Andrew Sage

And our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and give us a tentative yes.

To the tech.

Yes, they indeed got there, but it was unclear at first.

And I was a little raw about it, given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that he had mentioned before.

There was a question about NFTs.

Do you remember this question?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves were part of this breaking up of the control process, the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it was related to the cut up method.

It was one of those questions that was a narrative before it finally got to your question that really just invited the readers to respond.

There were others that talked about this too and related their own personal experience to the generative AI process that they approach AI not with the expectation that it will provide sense, but it will almost have this oracular, or again, they related it to the third mind.

This idea that, again, you and the AI come together and somehow reveal the new, which I, at this point, was absolutely seething.

And to her credit, my girl, Kate Lady, who was talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be kind of tangentially separate from the other two, but the hybridity really made it, was the one that just gave us a great, straight Marxist answer of like, no, this is bullshit.

Yeah.

Let's actually look at the material implications as to where this is coming from and the environmental costs of running these programs, of server farms, the destruction of space, of livable areas throughout the United States, that these are questions that we need to ask and are not separate from these questions of magic.

So a really shout out to her.

I appreciated that response because it was instant and it was heated.

It's also like, I mean, from my perspective, it's also a labor issue, right?

Because these large language models and generative AI just scrape like so much data that's like writing from real artists and created by...

real like painters and whatever and it is the appropriation of human labor to shit out some some advertising essentially that is like my main well aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it is like very much that labor uh angle to it that frustrates me

Well, in the context of the talk, it was really important to then ground, and this is the comment that I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with, although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree with me.