I think this post is a great example of how most people *can't* subscribe to "death of the author" in a universal way (as much as the average internet critic loves to cite "death of the author" whenever it suits them - overall an incredibly misused concept, but I digress). We yearn for context and who the author is and what they intended is not easy to separate. I see an interesting picture that looks like an old painting and I'm curious as to what conditions it was painted in and what may have led the author to make those choices. If I found out that same picture was actually AI, I'm immediately uninterested. The "brainrot" image here conjures, to me, an immediate disinterest as it's obviously AI, that requires conscious breaking through with additional context (some you've provided!) to make it any more interesting than pure visual garbage. An AI "artist" could spend hours and hours on a single prompt, pouring their own experiences and heart and soul into what they're asking the machine to generate, but if the end result makes people think "this is AI", that non-authorship becomes incredibly important and destroys the viewer's relationship to whatever deep context or meaning might have been put into it.
I like this, memes are contemporary folk art, it's fun to think about how digital anthropologists will learn about this time period from our art :)
Although - generally I think our distrust / disgust at AI-art is misplaced, but still warranted. It's not that the medium of AI is inherently incapable of being used for artistic expression, it's that the mechanism of AI art production will make other mediums less feasible.
This is because under our current system, efficiently producing an abundance of things to be consumed is what is incentivised. This means AI-art is incentivised over more labour intensive (and typically embodied) mediums, as they are less efficient forms of artistic creation. I don't think this is good, AI art is a much more narrow and indirect process of creation.
It's not that Tung Tung Tung Sahur isn't art. It's that our system incentives works like Tung Tung Tung Sahur over Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. This is what I think we should be sceptical and distrustful of. Not the art it's self, but how it's mechanism of creation will effect other sorts of artistic creation. tbh I think most of our issues with AI are really extensions of issues with our systemic incentives for efficiency / capital accumulation.
So, though it is art, distrust of AI art is still a valid reaction toward a move away from art being an embodied and slow process.
What about the fact that there is no ai “art” that isn’t cobbled together from the work of actual artists who neither have permission for their work to be used in this way nor will they ever see a single cent of compensation?? That’s a big part of what grosses me out.
Totally agree, the means of creating AI-art is morally reprehensible. But someone could physically steal thousands of artworks to make a collage and that wouldn't stop the collage from being art, it would just make the mechanism of it's creation morally bad. I think using AI to create art is like that. But AI isn't even necessarily a morally bad mechanism. An artist could build an AI model (from scratch) and feed it exclusively their own art work - or images in the public domain.
I think that AI is (probably) an inherently lesser medium, that a lot of contemporary AI models have unethical origins, and that it's social / economic effect on artists is awful. But none of that means AI is incapable of being used for creating art.
Without any context or specific, external knowledge, the image on the left is much less interesting than the one on the right. It's a cartoon figure that alludes to baseball (to this American viewer); its expression is confusing and the setting is jumbled and nonspecific. What do the fragments of words mean? Why is it cropped this way? I seek meaning and struggle to find or make any.
On the right there is just way more going on -- the space is much larger, there is an unknown figure coming toward the child at play, and an evocative landscape. I can imaginatively inhabit that space. It reminds me of my own dreams.
Without all the cultural context about drumming or whatever, there's nothing to keep me interested in the AI image.
I think it makes more sense to say that AI "brainrot" art is more similar to propaganda than to actual art movements that have meaning (granted, also political) made by real people whereas these unethical computer-generated images seem to be planted for distraction and also monetary/engagementbait purposes. Not only that but our government itself has been starting to use it for literal propaganda.
This of course then begs questions about then what qualifies as propaganda considering past propaganda did use actual art but I just think the comparison here especially to real past art movements people have poured their soul into for their message is absolutely absurd. There is SO MUCH HARM being done with AI generated """art""" and to call it "brainrot" to be dismissive of it can be considered propaganda. Not to mention that those spewing out this very content has embracing the term "brainrot" as they make it because brainrot = funny = algo push. "Oh, it's just brainrot. Don't think of it as much." It's a distraction. It keeps developing kids and many others captivated because they are designed to so that they can have a cheap way of having a cashflow and to literally shut brains off like the algorithm wants them to. I just think the comparison is just a little insane and should not be the way you warn others about its presence.
How I feel about the 2 images is complicated by the fact that you first told me one was ai and the other was not. My response was to your words, the human's words, and not to the images. In general, I think ai is curiously emotionally flat. It's relatively fast. It can be fun. It can be unintentionally hilarious. It can be a useful tool for someone who needs to get advertising out fast for a deadline. But it doesn't communicate the way art/imagination+creation from a human, communicates that human's feelings or observations, to another. ai copies, and averages out numbers of images, styles, sounds, writings, and the results, so far, are flat, averaged, and curiously disconnected from experienced reality. So we read them as off, somehow. Not quite right. We can be fooled, but not for long. Art in all its forms, from doodles and texts to concertos and sculpture, is human communication. So far the machine is not sentient, so there is no real communication - just the semblance of it. Maybe give it time?
Your most brainrot post yet… I quit social media because I don’t want to engage with this brainrot (not art, brainrot). You are saying there is meaning and I am saying finding that meaning is not worth my time or energy. Engaging with art is interesting and nourishes my brain, engaging with brainrot… rots the brain among many other precious resources. I hope you find more worthy ideas to spread to the world, unsubscribed 👍
I feel like people that use AI generally do it to substitute the effort with instant gratification instead of exploring the medium in and of itself, too. Environmental issues aside, I'll imagine that data centers are not an issue in this hypothetical (which, yes it's a valid criticism to the art form too):
Could we compare Ai to those people that let a paint filled bucket dangle from the ceiling and push it around on a whide canvas? of course, even requires a lot more of an effort than the AI setup, but both *are* a result of setting up some variables and then letting *something other than you* take over. so perhaps, we're looking at the potential of AI all wrong? maybe there's more to it than just making pictures that steal from people's works?
I never expected to truly observe and understand brainrot that is based on AI generated art, but understanding the real meaning behind the brainrot itself gives it a different dimension that it didn't have before.
Though they may draw parallels as mentioned in the article, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (MMS) and the big Triple T stand in stark contrast to each other in one matter: intent. MMS was unlikely to be so immediately widespread during its time as to become a sensation in its early moments due to the absence of social media and differing ideas surrounding popularity then, and it was created with the intent to mean something which invited contemplation beyond the initial viewing. There is a raw intimacy between the artist and the art that happens before it is ever altered by the perspective of another, and that visceral connection between the art and the artist adds a certain kind of depth to the art. As one gazes at MMS, one might wonder what deeper meaning the artist intended for the piece, what it meant to convey. Triple T is devoid of all of that. It exists in a vaccum, the creator unknown. It contains intent from the initial prompt, yet how could the mechanical clacking of a keyboard and sharp click of a mouse compare to the serene stroke of a paintbrush on vibrant canvas? There is little wonder as one gazes at the one known as Sahur. I had much more of an intricate response typed out but I accidentally swiped and this freaking BROWSER got rid of all of it im so pissed right now holy crab im just gonna post this
Recently came across this quiz question as well about the origins of the word "Sahur" and it's importance for the month of Ramadan. It doesn't latches onto a normal person but the etymology behind all the brainrotted gen-ai images is also fundamental to our own history as well.
Incredible as always Adam. I literally had to turn away at the last paragraph because of how mind-alterning it was. The decentering of authorship in the critique of this "art movement" raises so many questions for me that I feel like a pinball machine shooting questions left and right in my head.
I wanted to say that Impressionism also never had a great following in the Paris Salon in the 1870s precisely because it was seen as low effort and didn't appeal to the sensibilities of the aristocratic artistic circles, but it did find a following with American buyers for whatever reason, and I like to think it was because Americans didn't try to "understand" the art but they "felt" it.
With the internet, it's all folk art. And like the Americans of the 1870s I think the internet is feeling before understanding, or looking at the phenomenology and context before the authorship, of these memes, and memes in general.
My whole definition of art has been thrown out the window. I think about "found art" which has no author, except that it does have a curator. Someone who had to either a) scoop the found art from its context and put it on display, or b) capture the found art via a camera, and physically press a button to shoot it.
Memes have authors, but the internet generally keeps people anonymous if they want to be. Users can act as anyone they like. But with AI, the only authorship is the presser of the keys to start a prompt to an image gen.
In that way, I think AI memes are a lot like the "found art" genre. They belong to the black box of the AI, and all it took was for someone to capture it.
I think this post is a great example of how most people *can't* subscribe to "death of the author" in a universal way (as much as the average internet critic loves to cite "death of the author" whenever it suits them - overall an incredibly misused concept, but I digress). We yearn for context and who the author is and what they intended is not easy to separate. I see an interesting picture that looks like an old painting and I'm curious as to what conditions it was painted in and what may have led the author to make those choices. If I found out that same picture was actually AI, I'm immediately uninterested. The "brainrot" image here conjures, to me, an immediate disinterest as it's obviously AI, that requires conscious breaking through with additional context (some you've provided!) to make it any more interesting than pure visual garbage. An AI "artist" could spend hours and hours on a single prompt, pouring their own experiences and heart and soul into what they're asking the machine to generate, but if the end result makes people think "this is AI", that non-authorship becomes incredibly important and destroys the viewer's relationship to whatever deep context or meaning might have been put into it.
I like this, memes are contemporary folk art, it's fun to think about how digital anthropologists will learn about this time period from our art :)
Although - generally I think our distrust / disgust at AI-art is misplaced, but still warranted. It's not that the medium of AI is inherently incapable of being used for artistic expression, it's that the mechanism of AI art production will make other mediums less feasible.
This is because under our current system, efficiently producing an abundance of things to be consumed is what is incentivised. This means AI-art is incentivised over more labour intensive (and typically embodied) mediums, as they are less efficient forms of artistic creation. I don't think this is good, AI art is a much more narrow and indirect process of creation.
It's not that Tung Tung Tung Sahur isn't art. It's that our system incentives works like Tung Tung Tung Sahur over Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. This is what I think we should be sceptical and distrustful of. Not the art it's self, but how it's mechanism of creation will effect other sorts of artistic creation. tbh I think most of our issues with AI are really extensions of issues with our systemic incentives for efficiency / capital accumulation.
So, though it is art, distrust of AI art is still a valid reaction toward a move away from art being an embodied and slow process.
What about the fact that there is no ai “art” that isn’t cobbled together from the work of actual artists who neither have permission for their work to be used in this way nor will they ever see a single cent of compensation?? That’s a big part of what grosses me out.
Totally agree, the means of creating AI-art is morally reprehensible. But someone could physically steal thousands of artworks to make a collage and that wouldn't stop the collage from being art, it would just make the mechanism of it's creation morally bad. I think using AI to create art is like that. But AI isn't even necessarily a morally bad mechanism. An artist could build an AI model (from scratch) and feed it exclusively their own art work - or images in the public domain.
I think that AI is (probably) an inherently lesser medium, that a lot of contemporary AI models have unethical origins, and that it's social / economic effect on artists is awful. But none of that means AI is incapable of being used for creating art.
It’s not the same as collage. I don’t know how to articulate why yet but I just know that it’s not.
Without any context or specific, external knowledge, the image on the left is much less interesting than the one on the right. It's a cartoon figure that alludes to baseball (to this American viewer); its expression is confusing and the setting is jumbled and nonspecific. What do the fragments of words mean? Why is it cropped this way? I seek meaning and struggle to find or make any.
On the right there is just way more going on -- the space is much larger, there is an unknown figure coming toward the child at play, and an evocative landscape. I can imaginatively inhabit that space. It reminds me of my own dreams.
Without all the cultural context about drumming or whatever, there's nothing to keep me interested in the AI image.
I think it makes more sense to say that AI "brainrot" art is more similar to propaganda than to actual art movements that have meaning (granted, also political) made by real people whereas these unethical computer-generated images seem to be planted for distraction and also monetary/engagementbait purposes. Not only that but our government itself has been starting to use it for literal propaganda.
This of course then begs questions about then what qualifies as propaganda considering past propaganda did use actual art but I just think the comparison here especially to real past art movements people have poured their soul into for their message is absolutely absurd. There is SO MUCH HARM being done with AI generated """art""" and to call it "brainrot" to be dismissive of it can be considered propaganda. Not to mention that those spewing out this very content has embracing the term "brainrot" as they make it because brainrot = funny = algo push. "Oh, it's just brainrot. Don't think of it as much." It's a distraction. It keeps developing kids and many others captivated because they are designed to so that they can have a cheap way of having a cashflow and to literally shut brains off like the algorithm wants them to. I just think the comparison is just a little insane and should not be the way you warn others about its presence.
So nice to meet you in Pittsburgh! Thanks for the sticker!!
How I feel about the 2 images is complicated by the fact that you first told me one was ai and the other was not. My response was to your words, the human's words, and not to the images. In general, I think ai is curiously emotionally flat. It's relatively fast. It can be fun. It can be unintentionally hilarious. It can be a useful tool for someone who needs to get advertising out fast for a deadline. But it doesn't communicate the way art/imagination+creation from a human, communicates that human's feelings or observations, to another. ai copies, and averages out numbers of images, styles, sounds, writings, and the results, so far, are flat, averaged, and curiously disconnected from experienced reality. So we read them as off, somehow. Not quite right. We can be fooled, but not for long. Art in all its forms, from doodles and texts to concertos and sculpture, is human communication. So far the machine is not sentient, so there is no real communication - just the semblance of it. Maybe give it time?
Your most brainrot post yet… I quit social media because I don’t want to engage with this brainrot (not art, brainrot). You are saying there is meaning and I am saying finding that meaning is not worth my time or energy. Engaging with art is interesting and nourishes my brain, engaging with brainrot… rots the brain among many other precious resources. I hope you find more worthy ideas to spread to the world, unsubscribed 👍
I feel like people that use AI generally do it to substitute the effort with instant gratification instead of exploring the medium in and of itself, too. Environmental issues aside, I'll imagine that data centers are not an issue in this hypothetical (which, yes it's a valid criticism to the art form too):
Could we compare Ai to those people that let a paint filled bucket dangle from the ceiling and push it around on a whide canvas? of course, even requires a lot more of an effort than the AI setup, but both *are* a result of setting up some variables and then letting *something other than you* take over. so perhaps, we're looking at the potential of AI all wrong? maybe there's more to it than just making pictures that steal from people's works?
we say brainrot, but I think identityrot is more accurate.
it's not a brain question.
it's a heart question.
I never expected to truly observe and understand brainrot that is based on AI generated art, but understanding the real meaning behind the brainrot itself gives it a different dimension that it didn't have before.
the one and only bullshit post on this substack, SAD
Though they may draw parallels as mentioned in the article, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (MMS) and the big Triple T stand in stark contrast to each other in one matter: intent. MMS was unlikely to be so immediately widespread during its time as to become a sensation in its early moments due to the absence of social media and differing ideas surrounding popularity then, and it was created with the intent to mean something which invited contemplation beyond the initial viewing. There is a raw intimacy between the artist and the art that happens before it is ever altered by the perspective of another, and that visceral connection between the art and the artist adds a certain kind of depth to the art. As one gazes at MMS, one might wonder what deeper meaning the artist intended for the piece, what it meant to convey. Triple T is devoid of all of that. It exists in a vaccum, the creator unknown. It contains intent from the initial prompt, yet how could the mechanical clacking of a keyboard and sharp click of a mouse compare to the serene stroke of a paintbrush on vibrant canvas? There is little wonder as one gazes at the one known as Sahur. I had much more of an intricate response typed out but I accidentally swiped and this freaking BROWSER got rid of all of it im so pissed right now holy crab im just gonna post this
insane larp
Recently came across this quiz question as well about the origins of the word "Sahur" and it's importance for the month of Ramadan. It doesn't latches onto a normal person but the etymology behind all the brainrotted gen-ai images is also fundamental to our own history as well.
Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Sahur 🥹
Incredible as always Adam. I literally had to turn away at the last paragraph because of how mind-alterning it was. The decentering of authorship in the critique of this "art movement" raises so many questions for me that I feel like a pinball machine shooting questions left and right in my head.
I wanted to say that Impressionism also never had a great following in the Paris Salon in the 1870s precisely because it was seen as low effort and didn't appeal to the sensibilities of the aristocratic artistic circles, but it did find a following with American buyers for whatever reason, and I like to think it was because Americans didn't try to "understand" the art but they "felt" it.
With the internet, it's all folk art. And like the Americans of the 1870s I think the internet is feeling before understanding, or looking at the phenomenology and context before the authorship, of these memes, and memes in general.
My whole definition of art has been thrown out the window. I think about "found art" which has no author, except that it does have a curator. Someone who had to either a) scoop the found art from its context and put it on display, or b) capture the found art via a camera, and physically press a button to shoot it.
Memes have authors, but the internet generally keeps people anonymous if they want to be. Users can act as anyone they like. But with AI, the only authorship is the presser of the keys to start a prompt to an image gen.
In that way, I think AI memes are a lot like the "found art" genre. They belong to the black box of the AI, and all it took was for someone to capture it.
Kind of like Pokémon I guess.