Is craft making your own chisels for woodworking?
Perhaps there are craftsman who buy chisels made by others.
Okay. Then is craft only making furniture with dovetail joints by hand?
Well, I guess people use planers.
So, no it's not just hand made wood working that's craft.
Someone uses a CnC machine with a design they made to cut wood, then hand sands and polishes. Is that craft?
What if you learned it took them three or four times as many hours to learn the CnC machine and design as it did to hand plane a cedar log?
To be clear, I don't identify as an artist at all, but I do have a stake in this conversation -- which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them. The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available. It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
People have had access to tools for creating for generations. In the modern era you can buy a pencil and a sketch pad for dollars. You can buy an instrument used for as little as a hundred dollars. Hell, schools teach art and music for free.
>The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available.
Not all technology presents a net good for society. These technologies only exist on top the mountain of stolen artwork created by millions of artists, and this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists as long these companies are pushing them.
>It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
JFC. Don't talk to me about brain rot. The "art" and "creativity" you speak about here is just more finely grained consumption. Now instead of scrolling through a feed, you can ask Google to present your dopamine addicted brain exactly what you want to see in that moment.
In contrast, focusing on improving a craft acts as a sort of antidote to "brain rot" because you're engaging in multiple important things at once:
- critical thinking
- delayed gratification
- habit formation
- emotional exploration
- and more
I agree with the idea of “Amistics” (thanks Neal) - a sort of societal and moral lens to view technologies through and evaluate them. Totally with you there too.
I agree that doomscrolling and social media are cancer-y in the extreme, to the extent that for a number of years I printed a daily personal newspaper. Srsly.
> this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists …
Nope. We’ll just redefine what an artist is. Pop quiz: did Disney employ more “artists” when each cel of a film was hand drawn and colored, or now when these modern “faux-artists, not like the real ones” have access to rendering clusters?
Or a second pop quiz, when da Vinci or Rubens ran workshops where apprentices painted “da Vincis” or “Rubens(s?)” who was the artist?
By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is. I’m going to get super controversial, ca 1900 and say that photographers can be artists. Now I’m going to get super controversial ca 1910 and say that someone mounting a bicycle wheel as a ‘readymade’ and displaying it can be an artist. Wait, now I’m going to move ahead the 1980s and say a cow cut in half and suspended in some sort of formaldehyde can be art. Hang on. A poem on a disk that deletes itself as its read is art.
The art is the creative endeavor itself. It’s the outcome of a creative person engaging with whatever tools they want to create some output. If someone wants to engage with an LLM or diffusion model or whatever and have it make something to those standards, it’s art. Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect.
I’m not saying all uses of diffusion models or any other AI assisted imagery is art. But I am saying that ingesting and summarizing publicized images is not theft, and people choosing to use those tools to instantiate a creative vision can absolutely be art, and further that generally the cheaper a form of creative expression becomes the better on balance for the world.
