Heretical Teapot

“Hey, none of that. You're a valued member of the team, no matter what your power level.”

“I just don't understand how you can tear open that portal to the fire dimension so easily.”

“… fire dimension?”

“Yeah. Where the fire lives. Before you summon it. For fireballs.”

*actually looks at the environmental impact and discovers it's a drop in the bucket*

except it's not actually about that, it's bad because it's not real art

*realises my definition of art is so reactionary it excludes duchamp, pollock, and about half of the stuff since the 1800s*

except it's not actually about that it's about how it's STEALING our intellectual property

*realises my understanding of what is and isn't copyright infringement is somehow even more litigious than the actual law, and that adobe is trying to exploit the pro-copyright elements of anti-AI rhetoric to make artstyles copyrightable*

except it's not actually about that it's because it's destroying your brain

*actually reads the study i keep using as proof and realises that not only is it not a very good paper, the authors have explicitly disagreed with the conclusion i keep saying it proves*

except it's not actually about that it's about how it's replacing workers

*remembers that's been happening for the entirety of history and trying to destroy the thing automating your job out of viability has literally never worked*

except it's not actually about that it's about the innate human sovl

*realises my hitler particles are off the charts*

AI companies are not your friend. their valuation is ludicrously inflated right now and sam altman is scamming investors out of their money (which admittedly is pretty sexy of him). anyone who's trying to convince you you need to "uplift your productivity with AI" is either an idiot or a snake oil salesman

i am not going to force you to like AI. i personally don't use AI because i've rarely ever had a need to. i think it's perfectly fine for you to not like AI art and want some sort of filter to exclude AI stuff from search results or whatever. it wouldn't catch everything, but it'd still remove the bottom 90%, which is where the real problem lies

any belief that boils down to "the masses are all tasteless rubes who don't know what's good for them and need to be controlled (by me and my group) in order to culturally uplift them" is both incredibly pretentious and rather dangerous

i understand that there are two different things people mean when they talk about "human soul" and i think they're both shit. either:

A: you genuinely believe in the existence of an intangible human soul and are telling other people what they should and should not be allowed to do based off of your religious beliefs, in which case i think you should examine what meaningfully separates you from people who want to ban homosexuality because of the bible

or

For example, with automatic translation, when you translate from a language that's more gender neutral to English, which uses "he" or "she", biases sneak in - he treats the patients, she cooks dinner, stuff like that.

(Similar to how a lot of the image generators had a period where it turns out they were adding "racially ambiguous" to all prompts on the back-end, because results trended white-as-default).

Or, for another point of comparison, the whole argument of "are video games art?" turns out to have the boring answer of "yes, but that doesn't mean art is inherently meaningful".

Image generators tend towards average results, (they'd probably be really good at inoffensive hotel lobby art designed to provoke nothing), so on the whole humans will probably produce more interesting results out of an ability to get weird with it - you don't have to believe in the soul to prefer human art!

...But, by the same token, AI outputs curated by humans have, in personal experience, actually gotten pretty interesting.

Duchamp's Prelude to a Broken Arm (shut up about Fountain, it's not even the only readymade he did) is literally just a stock snow-shovel anyone could buy, hung up in a gallery.

But the nature of a snow-shovel titled the way it is inherently implies a story - someone shoveling snow, slipping, and breaking their arm. The title's implication creates that mental image in the viewer, and suddenly the piece is having a conversation with the viewer even though literally anyone could have made it.

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

Dianakko, in which Diana is a proper milady from the UK who confesses like if living in a Jane Austen novel… but Akko is Akko.

part 2

bonus: