drueter

Its text praising the divine virtues of the pharaoh Ptolemy V

Unfortunately, this article repeats this common half-truth. It neglects to mention the news that the text of the Rosetta Stone actually announces: general debt forgiveness.

If one reads past the Rosetta Stone's long-winded introduction about how royal and divine and legitimate Ptolemy V is, the text eventually gets to the point, which is an announcement of official acts:

under his reign [and as regards the sums which were due to the royal house] from the people of Egypt, and likewise those [which were due] from every one who was in his august service, His Majesty remitted them altogether, howsoever great they were...

It goes on in detail. Of course, this act is intended to consolidate political power, but why tell any history if that's all we can say about it? It's not common knowledge that general debt amnesties were a common feature of ancient economic life, and this kind of writing is perhaps why. Reducing an official act to "propaganda" is often just a way to dismiss governance that one disagrees with.

It's important to keep in mind that these art communities represent one very narrow kind of art, one that is more focused on illustration and graphical style, and most often not the kind of art that major art institutions work with. In the past 5 years, AI-generated art has been accepted and incorporated in the contemporary art world, with major works produced by luminaries such as Pierre Huyghe (of Ideal), Trevor Paglen (Bloom), and Hito Steyerl (Power Plants). For these artists, the graphical potency of the generated images is usually only one factor of the work, which also centers on how the artists use the technology, its origins, history, and broader uses, and what it might imply.

For this kind of artwork, the kind made by artists who feel threatened by AI, I’ve been thinking for a while that a computer could likely do it better. Intricate detail, repetition, sampling and recombination of popular styles, optimization for aesthetic popularity and mass appeal — these practices are all squarely in the domain of automation, data science, and marketing. We might call it the Netflix-ification of illustration art, but it’s quite different, because the tools for making are available to many. As an arts educator and artist, I welcome these new tools, as they allow easy experimentation for newcomers, but also as they reveal that art based primarily in deployment of technical skill and eye-popping graphics is missing something vital.

This atrocity (and the well from which it springs) might be an interesting variant of Dunning-Kruger, one that also seems capable of infecting academic institutions. The belief is not supreme knowledge of a poorly-understood subject, but the belief that any such knowledge is superfluous, naive, or partisan when compared to a suitably abstract empirical method or algorithm. It's not unfamiliar to the attentive, because we all live in a world built by this effect, and it is precisely what happens when one removes the human from the humanities, and the humanities from education.

Apologies for what might be shameless self-promotion, but if you're interested in this idea, you might like my 2012 project , "The Kuramoto Model (1,000 Fireflies)." I built 1,000 microcontroller-based LED devices that synchronized with each other using radio communication, with a similar algorithm to what Nicky used. Link is here: http://davidrueter.com/projects/2012-the-kuramoto-model.html