[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Hi Allen,

Thank you for raising this point. I also agree that it’s interesting/critical/something worth discussing. I was reading a similar article yesterday.

From my perspective, your comment touches on three different strands of argument.

The first is the ‘what is art?’ question that has been going for centuries (Warburton’s The Art Question and the indomitable Berger, though old, are my go-to’s on this).

The second is the ongoing arguments about AI and ethics (which include the ‘is it going to take people’s job’ question).

The third is a more implicit argument about what ‘validation’ might be and where this sits within wider structures of power (who is the validator, what wider structural social ‘norm’ are they representing or propping up in their validations?)

For me, the elephant in the room is sustainability/environment. These servers must take enormous amounts of power, and I wonder how the people running them, if they do, consider how to make their projects carbon-neutral.

I wish I had the time at the moment to engage more fully in the argument. But I don’t, not here at least, although I suspect it’ll be one I’ll engage in at work.

I have to admit that I engaged with Mid-Journey yesterday though, as I wanted to find out what it did with my alt-text for my images (interestingly, and probably predictably, the results were nothing like the original image). And today I will sponsor some tree-planting to try to offset the server time.


Sarah-Jane
(yet another thing I find interesting is that the AI privileges text over image. Everything is made from image prompts. I wonder if Lefebvre, my favourite theorist, would argue that this promotes abstraction, a diminishing of the space of lived experience, maybe, although he is long-dead so who knows for sure).