Post

one thing i noticed at the art crawl this year is a number of fine artists using LLMs in their work. i spoke with one painter who said their neighbor had used mj to "recreate his style." I asked "how does that sit with you?" and he kind of waved over his face and said, "yeah, it's not... this/me"

I bought 2 paintings. Went to pick them up later and we talked more about generative art (of which I created a lot of in the early 2000s: processing!) and reactive music. He shared a bit of the story behind the work, getting excited to share some of his history. I felt enriched by this connection.

But he also had a lot of very fuzzy understanding of how LLMs work and we talked a bit on that (no, they aren't autonomously deciding to hack the world, etc.). It's making me aware that it's irresponsible to try to yell at people for using AI. It's happening, and w/the most expressive and creative.

But it's interesting to me how unfazed these artists are by it. To artists it IS simply a tool. To programmers and computer graphics producers, it's more of the entire production line. If you are fully tokenized, you are absolutely comprised and should probably start making art in earnest today.

That being said, I remain unsurprised that even creative people use extractive corporate technology w/o much of a second thought to the meaning behind these tokens. But I'm finding it harder to blame them considering the obfuscation of tokenization. What is *in* a token exactly? What is consumed?