This AI-generated image won the Sony World Photography and Lens #Culture awards.
I’m reluctant to name the “author” — Boris ELDAGSEN — who says the “image was imagined by language and re-edited between 20 and 40 times through #AI-image generators, pic.twitter.com/qiUiORzGMW
combining the techniques of inpainting, outpainting and prompt whispering… just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace #photography.
Don’t be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind has always created the world that makes us suffer.”
Ahem… That’s totally NOT why I had been photographing the real world since 1997!
The award should go to AI #engineers who, by the way, never paid us — the real, living human #artists with a rent and electricity bills due — a single cent for the ingest of our pre-existing photographs to train their #LLM s (same applies for code and text).
“In wartime, the State seeks to destroy its own #culture — in times of #conflict, authentic culture is subversive. As the cause championed by the State comes to define national identity, as the myth of war entices a #Nation to glory and sacrifice,
those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myths are branded internal enemies.
Art takes on a new significance in wartime. War and the nationalist myth that fuels it are the purveyors of low culture—folklore, quasi-historical dramas, kitsch, sentimental doggerel, and theater and film that portray the glory of soldiers in past wars
or current wars dying nobly for the homeland.
This is why so little of what moves us during wartime has any currency once #war is over.
The songs, books, poems, and #films that arouse us in war are awkward and embarrassing when the conflict ends, useful only to summon up the #nostalgia of war’s comradeship.”
“War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” by Chris Hedges
“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written by @LFeldmanBarrett for someone without knowledge of science, its methods or branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since?
The message of the book: we don’t know what, where or how #emotions are made. But, the author has a hypothesis, much in line with current fashion: emotions are constructed by #culture (nurture), because languages around the world differ in how they describe them.
The author follows up with a mishmash of contradictions like:
• “We can’t locate the origin of emotions in the brain”, but we know there’s an “interoceptive network.”
• “#Stress doesn’t come from the outside world. You construct it.” But, a few pages later, “fasting and gut flora very much influences our emotions”… so, I suppose, something coming from the outside world?
Any practical advice?
Sure. Construct happy thoughts (even when bombed in a war zone), inherit good genes and real estate, cook healthy food, take a walk in a democracy, keep an FSC-certified #gratitude journal and, of course, #meditate!
This book might have been titled “Science Doesn’t Know How Emotions are Made — But babies learn to name and classify emotions from their caregivers… whose vocabulary size correlates with babies’ emotional granularity, #EQ or whatever you want to call it…
…as long as it’s not essentialist, oh, and our #lifestyle constructs our emotional worlds, like, being poor in a high-crime neighborhood is bad for you, did you know that?”
Worse, the self-contradictory opus is written in a cringe-worthy, kill-joy #style of “Get ready for that twist I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter”.
But mine’s just an opinion of a #trilingual who’d “culturally constructed” 3 variants of each of his emotions.
Augmented by the professional “emotional granularity” of a film director.
And someone who should’ve Google Scholared the author’s publications before reading this book… to skip it altogether. 🤦🏻♂️
Trans / Queer+ #Identity Quests™, #Gender Wars™ and other popular sex mechanics extend our #culture of perpetual dissatisfaction beyond the shopping for stuff you don’t need.
A consumer culture that now includes our bodies to the list of obstacles to True #Happiness™.
Wow. A fascinating post by Steve Yegge about the #culture differences at Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Team management, #quality control, #accessibility, #SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture).
gist.github.com/chitchcock/128…
To me, pillars of #Swiss #culture have been blasted to lowest global denominator: cleanliness, punctuality, banks and polite driving. Gone.
Similarity of #humans compared to #animals in #aggression, theory of mind, Golden rule, #empathy, anticipation, #culture: youtube.com/watch
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