuff specifically. And if you don't know what that is, God bless you. um there's sort of like it's like tun tun tun secure and all that when you have just like some horror some broccoli haired kids showing it to a man clearly who's homeless and experiencing mental distress truly awful videos yeah anyway they are but the thing is is like they so so those came where they're born out of like the shrimp jesus era of like early you know stuff that was like okay this is just really stupid and so a lot of what happens is these kids kind of take this and they're making fun of um sort of just like the tech industry in general by making these uh characters but to your point arif like the second that they do that like someone else will just take it and monetize it like you you'll see you know we went into a sort of uh genealogy of this with the fine folks of internet today ricky and elliot on my show it was a lot of fun but the second that you know you get some of this stuff that's like okay this is something that people are kind of sort of claiming through memes then in like farmer's markets pop-ups there's like trading cards of italian brain rounds okay well you know clearly there's the grift is just non-stop yeah and it's the whole and a lot of that as well is like the italian brain rot memes are mostly just playing on the oldest form of humor which is funny words the actual art itself is not really the funny part and it's it's frustrating as well because i'm sure there is someone making art with llms but that is not the same as air and they are being drowned out by these freaks i guess i'd call them just because i don't like i'm not even sure i'm comfortable saying that llms can make art like actually i'm taking a step back now because it's so hard for you to have enough act because it gets back to the artist thing it's for you to be able to do that you would actually have to be able to train and understand the LLM on a technical level so you're basically a mathematician, software engineer, what have you which at this point you could have just learned to paint or something or draw it's just basically the same as that now and it's just the fact that this debate exists pisses me off as well because even through like cutting it up in the way this paper does, it legitimizes it it treats it on the level of kitsch because even the shittiest looking reality tv show you've ever seen even the worst hallmark movie still has probably a first and second ad definitely as a director of photography definitely has a producer or two definitely has runners the bunch of people on set even if they're doing it in a way where the they don't allow the people to sleep or whatever like how all reality tv shows work there is actual

21:50Arif Hasan:real intention going on yeah yeah and and i think i to to kind of dig at the existence of what we would call ai generated art i think that there are ways for artists to um especially like you mentioned like someone who's deeply invested in cs and machine learning and modifying the weights and stuff like that to produce like resistive art or art that like in the same way that pop art used materials that were not often thought of as like artistic materials or depicted subjects that were not you know traditional subjects of art and stuff like that um like there are ways that you can and i'm thinking of like one of the examples of people like to to go all the way back to when conservatives used to complain about modern art a bunch uh one of the one of the things that they would make fun of is the urinal um that was genuinely a very impactful piece of art specifically because it had opened itself up to the kind of ridicule that's what it was attempting to do about like the nature of art and what we consider art and you could do something somewhat similar with um ai art so long as you do it with like a bunch of intentionality and there was an attempt to kind of interrogate the way our um obsessions may be the wrong word but the proliferation of ai art and AI content throughout like our day-to-day life.

23:15Arif Hasan:Like there's something you can do about that that would probably be an interesting art piece, but you have to do it with a lot of intention. And it's always really difficult to do something like that without it being interpreted in a different way. And so it would take a really strong artist to be able to do that effectively, but it is possible. But I just think that the parameters for something like that are fairly narrow have you guys uh either of you seen there is a creator on instagram whose name escapes me but it started out kind of as these things go one person that makes it and then a million other copycats or like versions of it pop up but it's like the it's like this kid teams up with tongue tongue to like destroy the ai bubble and then oh yeah yeah and then then tongue tongue turns into dust like thanos and he starts crying it's actually like you know it's literally based on a jojo's

24:04Caleb Wilson:bizarre adventure bit when avdol dies i just realized i spoiled jojo i'm sorry anyone but it's like that's literally based on a very specific jojo's bit anyway yes i know the thing but keep going i thought that was very that was just my point it's like that was actually kind of funny and you know that's a reference to something made by a human being where the art is a reference rather than well and that part that creator specifically also made that you know i it wasn't his creation but he made a video with tongue tongue in it you know what i mean there's like there's like hand-drawn animation and his own voice acting that made it good right yeah and that's the thing he always comes back to our human being did something and people will argue oh what are you talking about well it's a human being should just be able to type a prompt in and it's just as valid to do that no no it's not shut the fuck up

24:55Arif Hasan:We do not consider the people who commissioned artists during the Renaissance to be the artists who produced those paintings, right? Like, I think that that's a ridiculous argument. To argue that the patron is the artist.

25:08Caleb Wilson:Yeah. Like, if someone painted my house, I don't think that – I wouldn't be like, I painted my house. I might say I have my house painted. I don't know.

25:18Arif Hasan:Yeah, and sometimes people will use that language in ways that are generally understood. Like, hey, I renovated my house. I think most people would understand that if I'm not a contractor, they know me to be a contractor. I probably hired contractors to do that. But that's within the confines of how that language is used. But when people say, I made this, and they point to a piece of art or a piece of content, the understanding is that you are responsible for its creation by having a hand in how it was made as opposed to commissioning it. and I think that we should keep that divide. I think we should very much make sure that we don't make this mistake of confusing the patron for the artist.

25:57Caleb Wilson:Well, I think that this is, it gets back to the other things. Like, oh, we should tolerate AI writing. Oh, we should tolerate AI coding at scale. We should do all of these things because it ultimately comes down to these people want to crush the meaning out of creation of anything. They want it to be about the output only the output and you must lower your standards for output so that they can shoulder barge themselves in with whatever form of crap they swill i just i have like the also i mean if you ever need to really just believe that all of this stuff should burn i recommend going to r slash grok which is the worst community of people alive i would say it is people using r slash grok these members just use grok to uh generate porno yeah and uh i'm just picking a random headline i'm just going to read it in the tone i think it's tell me exactly what i'm paying 30 bucks amount for every damn thing i try is moderate every damn thing and i'm not even doing sfw clip selling though so tell me exactly what i'm paying 30 dollars for what am i getting tell me what am i getting for 30 dollars that is just one sentence and it's just guys trying an entire community of people helping each other trick the computer into seeing a nipple i mean that is the whole subject it really or making the single worst like space art you've ever seen it will be like a roman soldier flying through space throwing a spear at a space station another great another great one i'm just going to read is how's moderation compared to yesterday i saw some complain today it's just like people who can barely speak english having conversations about why they can't generate insanely horrifying images and i was about to say i wonder if

27:51Arif Hasan:some of the value is or some of the joy i guess is one word is it comes from getting around the moderation and tricking it to do what you want and probably that's still the case because there It's trivially fairly easy to find your way to a jailbroken text generation for sure and then probably image generation as well. But then as you're reading out the headlines, I realize, no, actually, that would be quite the task for these people. They are stuck in grok. They don't know how to find the jailbroken LLM, and that's fine. I'm glad that they're having this trouble.

28:30Caleb Wilson:Also, just another, this is a fairly obvious one, is most artists I've met are very open to new ideas. Like, they're very open to new concepts. They're like, oh, that could be interesting. It's why, by the way, I have some affordance for the weird Natasha Lyonne thing that she said about, it's ripping off Casey Kagawa, a friend of the show, where she said that David Lynch liked AI. It's like, yeah, she probably was like, what do you think of anyone? Ah, it sounds interesting. and they hadn't actually used it and I think most artists are curious I've dreamed of this guy and the thing is but past the immediate point of hearing about it I've never met an artist who's used AI and then gone oh wow I've met a lot of artists who have said I am horrified like just like i find this genuinely the things it creates are horrible to look at because there's this weird kind of like i realize tinny doesn't sound right for something you're looking at but it really just has this weird oh that's good echoing feeling to it i've just never been able to get my my head around but it's like my mate jerry willis out in greenpoint he's a great artist the idea of ai seems to offend him just like every artist i talk to a defense like arthur adams a great comic book artist never seen him pick up ai in fact i've yet to meet an artist who's picked it up like just just straight up no working artist i've ever met has been like i'm going to adopt ai into my workflows let alone into my artwork and it's just it's stark there's darren aronofsky who made that i don't know if you yeah i'm saying artists yeah but it's also However, that like you, he did that, but then you look back at his career and like shot for shot.