technology

I dunno, a lot of the early (pre-commercially viable) versions of these tools were significantly more interesting largely in virtue of the fact that they didn't reliably give you exactly what you wanted. As a kind of creative tool, that can actually be useful (or at the very least produce output that's not just more of the same). The early Deep Dream versions where it hallucinated eyes and dogs all over everything (e.g. ) at least had a distinctive psychedelic style that was kind of neat, and suggesting things like “Why Are Men’s Penises in Such a Tizzy?” or “Spiders Are Getting Smarter, and So, So Loud” as NYT opinion columns is actually pretty funny. In both those cases, it's the failure mode that's interesting in virtue of the gap between what people were asking for and what they were getting. There's some space to play in there. As tech companies managed to round off those sharp corners and move toward commercial viability, this sort of light surrealism converged on the homogenous slop we all hate today. Part of what makes these things suck so hard is that they're totally frictionless: they will bend over backward to do exactly what you want exactly how you want it, while also producing something that looks exactly like how you'd expect the exact average of every piece of art ever produced would look. It's both sycophantic and boring, and the output is the artistic version of pink slime formed into the shape of different foods.

Also, the point about people preferring the AI prose/poetry at the end . . . They're probably bot comments, but yeah, the real people who do prefer AI writing is because it's basically that same condensation/pornification of everything happening right now where people respond to signifiers in a thing rather than the thing in totality. I am deeply skeptical people are broadly conscious on the level we ascribe them and when you ask them something they're prone to tell you some bullshit they just hallucinated in response.

Like, I'm not a big fan of hip hop. It's cool it exists, I like some hip hop but I don't actually know why this is. I can guess it's because I like more melody-driven stuff. I can guess it's because I don't live a lifestyle that harmonizes with that kind of music or I wasn't raised with it and thus it feels alien to me. But I don't know any of that. So if someone asks my why I don't and I'm not conscious enough to know that I don't know, I can just hallucinate this long argument about the better musicality of metal, etc. etc. but it's all bullshit.

A lot of the shit people say on the internet both isn't true broadly, and isn't even true to themselves, it's just thought-reflex. Part of getting a new communist subject is going to be forcing people to be more conscious of themselves.