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.