Poor villagers live in the shadow of a mountain, scratching a living from the ribs of the earth. Inside the mountain is an immense quantity of gold, protected by a dragon.

An adventurer arrives. In the dead of night he scales the mountain, kills the dragon, and returns with a single gold piece to prove his deed. The villagers regard it with awe and suspicion, as though it might dissolve in his hand.

“There’s more inside,” the dragonslayer says. “The wyrm is dead, and you are all rich.” 

Villagers cautiously enter the mountain and take handfuls of gold from around the dragon’s cooling body. It’s as the adventurer said – there’s nearly limitless amounts of it. Soon men are hauling goldfrom the mountain by the wagonload, each believing that they have become rich.

The local economy instantly crashes. Gold is so common that it’s useless as a means of exchange – might as well barter with air or dirt. Nobody will accept it as payment for any good or service. 

The dragonslayer is astonished. He thought he’d killed a dragon. Instead, he’d really killed gold.

Obscurus artifex

AI generated-art is fascinating and should be closely watched by anyone in any creative field.

The speed at which technological breakthroughs are occurring is a little alarming. Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. 2022 is shaping up to be fifty-two Lenin-weeks back to back to back.

In the space of a few months this has gone from being a niche interest to a rapidly-growing commercial concern. A wave of consumer-facing products and services now exist, of which Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2. and Craiyon (the last two are based on OpenAI’s GPT-3) have received the most media attention.

It’s hard to know just how capable these things are. Once, it was claimed that DALL-E 2 couldn’t create an image of a horse riding an astronaut…but it could. You just had to ask it right. As someone once noted, it’s often like neural nets have the ability to do things but not the motivation, and can be tricked into performing well via cleverly-worded prompts. For example, prompting with “trending on Artstation” seems to increase the quality of DALL-E 2’s output. And none of the things that could possibly be bottlenecking GPT-3 in its current form (corpus size, or parameter count, or whatever) are close to a theoretical limit, meaning there is likely a massive amount of headroom still to be explored. OpenAI recently slashed the price of GPT-3 by 66%, which could be a sign that GPT-4 is nearing release.

Most commentary has focused on the job displacement issue. Will artists now be out of work now?

A valid concern. AI-generated art has potential to create the same kind of industry shifts that mp3 piracy did twenty-five years ago.

A basic economics concept: any product has a mixture of fixed costs and marginal costs. Fixed costs do not vary with the number of products, while marginal costs do. In practice, the fixed costs of a Metallica album are whatever it costs them to write and perform the music, and the marginal costs of a Metallica album are the pressing, distribution, shelving, and so on. The fixed costs get you one of a thing. The marginal costs get you the second.

At the start of the millenium, digital filesharing caused the marginal costs of music to crash to near zero. Suddenly, no shelf space was required to stock music, and no trucks were needed to ship it. You could fill an entire hard drive with Metallica songs for free if you wanted.

This famously crunched the record industry and did great damage to other fields. But through it all, artists had a lifeline: piracy didn’t affect their fixed costs. “Someone still has to pay us to create art, right? You can’t pirate art if nobody makes it.” Thanks to AI, this is no longer necessarily true. Now artists are hammered at both sides: in the 00’s Digital filesharing disrupted the distribution of art, and in the 20s neural nets will disrupt the creation of it.

But  if this was the only consequence, I’d probably feel quite well disposed to AI art.

Technology has always displaced employment. We generally consider this to be a net positive. Yes, it sucks that wheelwrights don’t exist anymore, but now we have cars.

There’s an anti-technology attitude among artists that’s a little frustrating. We’re now standing at the threshold of an age of wonder. A day where you can just imagine something and get a photorealistic image of it. I think it’s honestly amazing, and if a porn artist has to get a day job because neural nets can create better rule 34 of Dora the Explorer shitting into CatDog’s mouth than he can, then so be it.

And as patio11 notes, all artists are reliant on technology themselves. They just don’t realize it. When a writer uses a thesaurus to look up a different word for brown, that’s normal. When a writer uses NovelAI to workshop a scene…well, that’s just wrong.

But there’s something far more disquietening going on: AI-generated art almost seems like an axe aimed at the concept of art itself.

Art won’t die, but it’s likely that over the next twenty years (or sooner), it will cease to exist in its current form. What the next evolution of art looks like remains to be seen. But it now must evolve.

What is art?

An academic would tell you that it’s an artist’s aesthetic experience trapped inside a medium.

An evolutionary psychologist would tell you it’s a peacock’s tail: a form of social signaling designed to attract a mate.

But for the average person, it’s probably fair to say “art is the world made special”.

What’s the difference between an empty wall, and a wall with a painting on it? The second wall is special. 

Art adds uniqueness to the world. However poor or hackish an individual piece of art might be, collectively, art enriches our experience of living.

Art’s specialness stems, in part, from its rareness. Few men can paint like Da Vinci, few sculpters can shape marble like Michelangelo could. When you look at the Sistene Chapel, you are gazing upon the apex of human achievement.

(Modern and contemporary art is a slightly different story. Obviously Duchamp’s Fountain isn’t particularly rare – there’s urinals in every public place – but it’s “rare” in the sense that it was a bold statement, a founding work in a new movement, was seen as opening new avenues of discussion about everyday objects elevated to art, blah blah. Not every urinal is a work of art.)

…all of this goes away when a neural net can fire out a firehose of Da Vincis. When everything is special, nothing is.

The permanent debasing of art is a difficult idea to get your head around. In a sense, it’s actually worse than art disappearing. Imagine if every art gallery was suddenly empty. Yes, the world would be much the poorer, but we would create new art to replace it.

But imagine if the concept of art ceased to exist. But imagine if those artworks…but through sheer commonality, we lost our ability to appreciate them.

This has happened before. We stand on the bones of many past dragons.

Watch this:

No, Youtube’s player didn’t break. You saw the whole thing. This is Fred Ott’s Sneeze, from 1896. It’s Thomas Edison’s assistant sneezing, shot on a kinetograph.

It wasn’t the first film, but it was the first to be copyrighted. People used to pay money to watch things like this, in traveling road shows. The new technology amazed people.

What feeling does it produce in you now?

I’ll tell you what I feel: absolutely nothing. It’s just a grainy video of a man sneezing. We’ve had this technology for well over a century and the novelty is gone, along with the emotional response that it once triggered. The thing exists but its soul has departed, exorcised by technology and time.

Even more “legitimate” art isn’t safe. An Aboriginal cave painting provokes scientific interest…but I doubt I’m feeling what the person who painted it felt. A lot of art from centuries past feels quaint and odd, because it was baked in a fire of religious fervor that modern audiences don’t share.

Even if you look at the paintings in this book so closely that your nose touches the paper, you’re still looking at them across a vast distance: the centuries that separate the highly religious, proto-scientific age of Jan Van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) from our own post-Christian, science-saturated age. We can’t see them as Van Eyck meant them to be seen and his contemporaries did see them, because the old beliefs and certainties have vanished or changed. Perhaps the portraits – including his own shrewd, thin-lipped and highly intelligent face, watching with careful, observant eyes beneath a red turban – have best ridden out the centuries. But what do the Madonnas and Annunciations mean now? Not what they meant once: Protestantism and secularism have trampled on Van Eyck’s Catholic world.^[1]https://papyrocentricperformativity.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/eycks-eyes/

What he means is that although Van Eyck’s paintings remain, the context that allowed us to appreciate them has vanished (unless you’re Catholic). For art in general, the Reformation is here, and the Enlightenment soon.

Heap of Broken Images

But maybe this sort of jeremiad comes years too late.

I largely agree with nostalgebraist’s thoughts here. AI is just an A-bomb falling on a city already blown to rubble. It almost doesn’t matter. There’s too much art already.

Every year, there are thousands of new books that nobody reads, millions of new photos whose fate is to sit on page 214 of an instagram feed, hundreds of albums that clog Bandcamp’s servers, etc.

Even huge cultural moments (such as massive Hollywood movies underpinned by hundred million dollar ad spends) no longer seem to mean what they did. Massive studios spend a quarter of a billion dollars making a movie…and after a few years, it’s like it never existed. It’s frequently joked that James Cameron’s Avatar grossed $2.847 billion at the box office…and yet nobody can remember a single thing about it.

There’s so much stuff now. Great news for the consumer, but for the artist it feels like pouring endless smoke into a black sky. The novelty has gone, and no matter what you do, there’s someone out there doing it better.

The most reliable way to establish yourself as an artist is to find a “scene” that’s small enough for a name to stand out, exploit that scene as much as possible, and pray it doesn’t collapse. You can’t realistically be the best writer, but maybe you can be the best Post-Futurist LGTB Afropunk writer. Be a big fish in a small pond. But soon (possibly very soon), AI-generated art will be able to instantly fill any niche you point it at.

The future

I think art will re-emerge in a new form. The beauty and rareness-seeking impulse hasn’t gone away.

But what will that new form look like?

We might see a concerted pushback toward human-generated art. “Created by a person” might become the next hot marketing buzzword, the way Queen albums used to be advertised as having no synthesisers.

Or art might rally around performance. Computers have beaten humans at chess for a long time, but chess between two humans is still fascinating to watch. And someone like DrDisrespect is doing far more than playing a videogame: an aimbot can easily defeat him in raw technical skill…but nobody wants to watch an aimbot stream a game. Already, Art and Music are among the top-viewed categories on Twitch. There seems to be demand for this kind of connection, and insight into the creative process.

Lastly, art might coalesce around intentionality, meaning, and context.

I appreciated Bruno Schulz’s prose and George Trakl’s poetry more when I knew the circumstances under which they made it. I appreciated Black Sabbath more when I knew about the pain in Tony Iommi’s amputated fingertips. That sense of human connection is very important, or at least it is to me. “This isn’t just a random shard of beauty and horror, it was forged by a mind.”

Can GPT-3 offer that? Here’s the circumstances under which it makes art.

But regardless of what happens, I think we’re heading into a world where art has no intrinsic value, in and of itself. It only has conditional value due to the circumstances attached to it. This was probably always at least partially true, and will now become fully true. It is the Total Eclipse of the Art.

Years pass at the village. Everyone uses paper money now. Mountains of gold are left lying in the street. Its value now stands at negative. You pay to have it carted away.

It still glitters, just as it did. Occasionally someone notices the shine, and thinks that it’s pretty. Then they understand, a little, why their ancestors prized it so highly.

But that world has gone away. The shine is everywhere. Gold means nothing.

…except in one household.

The dragonslayer has kept the original piece he took. It’s on his mantlepiece. He cannot say why, but he can’t bear to throw it away. He looks on that tiny scrap of worthless metal and sees anew the dragon: the heaving scales, the flaming breath. Remembers the blood pounding in his ears, the terror wrapped like a claw around his heart. Remembers how he felt in the moment after he drove a sword through the monster’s breast, and knew that it was all over.

Yes, the gold still has meaning to him.

As a kid, I watched Beavis and Butthead with the understanding that they’d prove a fleeting pleasure. “Soon I’ll be too old for this crap and it won’t be funny anymore.”

I am now very, very old, and still waiting for that day to arrive.

Maybe Mike Judge is a genius, or maybe B&B is so simple that it’s impossible to screw up, but the formula continues to work after thirty years. Beavis and Butthead are still two idiots who stumble through life mouth-breathing and misunderstanding everything that happens to them, and that’s all they will need to be. If only life was so simple for the rest of us.

The plot involves Beavis andButthead literally failing upward. After trashing a science fair (“Did we win the science fair?” “Even better, Beavis. We kicked its ass.”), a judge orders them to attend space camp for at-risk youth. An astronaut sees them, believes they are naturally gifted astronauts (a recurring plotline of B&B is the adult who mistakes them for secret geniuses), and takes them into orbit to study a black hole approaching Earth.  In space, they create havoc, fall into the black hole, and emerge in the year 2022.

There’s the obligatory larger plot about government coverups and an incipient apocalypse, but the bulk of the comedy comes from them interacting with this new, strange world. Beavis thinks Siri is an actual woman and sexually harasses her. Later, the duo wander into a college class, are told that they have “white male privilege”, and start using that as carte blanch to do whatever they want. “Step aside please. We have white privilege.”

A 4channer once proposed a movie idea: a generic 90s bully time-travels to a modern high school full of furries and tenderqueers. B&BDTU is almost that movie. Aside from being funny this solves the main problem with the characters: they’re so indelibly a product of the 90s. What’s B&B’s main form of entertainment? To sit on a couch watching TV. Few kids do that anymore. They were further characterized by their love of heavy metal, which hasn’t been a mainstream force in a long time.

The Simpsons never knew how to upgrade its stock 90s setting into the modern age, but Mike Judge draws attention to the cultural gap. His duo is now more oblivious than ever.

There’s lots of bite in Judge’s comedy but no real cruelty. He isn’t mocking anyone except Beavis & Butthead, and even that’s not true mockery. The show was always a parody of boomer paranoia about Generation X (that they’re morally vacuous retards who just want to stare at bouncing boobs on MTV all day). To think Beavis & Butthead exists to ridicule Generation X is as misguided as thinking blaxsploitation exists to ridicule African Americans. And even if they’re figures of fun, so what? Beavis and Butthead are immune to mockery. That’s their power. Deplore their lack of morality, and they’d simply wheeze-laugh. “Heh heh…you said ‘oral’.”

And that brings me to an insight I had about Beavis and Butthead.

In the 17th century, a philosophical debate raged about the nature of mankind. Are humans endowed with an innate moral sense (Shaftesbury), or are we natural savages who must be disciplined by an external force such as civilization (Hobbes)?

In the 20th century, evolutionary theory offered a new answer: we’re both.

Imagine that humans come in two varieties: nice guy and bully. When a nice guy meets an bully, the bully wins. But if bullies become too common, nice guys gain an advantage (because bullies waste time picking pointless fights with each other while nice guys don’t). Over time, an equilibrium of nice guys to bullies is found (attach numbers to this simplistic model and you even calculate the exact ratio). The point is, you wouldn’t say that humans are naturally nice or naturally bully, you’d say that our species is split between two competing strategies. This is the insight of John Maynard Smith’s hawk/dove theory.

It occurs to me that Beavis and Butthead occupy one half of a hawk/dove strategy. The fact that they’re stupid and selfish isn’t a failing, it helps them. David Van Driessen is moral and empathetic, but this gets him exploited by Beavis & Butthead at every turn. Tom Anderson is conservative and proud to be an American, even after his country literally rapes him in the ass. Likewise, the social justice warriors have an elaborate set of shame-based social theories that Beavis & Butthead promptly weaponize against them without even knowing they’re doing so. It’s like intelligence and all its fruits (morality, empathy, time preference) is actually a harmful virus, and only Beavis & Butthead are immune.

I’m probably overthinking things myself. B&B is a fictional show. Whenever the idiots win, it’s because a writer made it so. But I still think B&B is pointing toward a real thing: intelligence is a virtue, but not a universal virtue. In a universe of rippling chaos, sometimes it’s the stupid who win.

Invest wisely and your portfolio will grow 9.89% YOY. Meanwhile, an 80 IQ truck driver just bought a lottery ticket and made a 133,333x return in five minutes. In the long term, intelligence wins out, but in the short term, the winners are usually stupid. And sometimes, the short term is all that matters.

Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Indies was only somewhat less moronic than Beavis and Butthead going to space to get laid. But it led to the Columbian Exchange, the historical event of the millennium. Who knows, maybe the world really will be saved by a man with a T-shirt pulled up over his head, screeching about TP for his bunghole.

Michael Jackson’s recording career came to a sad conclusion on October 30, 2001. He should have released Invincible in September, when it would have only been the second greatest tragedy of the month.

It’s not an album, it’s a PR statement: “don’t listen to what everyone’s saying about me. I’m a normal guy!” By 2000 Jacko’s public image was absolutely out of control and he’d had two options: either rebrand himself as a Howard Hughes-type freakshow, or tamp down the weirdness somehow.

He made the boring choice, or perhaps Sony made it for him. The label had a lot invested both in Invincible’s success (its thirty million dollar production cost remains an industry record, though Michael demanded still more money and accused CEO Tommy Mottola of racism when he wouldn’t pay), and in its main star not appearing like a total lunatic. Before anything else, this album tries to not rock the boat, and unfortunately it succeeds.

Invincible wants to be vapid millennial R&B and follows a formula. Ballads, soft strings, “edgy” songs containing glitched-up funk beats and rapping, guest spots by normal wholesome dudes (ie, R Kelly), lyrics spat out by a Platitude Bot 2000, and when ideas run out (almost immediately) still more ballads. Most albums are accidentally forgettable. Not so here. Invincible was conceived and executed with that goal in mind.

The biggest problem with Invincible – aside from the fact that there’s nothing creepier than a man loudly insisting that he’s normal – is that it’s extremely dull. Who wants to hear a former titan ripping off people who were ripping him off to begin with? The lyrics (aside from “Privacy” and the nauseating “The Lost Children”) are just all about love and romance, and the music just blurs into Boyz II Men (emphasis on the boys, I guess).

Sony was heavily invested, but the same can’t be said for Michael. He barely seems to be in the studio, and he projects not an iota of coolness or attitude into these songs (which aren’t worthy of them in any event). He moon-shuffles. He’s a Smooth Criminal whose offense is an unpaid parking ticket, a Speed Demon doing 62 in a 60 zone. I aspire to someday be this indifferent to thirty million dollars landing in my checking account.

Needless to say, he didn’t tour off Invincible, sparing us the comedy of seeing “You Rock My World” on a setlist with “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough”. He made a few media appearances. For example, in 2003 the deputies of Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Dept got a unique meet-and-greet photo session when Mr Normal was charged with seven counts of child sexual abuse.

His songwriting talent had already started to crumble on HIStory and here it’s completely gone. Sixteen bad songs. No good ones. If you want to hear music like “Billie Jean”, you’re in luck. In 1982 Michael Jackson released an album called Thriller, and by sheer coincidence it has a song that sounds exactly like “Billie Jean”! It even has the same title! Don’t listen to this album, though. It’s shit.

I am sorry if I seem to dislike Michael personally. I actually don’t understand him at all. The more I learn and read and expose myself to his personality, the more my noncomprehension deepens. There’s something alien and unreachable about him. But I am repulsed by the parts I see: the glimpses of squirming tentacles behind an impenetrable shell.

I am strongly persuaded that he molested children. This casts much of his character (his philanthropy, his generosity) in a different light: the deeds of a manipulator trying to escape consequences. It makes his war against the paparazzi far less sympathetic. I hear “You keep on stalking me, invading my privacy. Won’t you just let me be.“, remember Robson’s story about finding bloodstains in his underwear, and accept that maybe Michael’s privacy should, in fact, have been invaded. The paranoid tenor of his later work seems less fanciful: it was no delusion, because Michael actually had everything to hide.

His fans are awful. He was incredibly talented as a musician, but in the 90s this talent was eclipsed by a different skill: building and leading a kind of cult. He is a fascinating example of a secular religious icon, and to this day, living Thriller zombies haunt Twitter and Tiktok, circulating his apologetics. The basic thrust is that everything that went wrong for Michael – his finances, his appearance, his death – was someone else’s fault.

There’s a grain of truth to this. Michael Jackson never had a chance at living a normal life. But his fans ignore Michael’s agency (and four hundred million records sold buys a lot of agency), objectifying him to the level of a puppet.

Did Conrad Murray cause his death? Yes, the Jackobots say. He gave him surgical anesthetic as a sleeping aid! Bad doctor! They don’t ask the next question: who hired Conrad Murray to do this? Answer: Michael. They also don’t ask what would have happened if Murray had refused this stupid and insane order. Answer: Michael would have fired him, and found a different doctor.

The same can be said for the ruin of Michael’s face, his oversized chin implant, the nose whittled away like a blade, etc. Unneeded operations. But what would be the point of a plastic surgeon refusing to perform them? Michael had endless money to indulge his body dysmorphia. He would just go to someone else. The problem was always Michael. His story is one of tragedy, victimization, and self-destruction.

But self-destructive people can make fascinating art, and this was Michael’s saving grace. I’d like to pretend his recording career ended with HIStory. That album, like the one before, was a paranoid, sweaty jumble of blame-laying and resentment. Disturbing though it was, it made for compelling listening. You felt you were getting ringside seats for a man’s breakdown, and you got some strong songs, too: “Scream” and “Stranger in Moscow” kick the shit out of everything on this album. There’s a class of words in English better known by their opposites (gruntled, hinged, domitable, and so on). Michael Jackson’s last album is very vincible indeed.