November 2024 - Nina Paley

Soul and Intention

People assure me AI art is “soulless,” that unlike human artists AI can’t be “original.” It can only copy. This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of how human artists work: we copy, and there’s no such thing as “original.” I understood this 16 years ago.

We draw from more or less the same pool of culture that AI does, only our pools are necessarily smaller as humans simply don’t have the capacity for exposure to as much stuff. No matter, because all works carry the influences and language — be it verbal, visual, or musical — as the works around them. You don’t need to see every painting to get the styles and grammar of its time and place, just as you don’t need to hear every English speaker alive to learn English. But AI can read, see, and hear vastly more cultural artifacts than any individual artist can, making it capable of a much broader stylistic range.

All creative work is derivative. AI simply derives faster and better than humans.

What about Intention? The intention comes from the human prompter. All that AI art is prompted by someone; that’s its intention. Is that its Soul? No, its soul is the soul of human culture, that vast pool of source material it draws from and imitates. The same one humans draw from and imitate. Humans aren’t individual geniuses, we are imitators. Our “genius” lies in our shared* culture, and our skill in copying.

This is why I don’t hate AI, but marvel as it shakes the ground beneath my feet and blows apart my orientation to culture and my fellow human beings. Those who hate it believe in the myth of originality and think copying is theft. They were delusional 16 years ago when I freed Sita Sings the Blues, and they’re delusional now. Delusionality is part of shared human culture too, and AI will imitate, remix, and regurgitate it just like we do, only much faster and more efficiently.

And, perhaps admirably, without the ego.

*Shared despite countless delusional egos insisting it’s private property. Fools.

Musical Memory

I have an excellent musical memory. I forget everything else, but music stays. Music plays in my head 24/7, and has my whole life. I can remember entire symphonies my sister would spin on our record player, although I have no idea what their names are, or the names of their composers, let alone conductors or orchestras. Names are the weakest part or my memory by far. Music is the strongest.

Musical memory evolved to preserve epic poetry and precious human culture, to bind the tribe and pass on important wisdom to future generations. Yet mine is full of commercial jingles from the 1970’s onward, and crappy Christmas music I never wanted to hear in the first place, and musical “product” engineered for popularity and sales by copyright industries. And now it’s hooked on AI-generated songs, not even human voices or instruments. My amazing musical memory, the strongest part of my crumbling mind, designed for binding humans together: occupied by venal, commercial, exploitative, and now not-even-human patterns, forever. God must be rolling in His grave.

I feel grateful nonetheless, not least because most of those AI songs in my head were generated at the behest of my friend Cori, so I associate them with our friendship. Cori even generated (directed? prompted? pushed a button requesting?) a commercial for “Nina’s Art Gloves” which he inserted into the latest episode of our Heterodorx podcast. It is hilarious.

Buried in Diamonds

I have no desire to animate. Add my work to a media stream already full of fascinating hallucinations? The creativity of AI exceeds my own, with its innumerable fingers and multiple arms and morphing cat heads. Things turning into other things used to be magic worthy of hard work and years of study. Now it’s a mere artifact, a waste product generated in pursuit of the more mundane.

All my work will be forgotten, because there is so much work. Art used to be diamonds the future could sift from the dust. Now the dust is made of diamonds. I used to imagine I was making Art for the Future, but no future will find mine. I guess it’s just for me, and a small audience of the Present, and God. That’s enough, but it’s humbling. A glove has no more or less value than a feature film.

I thought Sita was future-proof because of Free Culture, but that only protected against Copyright. Cancel Culture was still to come, and there’s no protection against that except cowardice, which kills art before it’s born. And now the glut of “content” is on steroids. Attention is fractured and overwhelmed. Anything I make is buried in diamonds.

Still, I make, like writing this now. Like the countless un-named and un-indexed photos I take on my bike rides, not even worthy of my own efforts to organize. I make little posts on social media to be forgotten by the next day or, at best, next week. I chatter to my fellow monkeys, amidst the chatter of robots, as if monkeys are so starved for chatter we have to build robots to do it for us.

Yesterday at my women’s meetup M and L brought knitting. M finished a blanket she’d worked on since 2023. Every row was a different color yarn, to represent the high temperature of that day, 365 rows total. It has no commercial value. It represents countless hours of work. It will be used only by M, and seen only by a few of her friends (like us). It is Art. It will be forgotten like all art, and like all of us. We are here today only. That has to be enough.

Make a Bias Knit Temperature Blanket - Craft Warehouse

My Past lives on Fecebook

So much of my past lives on fecebook. People who believe in more than 2 sexes; the same “scientific” and “compassionate” articles on this subject keep getting re-shared by my former friends and acquaintances. Also denunciations of Twitter and declarations of moving to Bluesky.

I feel so disconnected from my past now. Who even am I? Young me might be aghast. Every article about policy responses to “climate change” makes me scoff. You’re 20 years too late, I think. NOW you’re trying to fix it? We knew back then it would be unfixable by today, but here you are insisting you can stuff the apocalyptic horse back into the barn. You’re only making it worse now, accelerating environmental destruction, mining for costly and short-lived batteries, building wind farms on my prairie, all this subsidized “green tech” becoming obsolete waste faster and faster. This, after you reduced all environmental impacts to a single vector, “climate.”

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions; electric cars will just drive us there faster.

Have I grown callous? Conservative? Uninformed? No, I have merely given up and wish to use my remaining years on this planet to accept Reality instead of imposing my bright (read: stupid) ideas on it. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions; electric cars will just drive us there faster.

Oh, and nuclear power is the new “clean energy” to save us and the planet. I don’t know if this is wrong. I don’t know if my passionate anti-nukes activism from the 1980’s was wrong. I only know, from living this long, that all these save-the-world virtuous environmentalist ideas are folly. Humans are gonna human. We’re idiots. Just look at fecebook.