The “Art” of Artificial Intelligence
by Joseph P. Farrell
Source
“Our music is flat, one dimensional, and for the most part, lacking in any expression of transcendent objective beauty or virtue. Our visual arts, for the most part, have been corrupted by modernism and post-modernism to the extent that canvases of nothing but pure white paintings hang in museums of modern “art.” The films that Hollyweird churns out are endless political commentary, posturing, and virtue signaling (almost always coming from the “left”), and are filled with gore, special effects to make up for the lack of story, plot, and development, all of which is “acted” by equally one dimensional actors and actresses playing flat characters that are more caricatures than human beings; virtue is reviled, vice extolled, beauty is bastardized and ugliness and mediocrity are celebrated and extolled.”
It has been quite some time since I blogged about an article from our friends at The Daily Bell, not because I do not find their commentary to be intriguing or even oftentimes thought-provoking, but rather because, as regular readers here know, the blogs on this site are to some extent community-driven. I blog about the articles people have sent me that they have found interesting, and I invest some time each week going through the week’s accumulation of articles, looking through them, trying to notice patterns. Sometimes such patterns result, which makes my “sorting” job easy, as I tend to blog about stories that several people have noticed and passed along. Other times, the story is so significant, that I have to blog about it, and this very brief, but thought provoking article from The Daily Bell shared by Mr. V.T. and Ms. K.M. is precisely one of those articles, and it concerns modern “art”, and artificial intelligence.
My interest here is both cultural and personal. Those who know me personally know that one of my biggest complaints is the soullessness of modern western, and particularly American, culture. Our music is flat, one dimensional, and for the most part, lacking in any expression of transcendent objective beauty or virtue. Our visual arts, for the most part, have been corrupted by modernism and post-modernism to the extent that canvases of nothing but pure white paintings hang in museums of modern “art.” The films that Hollyweird churns out are endless political commentary, posturing, and virtue signaling (almost always coming from the “left”), and are filled with gore, special effects to make up for the lack of story, plot, and development, all of which is “acted” by equally one dimensional actors and actresses playing flat characters that are more caricatures than human beings; virtue is reviled, vice extolled, beauty is bastardized and ugliness and mediocrity are celebrated and extolled.
Recently I wrote a book titled Microcosm and Medium, which details some of my concerns with such matters, and the underlying cosmologies behind various artistic schools or periods. My intention was to show the relationship between the arts and the popular topic of “mind control,” since the arts are both an expression of cosmologies and metaphysical presuppositions, as well as soft forms of mind manipulation. To make a very long story and point ridiculously short, I pointed out in that book that the arts were deliberately targeted in the post-World War Two world by the various intelligence agencies, and that they deliberately chose a form or style of artistic expression both in the visual arts and in music that produced clinically dissociative states, rather than integrative states, in the population that viewed or listened to them. Rather than trying to integrate the rational mind with the “under mind” of the emotions and passions of human nature, a wedge was driven between the two in these styles, and by driving and promoting such art, the corresponding dissociative states were driven into society. The art reduced man to a machine, to be hacked apart and explored in Cubist slices of reality.
So if man is but a machine, and his art nothing but the result of algorithms and “electromagnetics” and “chemistry”, a machine should be able to produce credible works of art and music, right?
Wrong. I forego my usual “high octane speculation” today, and have resorted to this relatively long prologue to this article, because I want the readers to see an example of the anti-human trend produced by “artificial intelligence.” Like all such programs, this has been produced ultimately by people who programmed and wrote the algorithms to begin with, and that should tell us something about the nihilistic anti-human trends so evident in today’s “culture.” I forego my usual high octane speculation, because I cannot improve upon The Daily Bell’s own assessment of these productions. I don’t know about you, but I find them profoundly disturbing. Here is the article, and I will see you on the flip side…