> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Basically, reading writing (without instruction) will only make people seem like they know stuff, by parroting others, when in fact, they know not much of anything.
Which is an intriguing argument considering he .. wrote it down and not just once. He was a prolific author. He also speaks _through_ other people, mostly Socrates, which complicates matters quite a bit. You're getting a narrative as told by someone inside the narrative about the nature of narration itself.
I'd be hesitant to linearize Plato. There's quite a bit of subtlety to his arguments.
That said, I understand the sentiment. Just want to introduce some nuance into the statement. I'd hate it if people thought Plato could just be pinned down like that.
Second that it's unlikely that Plato agrees with Socrates on writing in the Phaedrus. When reading Plato you should think of him as writing dialogues for people to see various arguments and arguments develop over the books, for example Timaeus goes against positions held by Socrates and even more so later in the Parmenides.
Plato is not linear either and if you really want to understand what Plato held you have to look at what the academy taught and what the Platonism became. Though clearly Platonism develops and changes and has various different flavors that academics pick out such as middle-platonism and neo-platonism. I would say it's not definite what Plato believed and one might say that he entertained multiple ideas at the same time, though clearly despised many positions.
The one I have is called Xperia Hello!, and the one I had in mind when writing the parent comment was the one called poiq that was rented to select users on a limited basis. Both require different cloud connections that were likewise shut down. The only one in active support is the latest gen aibo, though its replacement of some form has been teased for a while.
Looks like someone RE'd motor commands for the Hello![1], I guess I should try recreating its "signature pose" command at some point...
This reminds me a web 2.0 startup in 2006. It was similar in that it wanted people to break down arguments into a flowchart. Had more of a public collaboration flavor to it at the time.
Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of that. It saddens me a little when I hear about all the structured argument sites that died. I'm always interested in trying to learn from them, like what worked and what didn't work. I can't seem to find many details about this one.
I started learning and implementing the prolly tree since December 2025, the current one crabbuild/prolly might be the 4th or 5th prolly tree implementation ;)
That's great. I spent the majority of my time at the Recurse Center doing a first implementation. The full rebuild version of an insert is trivial. The incremental version took most of the time.
Not for me. By asking it to interview me, and then working through the options and their consequences, it feels more like the whiteboarding-with-a-colleague part of engineering. I don't have to remember to specify everything. The agent asks me things that it's unsure about, still ambiguous, or open questions. I have it write down all the decisions we made.
The resulting decisions are fed into the coding loop with guardrails derived from those decisions. The agent one-shots features once it goes into the coding loop.
Has there been a time when your spec was accurate, the agent implemented it, everything passed — but you still felt you didn't really understand what was happening? If so, what did you do about it? Did it degrade your ability to make subsequent specs?
sure, if I get lazy and don't read every line of the spec or don't thoroughly review the generated code, then I have felt a gap in understanding, but thats more on me than the tools. Another case is when I'm just completely unfamiliar with the framework the code is written in, I feel this happen whenever I use AI to write any non-trivial frontend as I rarely did frontend pre-AI.
> when you come back later and have to remember wtf is going on."
When that happens, do you read just the spec, or do you also need to read the code? Is there a difference between "I can remember what I intended" and "I can predict what the system will do in a situation the spec didn't cover"?
Interestingly, you said the spec author must be you. What happens when you join a codebase where someone else wrote the SPEC, or where an agent wrote the code and nobody spec'd it? Is the spec still sufficient, or does the "you must write it" part mean the understanding doesn't transfer?
I had to unfollow a coworker who was starting a female inspiring coaching career by constantly pushing messages like created by thus CringeBot while adding photos in bikinis. On LinkedIn.
That's what the words say, how much of it is authentic is still a mystery to me.
Basically a bunch of sales, business consultants and HR people developed their own language and took over LinkedIn. They know it's bullshit, we know it's bullshit, but apparently there's enough money to be made doing this that it's worth the time. A couple of people I went to high school with dropped regular corporate jobs to do this stuff, and I know they're too smart to take it all literally.
I can only imagine it's like the famous Mackenzie interview, where they ask you to explain something you can't possibly know and judge you on how persuasive your bullshit is. They're all just showing off their sleazy salesmanship/thought leadership/persuasive abilities and through that conveying some sort of value, and presumably more productive conversations happen offline as a result.
How many of them source to real humans, though... who can tell anymore.
That number is certainly non-zero, though. To a first approximation every stupid thing you can imagine happens. But it may not happen as much as the bot engagement army makes you think it does.
Would photography discourage OP from reading a blog? Should I hand-paint my imagery? If I am the type of person that would use a camera, then maybe I'd be the type of person to hire a ghostwriter.
People hate the false effort signaling. Photos require effort and skill to take, and while it's perhaps less than an oil painting, it's still something.
If you push AI-generated content to make stuff look fancy, it's a bad idea. If you generate stuff to communicate more clearly, I don't see a problem.
Charles Baudelaire argued photography could not be considered a fine art because it merely produced mechanical replicas of reality without input from human imagination. He called photography "art's most mortal enemy" and the "refuge of all failed painters" who lacked artistic talent and training.
And if he's to be believed in 1859, photography isn't art.
But today, it's widely accepted that it is. And in all likelihood, you think it is too.
Why is that? And if you have an answer, you'd have to argue why AI generated images wouldn't follow the same trajectory.
What about stock photography, IMO as much as I personally hate "overcooked" AI-generated imagery, it doesn't annoy me that much more than stock photography does on blogs.
I do however use it as a gauge of "if the images are generated by AI, how much of the text content is?" though, so...
Yes, stock photography is also lame, but at least their creators gave permission. It's my dream that "AI" is going to make us look back and reconsider some of the pre-era slop we've accepted in the name of convenience. I doubt it, though.
Your quick take lacks perspective. Photography wasn't always viewed to be art. Critics called photography "slop" in its infancy for a long while. See Charles Baudelaire for his 1800's take on photography:
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.
Harsh. It wasn't a fringe view either. I encourage you to read how much creatives despised photography.
This argument was transferred to film when it first came out as well. It took a long while and a couple court cases before it was accepted that it took editorial choice for a photograph and film to be good. When it was accepted that to be the case, despite the aspects of mechanical reproduction, it was also accepted into the pantheon of fine art.
So it will be for AI generated images and video. So far, I've seen nothing inherent in the properties of AI generated media as a medium that obviates a human editorial eye. Even if AI could exercise comparable judgement, we will like an image because we want the curation of a specific person.
In Grant Sanderson's interview with Dwarkesh Patel about the future role of mathematicians (36:25), he says:
> One interesting take that I've heard about what mathematicians will end up being is that it's actually more analogous to art museum curators than anything else. The AI solved the thing, so the art exists. They even know how to explain it really well. But you still want someone to help you navigate this nearly infinite space of what ideas are worth engaging with. Even if AIs were in some sense better at that, I think we would always still prefer a human that we had a relationship with, because the way we get motivated to be interested in things is a social phenomenon. If you have some specific technology you're trying to build, that might be different. But the people listening to this podcast trust your curation on what's an interesting topic in the first place. It's not that they're landing here because whatever your next topic is, that's what they wanted to understand in a prior sense. They're trusting you as a curator. So my role, and arguably that of other mathematicians, might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are worth pursuing. That's a lot of my job right now.
Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions--as well more mundane uses like what's sitting on your phone right now--just like how photographs are used today.
> Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions
Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence, given generative media has been around for about 6 years?
Does the lack of an existence proof for fine art photography in the first six years mean that photography will never be fine art? Obviously not for us living in the future.
You'll need to propose a different, more honest test.
> Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence
"Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" is thought to be the first staged photograph and it carries a powerful artistic and political message.
Literally everyone in the world with access to a browser can prompt chatgpt for an image. Billions of AI images have been generated yet you can't point literally to a single one.
Illiterate hunter gatherers in the Paleolithic with a life expectancy of mid-20s scrounged what few pigments they could muster and left their hands' imprints on stone. Even in this age of globalization, immediate access to information, and the sum of human knowledge on your pocket, having stood in one of these caves I can tell you it's breathtaking. A billion clanker slop images later and you can't produce ONE (fucking 1) of value. And you think I'm the one who's "lacking perspective"?
But once we have AGI and ASI the Minds will produce great art! Super related to current transformer architecture slop.
Was "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" thought of as great art at the time it was taken in 1840? Or was its status as great art a retroactive judgement with the perspective of time by people after 1840?
Not being familiar with the piece, so I looked it up. Seems like it was a protest correspondence aimed at a specific institution, not a public artwork. It doesn't appear to have been exhibited, reviewed, or discussed in print in 1840. Mostly circulated privately.
So I don't think it's a good test. Because you're asking me to point out an equivalent piece in the billions of generative art produced in these six years that would be judged by future historians to have great artistic value. If we were both back in 1840, we both wouldn't be able to point out "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" either. It never posed itself as art at the time, and we'd have to know what future art historians thought.
Yes, I stand by the "lacking perspective" comment, because your judgements on photography and what's considered art are from the current modern point of view, rather than putting yourself in the shoes of those judging photography when it first came out--which is the shoes we find ourselves wearing when it comes to judging generative images, because the alternative (retrospectively judging it from the future) is unavailable to us.
Hence, my core argument still stands. In what way is photography different than generated images, where in photography is considered art because humans can exercise their creative judgement, but in generative images isn't because humans cannot exercise their creative judgement?
To argue against my own stance, the tact you should have taken could have been:
If one major component of art is the human judgement, how could humans could be credited for exercising any judgement at all when prompting, when LLMs are at the end of the pipe? And if they're at all intelligence, what's to say they're not superseding our intentions with their own?
Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process.
Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.
I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses.
In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.
Exactly my point. People simply weren't alive in the beginning of a medium, so they think how it is now is how it was always so. For the first 20 to 30 years of film, people disregarded it as art.
And somehow, it's a leap of logic that just because the AI image is generated that the text is also. It's as silly as asserting because someone used a camera, they hired a ghostwriter.
Yeah if you want recommendation of things I like, drop a contact and I'll send you some. But I don't really want to get into a public debate about taste in art, because that's all posting anything would come down to.
It's a losing battle, because the bias is so strong you can post an actual Monet but say it was generated by AI, and people will come out to tell you how it's clearly not art:
Which is funny because that's how Monet and the Impressionists were originally received by critics. The comment about the light rendering being wrong, so clearly it couldn't be Monet is especially funny given the origin of why they are called Impressionists:
Le Havre, he called it Impression. The term, springing from the jargon used by painters, had been an artistic watchword since the middle of the century, reflecting the growing interest in capturing the atmosphere of a scene, or impression, rather than giving a painstaking description of nature
I told you why I won't, I'm not getting drawn into an argument about aesthetics. What I personally think has artistic value and whether or not you agree doesn't matter at all.
My comment was referring to the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder. Given your biases, nobody could show you an AI image that you would say is art.
Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited.
If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here.
> most people make garbage,
That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined.
These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
Basically, reading writing (without instruction) will only make people seem like they know stuff, by parroting others, when in fact, they know not much of anything.