making the blockchain into art
Slopsquatting is the creation of web sites or software packages with names that have not already been registered but that large language models (LLMs) are likely to hallucinate as the sources and the names of code libraries that they refer to when they are used to write computer programs. It is a development of typosquatting, […]
A friend asked me whether it’s true that feminizing HRT can affect your emotions. This is difficult to answer because the idea that women’s arguments on a matter can be discounted as being irrational because "hormones" is, to put it mildly, incredibly misogynistic. They weren’t asking and I’m not arguing this. So let’s not. That […]
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/29/court-of-appeal-ruling-will-prevent-uk-museums-from-charging-reproduction-feesat-last “Sweat of the brow” copyright was a legal confection created from whole cloth to support institutional enclosure of the public domain. It claimed that no originality is required to gain copyright as long as you have worked sufficiently hard to reproduce an…
Intellectual property is property. The artist who produces it speculatively is petit bourgeois. The illustrator who produces it as work for hire and is paid for their skill is labour aristocracy. Their privileged positions within capitalist society cannot be valorized by invoking a romanticized workerism. The loss of those privileged positions would be proletarianization (completely […]
Let us cavort like the Greeks of old. You know the ones I mean… – Hedonism Bot, Futurama. I get the job done – Chappel Roan, "The Giver". aye, there’s the rub – William Shakespeare, "Hamlet". From ancient pederasty to modern boarding school hierarchies, the morphism from competently performed socially hegemonic masculinity to its codomain […]
Semiogenesis is the emergence or introduction of meaning into a system, the emergence of meaning from meaninglessness. This is a process of irony – of the reversal of meaninglessness into meaning and then into further meanings. Meaning, or significance, will attach itself to any human activity. Preventing it from doing so is harder than imposing […]
An ethical thought experiment for the boys in the lesswrong/effective accelerationism/post-rationalist tendency. A future, post-transition you may exist as a girl. Regarding this as impossible or ridiculous may simply be denial. We don’t know how much dysphoria you are currently experiencing in comparison to her, as that can only be known post-transition. We therefore do […]
I am fantastically happy with how the show turned out. Two things I realized talking to people about it: The three new series are each depictions of different kinds of subjects/persons (patriarchal/legal/cypherpunk). I went outside my comfort zone, making works that could (but didn’t!) fail The new series are about who gets to speak under […]
OpenAI’s social media announcement of its new image model led to a wave of copycat "ghibliizing" of images, named for their imitation of the house style of animator Hayao Miyazaki’s animation studio. Elon Musk’s Whitehouse took only 24 hours to use that model to re-render a photographic record of its rapidly escalating human rights abuses […]
This should be the golden age of the study of rhetoric. The rest of the humanities should also be having a field day, from litcrit to epistemology to poetics. But LLMs deal directly in rhetoric. They are not models of knowledge, they are models of persuasive language, of language that convinces the reader of something […]