[HN Gopher] Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI
        
       Author : bryanrasmussen
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2023-04-25 07:26 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
        
       | RugnirViking wrote:
       | I like it. Artsy, sure, but a fun experiment with AI. The author
       | took a long description of a mysterious abstract painting from
       | Moby Dick and got dall-e to generate it, then iterated with the
       | proceess over and over with nautical-sounding language, choosing
       | variations on the image to shape it into a heart
        
         | JieJie wrote:
         | Humanity is going to be fine in the world of AI. There has
         | always been a distinction between fine and commercial art.
         | Commercial art will certainly take a big hit, but fine art like
         | this will be here as long as there are humans to make it.
         | 
         | I'm not convinced that the invisible hand of the market was
         | ever a good fit for creative works. It would be better for the
         | free expression of ideas if we go back to patronage through
         | things like Patreon, Kickstarter, etc. or even better, public
         | works projects like the WPA [0][1].
         | 
         | [0]https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/works-
         | progre... [1]https://www.britannica.com/topic/WPA-Federal-Art-
         | Project
         | 
         | > the WPA is celebrated today for the employment it offered to
         | millions during the darkest days of the Great Depression, and
         | for its lasting legacy of smartly designed, well-built schools,
         | dams, roads, bridges and other buildings and structures--many
         | of which are still in active use across the United States.
         | 
         | >The project employed more than 5,000 artists at its peak in
         | 1936 and probably double that number over the eight years of
         | its existence. It produced 2,566 murals, more than 100,000
         | easel paintings, about 17,700 sculptures, nearly 300,000 fine
         | prints, and about 22,000 plates for the Index of American
         | Design, along with innumerable posters and objects of craft.
         | The total federal investment was about $35,000,000.
        
       | denton-scratch wrote:
       | Well, none of those images came close to what Melville's prose
       | evoked for me.
       | 
       | And I'm afraid I found the author's prose pretentious, perhaps
       | like what ChatGPT might spit out if you asked it to write like a
       | pompous literary critic.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-04-26 23:03 UTC)