One day of letting go in front of generative tools and I end up with fantastical images for the eyes of ten years ago and probable slop for the eyes of today. All media now is both hyper-beautiful and economically worthless. How much have I spent on inference creating these? I just asked an LLM and the cost seems to be around £6, and labour cost in yesterday's figures? £600. No wonder the layoffs.
When everybody can fly, flying becomes both cheap and a miracle. Is anything worth if everything is hyper-abundant? Is worth only proportional to scarcity and popularity? Maybe in the previous era of media, reproduction made symbols hyper-abundant but true originality scarce and that is why we idealised ideas. But what now when originality is hyper-abundant and reproduction happens at 120HZ? Are these images worth the inference cost? And the labour cost? I love them and I loved creating them but what are they worth?
On the other hand, the old critique of critiquing modern art applies to AI even harder: You can say "My kid could do that. Yeah, but he didn't" for every generative thing out there. So, in the spirit of not succumbing to nihilism and dereliction, here is some exploring from me to you, with all my love, enjoy.
