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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Art isn't about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it's about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).
Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn't meant to be art, it's meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That's not what art is.
Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don't care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn't art, it was utility.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn't art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a "good enough" standard much more conveniently.
The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you're writing, you didn't want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.
I have a different take.
AI today is basically a mechanical school. AI students are trained to give a specific answer. This is at the heart of how all machine learning works, including generative AI. Even image generators do this.
"Here's a million examples of what the pixelated representation of a hand looks like; now go and make a derivative copy."
This is fine for objective facts, like physics and history. It is useless for art.
Merely drawing a hand is not art, it's an objective truth (do typical humans have 5 or 6 fingers?). But art school is not about objective truths. Art school teaches creativity. Specifically challenging ideas and expression.
AIs can't fundamentally challenge ideas and express themselves because they lack personal experience, personality and individuality.
Society at large has been fooled into thinking that speech (LLM) and other generative AI lead to AGI. But the reality is that these models have more in common with encyclopedias and stock image libraries than intelligence.
I've been saying this for years
I love your take. And extrapolating from it a bit, a lot of what we consider 'artists' weren't really making 'art', as you define it. They were (and mostly still are) drawing/painting, etc pictures as a means to an end. For money; and now they are mad or worried or scared (with reason) about losing their livelihood. Because a cheaper, not necessarily better but certainly with a better cost/benefit ratio, comes along.