Jan 27, 2023
Today we feature another addition to our Psychedelic Café
series. This time exploring what art means and what the meaning of
art might become in a growing era of ai generated art-like images
flooding the mindspace of humanity through consumptive digital
media channels.
The cafe is a curated collection of participants who, through a
structure series of rounds, explore together a single question.
The question we are exploring is: What does the meaning of art
look like in an era of increasingly-accessible AI art generators
with increasingly powerful capacities for fidelity and
complexity?
And our guests are Autumn Skye, Simon Haiduk, Evan Bartholomew
(aka Bluetech), Martina Hoffman, Chor Boogie, Dan De Santos, and
Michael Phillip.
...
For links to our guests' work, full bios and show notes, and a
link to watch this episode in video, head to bit.ly/PsyCafe11
*** FULL TOPICS BREAKDOWN BELOW**
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Episode Breakdown
- (0:00) Opening
- (2:18) Overture
- (7:36) Patreon thanks
- (8:33) Participant Introductions
- (15:49) Introducing the question:
- (17:27) Ai art is inevitable
- (19:32) Ai as a bypass of the raw creative process
- (23:52) Ai art prompting as a kind of compulsion/binge
- (27:22) Ai isn’t art but something entirely new; the birth of a
new god
- (29:32) The legal and ethical questions around ai use of
artists’ work without consent
- (34:14) Ai meets our cultural compulsion to consume, rather
than truly create
- (35:55) A spiritual way to work with Ai art as ceremony; image
generation vs making art
- (40:39) A flood of ai art generators culturally downgrading the
monetary value of actual art
- (43:00) The spiritual harm of ai art generation
- (46:04) If artists feel threatened by Ai, then they need to
step up their game
- (51:33) Resisting the pull towards living a solely digital life
by doubling down on the physical act of creation
- (1:01:34) Ai art generators as a new archetypal container for
reality
- (1:02:50) How ai art generators work; the latent space
- (1:06:43) If art alters consciousness, what quality of
consciousness is ai art cultivating in us?
- (1:11:55) “The ai does not copy anything from the image”
- (1:16:39) Losing our connection to nature and our humanity in
favour of a transhumanist fallacy
- (1:21:49) A heated exchange on being “transparent” about
artists using digital tools (1:31:15) Trending novel technologies
as a platform for massive shadow projection
- (1:32:51) The danger of human creativity being atrophied due to
the ease of access of digital content
- (1:36:26) The dishonesty of not claiming when art is made
through digital means
- (1:40:59) Ai art generators as a means to satisfy our need to
create, without having to leave the easy consumption of digital
content
- (1:45:11) We need human creativity, even for ai art to be
worthwhile
- (1:46:21) Artistic editing vs artistic creation
- (1:49:13) The dilution of the power of art by a deluge of ai
content
- (1:52:53) Closing thoughts on this conversation
- (1:54:25) Ai art generators as an avenue for non-creative
people to explore the creation of beautiful images
- (1:58:33) Learning faith through the process of artistic
creation (and the journey of life)
- (2:02:59) Do we choose to surrender our souls to the matrix of
digital novelty or stay in the light of a higher principle?
- (2:05:05) An expression of hope for us to remember our humanity
in the face of ongoing technological novelty
- (2:10:26) Wondering about intentions, psychedelics, and
resisting the pull to getting locked into an ai reality
- (2:13:42) The potential for ai is so incredible, but generating
art seems like a dangerous waste of that potential
- (2:15:28) The debate around art generators reveals the
meta-crisis we are all in.
- (2:18:30) Closing
*****
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