They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Like

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.

He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.

And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"

Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.

Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.

The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.

Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.

...

I began trying to answer this question because I thought it would be an interesting quest to try and create it.

I came up with several potential components of an answer:

It corresponds to reality. On Youtube I began watching some of the oldest videos that had ever been uploaded, from 20 years ago. At the time, these videos were simple moments in real human life, but now, in an era when many of these records are no longer extant due to the passage of time, and millions of fake videos could be created using AI, these videos become extremely meaningful because they represent reality from two decades prior.

It is intensely intentional. Every stroke, every word, every sound, every image, would be specifically selected and chosen or created for this project. Nothing could be included thoughtlessly; everything would have purpose behind it.

It is unique because of an artist's unique vision, intention, and process of creating. A similar piece could not be easily created because it is so heavily influenced by the decisions the artist made, the skills and experiences they have or do not have, and the process of assembling the piece.

It comes from physical interaction with the physical world. Even if the art was presented in a digital form, it would have to be created through the artist's interactions with physical objects. The artist's interaction with the material world would be obvious in every part of the piece.

The origins of each constituent part could be tracked down and understood. You could investigate and learn how each part was created and where the pre-existing materials came from.

The act of creating it would be crucial to what it is. The art would not just be a finished product, but the actual process and motivation of creating it.

I say that these are part of an answer because none of them in isolation are the answer, and together they do not form a complete answer. A complete answer is impossible. But they form a very interesting basis for an art project.

I’m curious if someone could find distinct examples in each of these directions? You say a complete answer is impossible, (which I mean, yeah, makes sense to me, it’s a big complicated thing and finding the exact ‘opposite’ of something is not necessarily possible)

But maybe there are certain pieces or types of art out there that can take some of these specific extremes (even if not all of them) and explore them to their fullest? Like, I could see maybe a handmade sweater for number 5, if someone say, raised their own sheep, found and created their own dyes, wove the thread, and knitted the sweater from all that? Seems pretty close, even if you could feasibly keep going indefinitely (breed the sheep yourself to get the right texture? Learn woodworking to craft your own loom?)

I think it’s possible to mistake the medium for the art.

Artists have certainly used algorithmic methods in both composition, execution and performance, for over a century. we wouldn’t have certain branches of modern music, stochastic composition, “machine-generated” music that involves levels of looping, triggers, sampling, randomization, or even just the simple automation of using sequencing and drum machines.

There is a line between “I made art by setting up a Rube Goldberg contraption out of modular synths, Lego Mindstorms parts and a Raspberry Pi running janky Python scripts” and “I wrote a really complex prompt to generate a hit single,” to be sure, but what would make the latter more palatable? Building your own AI model trained solely on your own music, powered by you on an exercise bike?

We have had a long and fraught relationship with the concept of “authenticity.” The Romantic idea that things start in some sort of Rousseauian state of nature, pure, only to become sullied by Civilization, so you must avoid Selling Out.

see also: the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition; people’s reaction to Bob Dylan playing electric guitar in 1965; the disco records bonfire of 1979; stickers on records proudly proclaiming “there are no synthesizers on this album,” and so on.

Note also that “bad” AI art has many qualities of kitsch; It is ersatz. There has often been a cultural backlash against “knowing” kitsch because of its association with LGBTQ & satirical resistance to authority. That said, can you satirize accidental kitsch, a mechanical byproduct?

Once you overvalue authenticity you start down a slippery slope in a quest for “un-coopt-able” art, which ironically is entirely about pose and artifice, which makes such “cool hunting” ripe for satire.

I guess the idea of correspondence to reality or being based on interaction with the physical world could be similar to authenticity, but it is not the same, because authenticity is a quality art supposedly has, not a quality of the process of creating.

The reason "the process of creating" is so important to "the opposite of AI art" is that with AI art, that part is mostly gone. You type a prompt, but unless you made the model yourself, you aren't part of anything that actually happens to turn the prompt into an output. You don't know or control what inputs the model was trained on. You as the user are almost entirely excluded from the process of art.

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

browser.ml.enable

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:

sidebar.revamp

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

there's a few great posts on here such as this one about how murderbot uses drones to fully and properly experience the world around it (it also accesses security cameras/other systems for this same purpose). but i haven't seen anyone so far talk about how once MB stops working for the company and consequently doesn't have a hubsystem/secsystem to connect to anymore (which for its entire existence up to that point had been how it was used to interacting with its environment/doing its job), after it meets ART, ART starts to fill that gap.

ART gives MB access to more cameras, systems, and information archives than it would normally be able to connect with while MB is on its own outside of ART's... body(? lol), but also directly gives MB access to its own cameras, drones, archives, facilities, and processing space. additionally, so much of ART's function is dedicated to analysis, lateral thinking, and logical reasoning, and it not only uses those skills in service of reaching murderbot's goals, it teaches murderbot how to use those same skills. (ART might be a bit of an asshole about how it does this, but that doesn't negate just how much it does for murderbot for no reason other than it's bored/interested in MB as an individual.)

we all love goofing about how artificial condition can basically be boiled down to "two robots in a trench coat trying to get through a job interview" (which is entirely accurate tbh) but that's also such a great example of ART fulfilling the role of both murderbot's "hubsystem" and "secsystem", allowing it to fully experience its environment/ succeed in its goals. ART provides MB with crucial information, context, and constructive criticism, and uses its significant processing power to act as MB's backup and support system while they work together.

from ART's side of things, we get a very explicit explanation of how it needs the context of murderbot's emotional reactions to media in order to fully understand and experience the media as intended. it tried to watch media with its humans, and it didn't completely understand just by studying their reactions. but when it's in a feed connection with murderbot, who isn't human but has human neural tissue, ART is finally able to thoroughly process the emotional aspects of media (side note, once it actually understands the emotional stakes in a way that makes sense for it, it's so frightened by the possibility of the fictional ship/crew in worldhoppers being catastrophically injured or killed that it makes murderbot pause for a significant amount of time before it feels prepared to go on. like!! ART really fucking loves its crew, that is all).

looking at things further from ART's perspective: its relationship with murderbot is ostensibly the very first relationship it's been able to establish with not only someone outside of its crew, but also with any construct at all. while ART loves its crew very much (see previous point re: being so so scared for the fate of the fictional crew of worldhoppers), it never had a choice in forming relationships with them. it was quite literally programmed to build those relationships with its crew and students. ART loves its function, its job, and nearly all of the humans that spend time inside of it, but its relationship with murderbot is the first time it's able to choose to make a new friend. that new friend is also someone who, due to its partial machine intelligence, is able to understand and know ART on a whole other level of intimacy that humans simply aren't capable of. (that part goes for murderbot, too, obviously; ART is its first actual friend outside of the presaux team, and its first bot friend ever.)

and because murderbot is murderbot, and not a "nice/polite to ART most of the time" human, this is also one of the first times that ART gets real feedback from a friend about the ways that its actions impact others. after the whole situation in network effect, when the truth of the kidnapping comes to light and murderbot hides in the bathroom refusing to talk to ART (and admittedly ART doesn't handle this well lol) - ART is forced to confront that despite it making the only call it felt able to make in that horrifying situation, despite it thinking that that was the right call, its actions hurt murderbot, and several other humans were caught in the crossfire. what's most scary to ART in that moment is the idea that murderbot might never forgive it, might never want to talk to it again. it's already so attached to this friendship, so concerned with murderbot's wellbeing, that the thought of that friendship being over because of its own behavior is terrifying. (to me, this almost mirrors murderbot's complete emotional collapse when it thinks that ART has been killed. the other more overt mirror is ART fully intending on bombing the colony to get murderbot back.)

its okay to have stagnant periods, all life has periods of time in its life cycle just to exist and conserve energy and its okay for people to do that too.