When They Say 'Machine Learning', Are They Talking About People?
AI, Creativity and Propaganda
You know what’s more boring than hearing gay people talk about how amazing it is to be gay? It’s gay people talking about how that may have been true ten or twenty years ago. I have become that boring person. I am gay and have NEVER spent so much time thinking about it and talking about it as much as I do now. It’s so tedious trying to counter all that the mainstream says about what it is or means to be gay. They can’t even say the word—they have to have a long string of gibberish letters that supposedly represents real people and not mentally ill children and fetishistic adults. You can’t even distinguish the LGBTQIAXz+-designation from a nasty sounding medication which is what it is symbolically. Take it. Trust it. Be it. It is an impossible pill to swallow.
Besides being a malcontent homo, I am an artist and writer struggling to find his place in a world after getting cancelled by my previous audience. Art and creativity is all that I’ve ever had to get me to where I needed to go, but what do you do when nobody can appreciate art unless it is in perfect alignment with their imagined truth? I’m still working on that and am happy to take suggestions.
AI and CREATIVITY. I have been very anti-AI. The apps that help you spell better, complete sentences for you, write papers…all of that garbage just tells me how few ideas there will be in the future. It tells me how lazy people are and how reliant they are on using something other than their own brain to solve problems and learn from mistakes. They can give us all the excuses they want about saving time and equity, but microwave ovens never made anyone a better cook either.
Because I know AI is not going anywhere, I decided to see what it was about. I don’t consider AI renderings as ‘art’. They can be nice and amusing, but they’re not art. It is ironic that the actual artistry is in writing the text-to-image prompts that tell the AI what to produce, but those aren’t secrets that will be hidden forever.
The images in the memes above and the images below were made with the assistance of AI. Maybe in the future AI will be able to discern the symbolism designed into AI creations and refuse to produce them if they go against the liberal programming and moderation. I won’t say the service I use, but it has refused to make certain images and refuses certain words that will produce images that moderators can decide to delete. In the meantime, I am exploring and looking for inspiration in the real world.
The racism in women’s basketball and biological men competing against women is of interest to me and might produce some interesting AI results. Here is a women’s sporting even I’d like to see. The Wheelchair Long Jump. So empowering and brave.
And though this is not a very good rendering, below is a pretty good imagining of the female Secret Service recruits in training or running to get in line at the DEI job fair. Pure chaos.
Or what about the darlings of the Biden Administration and people like luggage thief, non-binary person, Sam Brinton? Maybe AI can help us not to forget, but I know that it’s being trained to remember things in a certain way.
Authentic artists and creative people can’t just stop. We persist.
