[ SECRET POST #6075 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6075 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



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02.
[Fallen London]



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03.
[Krazy Kat]



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04.
[The Lost Tomb]



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09.
[Transcript: I swear the hell, none of you people think writing is "real" art that takes "real" effort, not compared to the other kinds.]


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10.
[Transcript: I bought a red immersion blender just so I could name it Tom Servo.]






















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #868.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, and anyone can doodle a couple of stick figures and call that good art by your logic.

Look, writing, good writing, is not something just anyone can do well, or even decently, without a massive amount of effort. It takes hard work, a basic grasp of punctuation and grammar, and a hundred other skills you don't know you need until you start trying to write something that's not just coherent, but substantial. Skills that take forever to learn on your own and learn only marginally faster with guidance. By your reckoning, at least the way it sounds to me, you'd be okay with AI writing because it can just plop out whatever, and everything is good to go! Look! Art!

Sorry, I don't mean to be so aggressive here, but you sound like someone who doesn't take writing as an artform seriously. You underestimate, or don't care about the agony writers go through trying to write a good story that might be read by a million people, or five. A real story that moves readers and makes them think, not some half-assed thing a barely literate ten-year-old writes on a sugar high in half an hour.

Again, I'm sorry if I come off aggressive and hyperbolic, but your post is maddening to me. I wish it was as easy as you said, but it's really, really not. Not at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, but "art" =/= "good art". Aside from AI, I think any time someone writes a story, they're doing art, even if that art is low-effort shite. We don't need to say it's not art in order to say it's bad or low effort.

And, like, not everyone writes fiction with the goal of making it Good. Some people write to explore ideas or feelings, to express something, to spend some time in a fantasy world they like, to have a fun time with friends, etc. And the same goes for visual art - the intentions and end results of, say, art created in an art therapy group or kindergarten class and art created to be sold at a gallery show are totally different, but they're both still art.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't disagree with much of what you're saying, but my larger issue with your stance is that your definition of what art is gives AI product room to call itself art, and you kind of waved off the point I was trying to make about that.

To further that point, I want to say there are AI evangelist out there fighting tooth and nail to make what AI does be seen as art, and your low thresh hold for what art is and how it's made kind of makes their argument from them.

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, forgot to mention NAYRT! Or, I am now, but not the anon you initially replied to.

I don't think that the original anon and AI evangelists having a similar position means that position is unavoidably an AI evangelist argument. Both anarchists and fascists oppose democracy, but for very different reasons and with very different proposed alternatives. The original anon isn't responsible for what some other group of people are arguing.

What would your definition of art be? Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky - does it depend on the effort involved, or the intention of the
artist/s? Does the work have to be of a certain quality? I feel like effort, intent, and quality are sort of subjective and hard to measure, but do you have ideas about how you'd assess them or where you would draw the line?

[(Anonymous)]

I used to think art was pretty much what the above posts I responded to said art is, but with AI generated product, "written and drawn," claiming more and more ground in artistic spaces, I started to rethink my stance.

Now I think art should be something that comes from a real person who puts more effort into their art than just having some vague idea they've haphazardly scribbled on a piece of "paper." It should be more than someone typing a ten-word prompt into ChatGPT, who then believes they've done the same hard work as someone who put real time, real skill, and real work into their craft. And I think we need to take a stance on what real art is before it gets redefined for us by tech bros who don't care one whit about art but do care if they corner the market and get paid all the money doing it. Because if it's left up to those guys, soon creating art will literally become just a button click, and I think that would be horrific.

Again, I don't mean to sound so haughty and hyperbolic, but this topic has been a sore spot for me, lately.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Okay, I get you. I definitely empathise with the existential dread that results from looking into the soulless vacuum of AI content and what it might become, lol, and I get how you'd be reminded of that by the original anon's comment, but I don't think that's what they meant or where they were coming from. They didn't mention AI at all, and I don't think most people consider putting prompts into an AI to be "writing a story", and I really can't believe that, in their heart of hearts, people who've used an AI to generate fiction think they've done the same thing as someone who wrote something from scratch. They might pretend they do, but... they don't.

I guess I'm interested in why you feel that emphasising the time, skill, and effort going into an artwork is the most important or best way to distinguish it from AI content. For me (and I obviously take a pretty dim view to AI stuff myself) the difference is intent - an AI's response to a prompt has no creative intent, no human mistakes, no cultural viewpoint, no personal baggage. At best it can only simulate those things. But my friend's (stunning and skilled) acrylic painting of their cat, and my friend's daughter's (unintelligible) crayon drawings of cats both have human intent, and end up looking the way they do because of the unique person who made them. Whether they took two minutes or weeks and weeks, that's still really different from AI content to me. And you leave WAY more of yourself on the table with writing. Even a ten year old on a sugar high!

I don't mean to be rude, but to me the emphasis on time/skill/effort tends to feel a bit elitist. I think it can foster a really discouraging environment for new artists/writers/etc who aren't skilled yet and so end up producing stuff that's kind of bad - and despite probably having put in a lot of effort, art that's not very good is often interpreted as low effort or "not trying hard enough". I don't know, I wouldn't want to discourage the baby (new artists) in an effort to get rid of the bathwater (AI).

[(Anonymous)]

I did bring up AI, and that was the larger point of my response and I wanted to know how that first poster reconciled their view of the so-called low barrier of entry, and other similar arguments used by AI evangelists. Did they see the danger of what their views implied in the age of AI? But I think I could have been clearer about that.

I know my viewpoint is elitist, and I don't like it either. When I first started writing I could barely string two sentences together, and I was lucky no one was kicking me in the face for writing so badly and daring to put my mess out there for everyone to see. But that was twenty years ago, and the world's a different place now. And because of AI and the general disregard for writing and writers as displayed by studios who want to replace skilled writers with AI prompts, remakes, and scripted reality tv, I think we need to make art and artists more valuable, more respected, not less by putting their efforts on the same level of fingerpainting parents stick on a fridge. We need writing and all forms of drawing, as artforms, to meet higher standards now more than ever.

Doing anything else, in my opinion, is opening the door to artists, all artists, being more easily relegated to irrelevance and destitution.

[(Anonymous)]

+1000000

[(Anonymous)]

I don't mean to be rude, but to me the emphasis on time/skill/effort tends to feel a bit elitist. I think it can foster a really discouraging environment for new artists/writers/etc who aren't skilled yet and so end up producing stuff that's kind of bad - and despite probably having put in a lot of effort, art that's not very good is often interpreted as low effort or "not trying hard enough".

Above anon and yes, this is exactly the point I was trying to make. When you start imposing arbitrary requirements like "you must have this much skill/have spent this much blood, sweat, and tears honing your craft" before someone can call themselves a writer/artist, you're implicitly discouraging all of those people who DON'T have that level of skill yet or maybe can't put in that amount of time from even trying at all. It's gatekeeping and it's shitty.

If you've written a story/drawn a picture, you're a writer/artist and you can call yourself that regardless of your level of technical skill. And that's what's great! You did a thing and you can be proud of doing that thing even if it might not be the best thing out there.

[(Anonymous)]

You're a perfect example of why I find so many writers shitty and intolerable, actually. :)