LLMs Will Never Make Art With Caleb Wilson and Arif Hasan

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Arif Hasan of Wide Left and Caleb Wilson of Kill The Computer to talk about an academic paper on AI slop, and the many reasons why LLMS can never truly make art. Why Slop Matters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060 Arif Hasan wideleft.football x.com/ArifHasanNFL arif.bsky.social Caleb Wilson https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 3:51Speaker 07

  Bonjour, I am Ed Zitron, and welcome to this week's Better Off Line.

• 4:08Speaker 07

  I'm back at it. Download the newsletter, subscribe to the premium. Goddamn, I need the money. After all, I need to make a big gold anvil to drop on my head at the end of the AI bubble. And of course, if you're not on YouTube, please subscribe on the YouTube. Please, I need you to do that immediately. Give me some Imodium, because I have the diarrhea of a CEO. And today, I am joined by Kill the Computers Caleb Wilson. How you doing, Caleb?

• 4:31Speaker 08

  Doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.

• 4:32Speaker 07

  My pleasure. And how you doing, Arif Hasan of Why Left?

• 4:37Speaker 09

  Doing terribly, as always.

• 4:38Speaker 07

  Wonderful. Today, we have two illustrious subjects, because Caleb delivered us a paper. I was gonna say, I'd call it that. It's literally an academic paper called Why Slop Matters? And these are some of the names. Cody Comers, Yehmon Do, Julia Gordon, normal, Ari Haltzman, normal, Tess McNulty, Spencer Stewart, Lindsay Thomas, Richard Gene Sohn, Hoyt Long.

• 5:02Speaker 09

  Hoyt Long.

• 5:03Speaker 07

  A bunch of people who work at university. Hoyt Long, we love Hoyt. And it's this, it's a fascinating paper that I'll link to in the notes, because it's very academic, but it's also the single most accommodating piece I've ever read about slop. It loves slop. It like genuine, it's like in defense of slop.

• 5:23Speaker 09

  It does seem like that. I read it pretty briefly, and I, we'll talk about it more in depth, but it definitely just takes some things as a given in order to mount its defense of AI slop.

• 5:36Speaker 07

  Yeah. AI slop has aesthetic value. Cultural critics of history initially dismissing low culture, only to later admit its significance. This is very fucking stupid, but I mean...

• 5:48Speaker 08

  I think it's like trying to use like the example like kitsch in the paper is like a, an aesthetic form that eventually did have value. For example, like the famous dogs playing poker painting that people, you know, famously love and don't make fun of.

• 6:05Speaker 07

  Right. But that, so, and I get what they're saying, they're saying it has like a social function, it's fulfilling a need for more content. And it makes the argument that human beings want to make more and consume more, but also assumes that slop is the actual thing filling that, rather than just spraying so much slop out there that it eventually does so.

• 6:27Speaker 09

  Right. I think for me, it, the paper is engaging in a couple of like rhetorical tricks. One, I think, is to try and accuse people who disagree with it subtly of like being elitist, when I think any, anybody who does any social analysis of, of pop culture will take pop culture seriously in its analysis, but that doesn't mean, like, they'll argue that it, you know, matters, right? So the title works, but they'll, they'll try to extract what it is telling us about the people who produce and consume this content, the culture that allows or encourages this content to exist. And that could be a critical eye, it could be a supportive eye, but it tells us a lot

• 7:12Speaker 09

  about the culture that we're in, which is what sociologists do. And the idea that the paper is presenting that, like, sure, like, in, in culture broadly, we dismiss it. I don't think there are many academics who are, quote, dismissing AI slop. I think it is an object of, quote-unquote, serious study, because it says a lot about where we are, you know, for whatever reason, however it says it. And it's mainly just making the argument that like, if it's so bad, why does it exist? Which is the stupidest fucking argument you could make.

• 7:45Speaker 07

  I love that as well, because there is actually a valid discussion to be had here, which is, and this is going to sound mean, and this is dismissive. I don't think most people using slop and making slop should, actually should be allowed to create stuff. Like, they don't want to make the effort to make something good, so they just, they're like, oh, every idea I have must be brought to life. I don't think that that should be the case. I don't think everyone should be able to have every idea legitimized.

• 8:14Speaker 08

  Because it goes to like painstaking efforts to sort of like, define what slop is in that way, right? Of, it's asymmetrical by their own admission, because of how easy it is to make and how fast you can kind of crank it out. And one of the examples that they use was, was kind of strange. I can remember if this, it was in this one or the, one of the responses, but it was like, well, slop only matters to the person who makes it in the sense that it's like hyper-personalized or whatever.

• 8:40Speaker 07

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 08

  So, like, it kind of discredits itself in that sense, because, like...

• 8:48Speaker 08

  You know, being able to hyper personalize your content doesn't necessarily matter. The amount that you can crank out doesn't matter if the whole point is to hyper personalize it, I guess. You know what I mean?

• 8:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 08

  And it's also probably worth noting, if you haven't heard of this paper, I don't know why you would if you're listening to this. These are not a computer scientists. These are humanities people, so they're having a humanities dork conversation about this, you know, this subject.

• 9:11Speaker 07

  Well, it's also, it's customized for the user based on the AI slop. And I must repeat, I don't get AI slop on Facebook. I, it's either that I have someone in Facebook who is like, we can't let him see this. We can't let him see this. We must mask the slop. Or there's someone in Facebook who's like, my man, I'm going to make sure you have Facebook premium. Where you don't have to be subjected.

• 9:33Speaker 08

  It's like, uh, it's, uh, C S Lewis, the demon screw tape. You have your own screw tape demon that's hand, hand sorting your algorithm for you to torment you.

• 9:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, but the slop I see is bad. Like it's just, it's slop slop. Like it's not like someone who's lovingly put together something using these tools, not to even say that that would be super valid, but it's not. The things I see are not the creation of someone thinking. It's a Grammy who's like, I'm going to make King Kong fight my, my husband.

• 10:07Speaker 09

  I, you, you, I think in order for this kind of personalization argument to really have any sway in terms of like the way we should primarily understand slop's aesthetic or cultural value is they would have to make the argument that most of the AI slop people consume is curated or created by them with that personalization in mind instead of fed to them through an algorithm, like through social media, like Facebook or Tik Tok, right? Like if more people are consuming, uh, Fruit Love Island, uh, then people are consuming like fan fiction where they get to insert themselves into the Hunger Games or whatever.

• 10:47Speaker 09

  Like if that's, if, if it's more Fruit Love Island consumption than self-insert fanfic, then the personalization argument doesn't really matter. And it's really a conversation about, like you said earlier, the sheer volume of content that is being blasted onto these platforms and the algorithmic biases that put this type of content in front of people. Unless, hey, we get to create this thing. I, I don't know if anybody follows, uh, the YouTuber Sean, but at one point he says, this is the only, uh, human created endeavor that I would deny the title art. Uh, and, and I think, I think we're at that point here.

• 11:30Speaker 09

  Um, but for the purposes of like talking about this content as content, um, we, we would have to, uh, separate out kind of our ability to personalize it versus what ends up getting fed to us through these systems. And that changes the conversation about the cultural or aesthetic value. Because I think in this part is not unique to AI slop. The, the thing that AI has done has, it has turned down the quality. It has turned up the volume that's being produced. But what it effectively does is it recreates the scenario where people mistake aesthetics for message, right? Or, uh, they, they consume the aesthetic that they want. Right.

• 12:15Speaker 09

  Uh, and so they're very enamored with the aesthetic of, you know, and, and by aesthetic, I don't just mean like the exact picture. Otherwise, you know, advertising with like gross looking food wouldn't work. But it looks like what a graphic, what you think a graphic designer will put together for an advertisement of food. This reality show has the trappings of what we would call a reality show, which is like a very funny reflection on the fact that reality shows are scripted, right? That they, that they're not really, uh, reality shows in the sense that, that we think of them anymore. Um, it did very kind of like a somali chroma has consumed itself sort of thing.

• 12:54Speaker 09

  I'm probably mixing academic terms here, but, um, but like it feels like a reality show. And so I'm consuming it because I enjoy the feeling or the genre of reality in the same way that if you were like really into, I don't know, like 10 years ago, if you're really into like YA dystopic fiction, you'd start consuming a bunch of really shitty books because you like The Hunger Games and you like the feeling that you got reading it, a genuinely good series of books. And then you start reading like The Virgin or whatever, and it, it has the trappings of it. And you get, and you remove yourself further and further from like what we think of as what art transmits to us

• 13:33Speaker 09

  and what, what kind of affect it has, uh, and closer to the comfort of, of the familiarity of the form that we enjoy.

• 13:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think the, the thing is people, the, the vacuous argument of like, can AI make art? The only way I think I could ever consider AI art is if someone was just doing it to be like, they were doing a very, very, very specific thing on device with a real understanding of like the underlying weights of the model. Like it was, there's something, I think that that's where it really lies. Like if they actually have a hand over the technology, because if you think of it as like a thing with a billion brushes, if you're not the ones tweaking the brushes, then who gives a shit? And I, the paper even does make this kind of point that it, that this has the aesthetics of art, of what you expect art to be, but is not art itself.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  And I, and I think that, I still get back to my point that there are lots of people that believe that they are denied access to making art because they're incapable of it, when what they actually mean is they don't want to learn.

• 14:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  And it may be more difficult for them to learn because like, Caleb, you can play music. I can't play music. I'm not sitting here being like, I'm not allowed to play guitar.

• 14:48Speaker 08

  I'm not allowed to be in the secondary of the Seattle Seahawks. It's not fair because I'm five'10".

• 14:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, I'm not allowed to play quarterback for the Raiders because somehow I'm not good enough. Which, I mean, look at, look at the current fucking guys. It's not, it's not a good time, fellas. It's just, it's interesting watching and also kind of exhausting watching an academic look at this stuff because it suggests there's so much more thought behind all of it. The, as in like the, the literal creation of the models and the image models themselves, rather than just making things that can resemble other things.

• 15:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I, I think that, um, one of the problems in this often happens in, in my understanding of academia. Mind you, I'm a college dropout, so like take what I say with a grain of salt. But, um, but one thing that, that seems to hang up a lot of people in academia is when they take a bunch of arguments like at face value, which is like kind of the whole point of academia is to be a critical thinker and to take a look at underlying systems and, and what might be motivating things that are not on the surface. But you often get caught up, and I think this is exactly speaks to what you were saying earlier about people talking about like, when they use the phrase democratizing access to art or whatever.

• 16:09Speaker 09

  Um, and it's like, look, I have, um, acquired somehow a bunch of Wes Anderson films. And, uh, the really early stuff is low budget. Um, what, and it, it, there was not a ton of barrier to access for Wes Anderson to start putting together some truly remarkable art. And through that, he ended up getting access to more resources and all that. And, and certainly we're not in a meritocratic system when it comes to rewarding, you know, art. But in the same way that, you know, I strongly believe that there should be democratic access to the tools, the materials that we use to make, um, you know, some of our, our greatest works of art.

• 16:52Speaker 09

  I also think that the people making the argument, they're not actually honestly making the argument. We have to understand that they're not making good faith because when you take a look at the people who are like tweeting out, um, or putting together videos about like, hey, we're going to replace film studios with AI or whatever. And, and you see this like shitty movie that like, there's like three heads and whatever. Um, you, they, you, they never answer the question of what they're attempting to communicate. Like what, uh, message value their film has, right? A lot of times it's just meme slop, right? Where they, where they paste together a bunch of memes and, and want everyone to jump on like reference humor.

• 17:36Speaker 09

  Like we're all living in a Family Guy episode or something. And, and there's nothing that they're trying to say. And so it's very, by virtue of the fact that we know that there's nothing they're trying to say, we also know that their arguments about democratizing art are bullshit. They don't care about that because they don't actually care about art. They care about monetizing content.

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• 21:45Speaker 07

  Yes, they want to make a job making content. That really, that's actually a really good way of putting, anyone who says democratising art is just saying, I want to be able to become an influence.

• 21:55Speaker 08

  I want to get paid for pressing buttons on the computer.

• 21:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 08

  I will say this, um, I think that there's an almost neo-dataist quality to some of the Italian brain rot stuff specifically. And if you don't know what that is, God bless you. Um, there's sort of like-

• 22:08Speaker 07

  Tun Tun Tun Sekur and all that, when you have just like some horror, some broccoli haired kid showing it to a man clearly who's homeless and experiencing mental distress. Truly awful videos.

• 22:21Speaker 08

  Yeah. Anyway. They are, but the thing is, is like, they, so, so those came where they're born out of like the Shrimp Jesus era of like early, you know, stuff that was like, okay, this is just really stupid. And so a lot of what happens is these kids kind of take this and they're making fun of, um, sort of just like the tech industry in general by making these characters. But to your point, Arif, like the second that they do that, like someone else will just take it and monetize it. Like you, you'll see, you know, we, we went into a sort of genealogy of this with the fine folks of Internet Today, Ricky and Elliot on my show, it was a lot of fun. But the second that, that, you know, the, you get some of this stuff that's like, okay, this is something that people are kind of sort

• 23:01Speaker 08

  of claiming through memes, then in like farmer's markets pop-ups, there's like trading cards of Italian brain rot. It's like, okay, well, you know, clearly there's the grift is just non-stop.

• 23:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it's the whole, and a lot of that as well is like the Italian brain rot memes are mostly just playing on the oldest form of humour, which is funny words. The actual art itself is not really the funny part. And it's, it's frustrating as well because I'm sure there is someone making art with LLMs, but that is not the same as AI art and they are being drowned out by these freaks, I guess I'd call them, just because I don't, like, I'm not even sure I'm comfortable saying that LLMs can make art. Like, actually, I'm taking a step back now because it's so hard for you to have enough, because it gets back to the artist thing. It's for you to be able to do that,

• 23:54Speaker 07

  you would actually have to be able to train and understand the LLM on a technical level. So you're basically a mathematician, software engineer, what have you, which at this point you could have just learned to paint or something or draw.

• 24:07Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 07

  Like, it's, it's just basically the same as that now. And it's just, the fact that this debate exists pisses me off as well because it, even through, like, cutting it up in the way this paper does, it legitimizes it. It treats it on the level of kitsch because even the shittiest looking reality TV show you've ever seen, even the worst Hallmark movie, still has probably a first and second AD. Definitely has a director of photography, definitely has a producer or two, definitely has runners, the bunch of people on set, even if they're doing it in a way where the, they don't allow the people to sleep or whatever, like how all reality TV shows work, there is actual real intention going on.

• 24:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 09

  Yeah. And, and I think to, to kind of dig at the existence of what we would call AI-generated art, I think that there are ways for artists to, um, especially like you mentioned, like someone who's deeply invested in CS and machine learning and modifying the weights and stuff like that, to produce like resistive art or art that like in the same way that pop art used materials that were not often thought of as like artistic materials or depicted subjects that were not, you know, traditional subjects of art and stuff like that. Um, like there are ways that you can, and, and I'm thinking of like one of the examples of people, like, to, to go all the way back to when conservatives

• 25:29Speaker 09

  used to complain about modern art a bunch. Uh, one of the, one of the things that they would make fun of is the urinal. Um, that was genuinely a very impactful piece of art, specifically because it had opened itself up to the kind of ridicule, that's what it was attempting to do about like the nature of art and what we consider art. And you could do something somewhat similar with AI art, so long as you do it with like a bunch of intentionality. And there was an attempt to kind of interrogate the way our, um, obsession's maybe the wrong word, but the proliferation of AI art, um, and AI content throughout like our day-to-day life. Like, there's something you can do about that

• 26:12Speaker 09

  that would probably be an interesting art piece, but you have to do it with a lot of intention and it's always really difficult to do something like that without it being interpreted in a different way. And so it would take a really strong artist to be able to do that effectively. But it is possible, but I just think that the parameters for something like that are fairly narrow.

• 26:31Speaker 08

  Have you guys, either of you seen, there is a creator on Instagram, his name escapes me, but it started out kind of as these things go, one person makes it and then a million other copycats or like versions of it pop up. But it's like the, it's like this kid teams up with Tong Tong to like destroy the AI bubble and then-

• 26:51Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 08

  Yeah. And then, then Tong Tong turns into dust like Thanos and he starts crying. It's actually like, you know-

• 26:57Speaker 07

  It's literally based on a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure bit when Avdol dies. I just realised I spoiled Jojo. I'm sorry, anyone. But it's like, that's literally based on a very specific Jojo's bit. Anyway, yes, I know the thing. But keep going.

• 27:10Speaker 08

  I thought that was, that was just my point. It's like, that was actually kind of funny. And, you know-

• 27:14Speaker 07

  But that's a reference to something made by a human being where the art is a reference rather than-

• 27:21Speaker 08

  Well, and that, that creator specifically also made that, you know, and Tong Tong, it wasn't his creation, but he made a video with Tong Tong in it, you know what I mean?

• 27:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 08

  There's like hand-drawn animation and his own voice acting that made it good, right?

• 27:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that's the thing. It always comes back to, oh, human being did something. And people will argue, oh, what are you talking about? Well, as a human being should just be able to type a prompt in and it's just as valid to do that. No, no, it's not. Shut the fuck up.

• 27:49Speaker 09

  We do not consider the people who commissioned artists during the Renaissance to be the artists. Who produced those paintings, right? Like, I think that that's a ridiculous argument. To argue that the patron is the artist.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, like if someone painted my house, I don't think that I, I wouldn't be like, I painted my house. I might say I had my house painted.

• 28:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, and like, sometimes people will like, use that language in ways that are generally understood, like, hey, I renovated my house. I think most people would understand that if I'm not a contractor, they know me to be a contractor. I probably hired contractors to do that, but that's like within the confines of how that language is used and that's it. But when people say I made this, and they point to a piece of art or a piece of content, the understanding is that you are responsible for its creation by having a hand in how it was made, as opposed to commissioning it. And I think that that, we should keep that divide. I think we should very much make sure that we don't make this mistake of confusing the patron for the artist.

• 28:52Speaker 07

  Well, I think that this is, it gets back to the other things, like, oh, we should tolerate AI writing. Oh, we should tolerate AI coding at scale. We should, we should do, do all of these things because it ultimately comes down to, these people want to crush the meaning out of creation of anything. They want it to be about the output, only the output, and you must lower your standards for outputs so that they can shoulder barge themselves in with whatever form of crap they swell. I just, I have, like, the, also, I mean, if you ever need to really just believe that all of this stuff should burn, I recommend going to r slash grok,

• 29:32Speaker 07

  which is the worst community of people alive, I would say. It is people using r slash grok.

• 29:42Speaker 07

  These members just use grok to generate porno.

• 29:45Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  And I'm just picking a random headline. I'm just gonna read it in the tone. I think it's, "Tell me exactly what I'm paying thirty bucks a month for. Every damn thing I try is moderated, every damn thing, and I'm not even doing SFW clips or anything. So tell me exactly what I pay thirty dollars for. What am I getting? Tell me exactly what am I getting for thirty dollars?" And that is just one sentence, and it's just guys trying to-

• 30:06Speaker 09

  It's literally an entire community of people helping each other trick the computer into seeing a nipple. I mean, that is the whole subject.

• 30:12Speaker 07

  It really, or making the single worst, like, space art you've ever seen. It will be like a, a Roman soldier flying through space, throwing a spear at a space station. Another great, another great one I'm just gonna read is, "How was moderation compared to yesterday? I saw some complaint today." It's just like people who can barely speak English, having conversations about why they can't generate insanely horrifying images.

• 30:43Speaker 09

  I was about to say, I wonder if some of the value is, or some of the joy, I guess is one word, is it comes from getting around the moderation and tricking it to do what you want. And probably that's still the case, because there, it's not, it's trivially fairly easy to get, uh, to find your way to like a jailbroken, um, text generation for sure, and then probably image generation as well. But then, as you're reading out the headlines, I realize, no, actually, this, that would be quite the task for these people. They are, they are stuck in grok. They don't, they don't know how to find the jailbroken LLM, and that's fine. I'm, I'm glad that they're having this trouble.

• 31:25Speaker 07

  Also, just, another, this is a fairly obvious one, is, most artists I've met are very open to new ideas. Like, they're very open to new concepts. They're like, oh, that could be interesting. It's why, by the way, I have some affronts for the weird Natasha Lyonne thing that she said about, is ripping off Casey Cagall, a friend of the show, where she said that David Lynch liked AI. It's like, yeah, she probably is like, what do you think of anyone? Ah, it sounds interesting. Wow. And they didn't, hadn't actually used it. And I think most artists are curious-

• 31:58Speaker 09

  Jesus, I was like, okay.

• 32:00Speaker 07

  I've dreamed, I've dreamed of this guy. Um, and, and the thing is, but past the immediate point of hearing about it, I've never met an artist who's used AI and then gone, oh, wow, I've met a lot of artists who have said, I am horrified. Like, just like, I find this genuinely, the things it creates are horrible to look at. Because there's this weird kind of like, I realize tinny doesn't sound right for something you're looking at, but it really just has this weird-

• 32:34Speaker 09

  No, that's good.

• 32:34Speaker 07

  Echoing feeling to it. I've just never been able to get my, my head around. But it's like my mate Jerry Willis out in Greenpoint, he's a great artist. The idea of AI seems to offend him. Just like every artist I talk to, it offends. Like, Arthur Adams is a great comic book artist, never seen him pick up AI. In fact, I've yet to meet an artist who's picked it up. Like, just, just straight up, no working artist I've ever met has been like, I'm going to adopt AI into my workflows, let alone into my artwork. And it's just, it's stark.

• 33:08Speaker 09

  There's Darren Aronofsky who made that. I don't know if you-

• 33:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm saying artists.

• 33:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, but it's also worth noting, however, that like, you, he did that, but then you look back at his career, and like, shot for shot, so much of it is stolen from like Perfect Blue and other Japanese animations and stuff like that. Okay. Like, guys like Aronofsky, who I used to, unfortunately, there's a couple of movies that I like, and it's like, oh, this actually makes sense. This guy just steals stuff that he would like, this kind of thing.

• 33:36Speaker 07

  Well, also, have you seen the clips of the Darren Aronofsky, George Washington stuff?

• 33:41Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  It's, it is-

• 33:43Speaker 09

  Oh, my god.

• 33:45Speaker 07

  I am going to link to this in the YouTube, at the YouTube link. It's so fucking funny just watching, like, when they're handing out, I didn't learn American history, sorry, the thing that started the American Revolution, there's a name of a document, I don't know. But anyway, if you're looking at the document, when they're handing it out to people, the text changes as they hand it, the shape of George Washington. It's great, and it's just, you watch it and you're like, what I don't get is how they publish this.

• 34:14Speaker 07

  Like, how they looked at this and went, fucking banger, ship it.

• 34:17Speaker 09

  Somebody was like, what if we did the American Revolution, but it gave you the same feeling as having a dream when you're punching underwater for thirty minutes?

• 34:26Speaker 07

  What, what if you watched something that made you feel like you were telling a lie?

• 34:33Speaker 07

  Just, just this really horrible, and it looked, you'll notice that no shot stays for more than a few seconds. There was that, I, I mentioned this in the previous episode, there was a, a film that was made with AI that they said showed at Cannes, and people were like, oh, is that the Cannes Film Festival? It was like, no, it wasn't. It was aired outside of the film festival.

• 34:53Speaker 09

  They aired it in the city during the film festival.

• 34:59Speaker 07

  Which is great, because all the media fell, fell for it. They fell for it because no one think, but that's the AI bubble at this point. It's just like misreading headlines and hoping no one notices.

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• 38:11Speaker 07

  Back to the paper. This isn't even an elitist thing. I actually have respect for people who can put out shit that sucks again and again, and they get iteratively better. And I'm talking about myself. If you go and read my 2019 stuff, it was rough. Was not great.

• 38:27Speaker 09

  I thought this was about Tommy Wiseau, so I'm...

• 38:30Speaker 07

  Tommy Wiseau has only got better with time, but it's also watching directors get better. Watching someone find the way to articulate their ideas is kind of the beauty of art. There was someone who, I'm sure it was ripped off of TikTok, but there was someone who posted on Twitter this video of a guy who just kept drawing every year. And it started out with his art looking like shit. Like, it just, it didn't. But over the years, you saw it tightening up, tightening up, tightening up. And the problem is, is I think that, to be clear, no one enjoys that. No one enjoys getting better at anything. Perhaps you do when you get your head into it, when you get a bit of the momentum under you. But yeah, getting better at stuff sucks, especially when you don't take to it naturally.

• 39:13Speaker 07

  And I mean, human beings will take any friction they can reduce, but this is, the friction that's being reduced here is the art, like just the actual, the actual thing. Like, yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 08

  The sense of accomplishment that you get from art is like overcoming the fact that you suck at it, right? We were talking about music earlier. It's like, when I make something, you know, what I always really love is, because I do all the music for my show, and I'll throw up outro music and stuff like that when I've written something. And I love when people ask me, like, oh, how did you do this thing? And it's like, well, that's, it gives me a sense of accomplishment because it was the process of learning how to do something I previously didn't know how to do and the strife that it took to get there, to learn a new skill or a new subset of skills or whatever, right? That's the whole point. If you take that out of it, what's left? You know what I mean? Say whatever you will to bring this back to a football thing. Sorry, everybody. But Russell Wilson had that quote, whereas you gotta love the process.

• 40:10Speaker 08

  And say what you will about him, but he was cooking with that.

• 40:13Speaker 09

  No, that's true. Yeah. One of the, so Ed, when you were talking about how like there were no artists that you know that have like embraced AI, I was thinking of exactly a perfect example of this that separates someone who's a content creator from an artist. Caleb, you probably know this name. You know, Shadiversity, the YouTuber?

• 40:34Speaker 08

  I do.

• 40:35Speaker 09

  Yeah. So he, there was like, don't worry about it.

• 40:39Speaker 08

  Don't, don't, don't.

• 40:40Speaker 09

  Yeah. He's, he arrived too late in the YouTube world for Gamergate, but he would have been a Gamergator. He's essentially that now, but for like wokeness and DEI in like Mario.

• 40:52Speaker 07

  Oh, good.

• 40:53Speaker 09

  But he was originally just like this, I accurately described him. He originally was like, meant to be an educational YouTuber that like taught you how like sword fighting worked. It turned out like all of it was BS, but he gained, he gained a lot of, a huge following out of, out of doing content around medieval realism. And he started posting pretty recently after he started ranting about like wokeness and DEI and stuff. He started posting AI art that he had commissioned, right? That he had had Mid Journey generate. And a bunch of people were appropriately mad. And he was like, well, actually, you guys don't understand, I'm a trained artist.

• 41:37Speaker 09

  And the really funny thing is, his brother, it turns out, I didn't know this, and I wish I remembered his name, is somehow an even more popular YouTuber than him with like 2 million subscribers, who is a trained artist and is a substantially better artist than him. And they don't talk to each other, which is even funnier.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 09

  And...

• 41:58Speaker 07

  Go on.

• 41:59Speaker 09

  Yeah. And so like he, he describes why him being an artist allows him to improve the AI generation. So what he does is he asks it to generate a really sexy picture of like Supergirl and, and then this picture with like two different sons in the background, but on Earth of Supergirl gets generated.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  She has an 11-pack.

• 42:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly. And it's a very bad picture. And he's like, well, as an artist, I understand proportions. So he puts it into Photoshop, screws around with it, uploads it back to Mid Journey and was like, hey, so I did a bunch of shit in Photoshop. Can you incorporate my changes? And then Mid Journey does it and makes it worse again. And he's like, yeah, I go through this process. It takes me hours and hours and hours to do it. I put a lot of time into it, and it's my artist training that allows me to produce this. And it's just the shittiest image in the world.

• 42:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 09

  And, and like real artists, and there's a bunch of really great YouTube videos about real artists, like breaking down what he does, what his misunderstandings are, and like why that doesn't make sense. And also like what you, you're in Mid Journey. Just ask it to make the changes that you're spending hours in Photoshop. You're doing this to show off that you're spending time, which ruins the point of this AI shit anyway. The craziest thing, but like, yeah, a content creator obsessed with creating content, loves AI, his artist brother, who he is not on speaking terms with, despises it.

• 43:20Speaker 07

  Well, this is, this reminds me of something that goes to a, it's a greater term that I found from this guy called Rob Sloan. I don't know who this guy is. He's, seems like a decent guy, a writer maybe, but he has this term called Jarvis-ing, which refers to how AI is really good at creating a thing that you work on, like a tooling system that you're constantly dicking around with, you're constantly tweaking, you're constantly messing with. Because, and this is a paraphrase of Atomic Habits, which I mean, pretty good book, kind of a dickhead, the guy, but makes this point of, there is a way to spend a lot of time doing nothing but feeling real productive. And I think these models really give it to you, especially with like Nano Banana, one

• 44:04Speaker 07

  of the worst things to ever, this, just the worst names of anything, in that you can be like, computer, make the booby bigger. Computer, make the eyes red. Computer, give her a sword. And you feel like you're doing something, even though you're not. You're like, you could not make that move yourself. And indeed, you are not actually intentionally tweaking exactly what you're talking about because, I don't know, describing what you're doing in words is not the same as actually physically doing something. And people will say, oh, there are all sorts of automations. We don't totally know what's happening in the background. Art isn't one of those things where that's okay, though. Like, art's not something where like, not really knowing why you're doing stuff, that's

• 44:46Speaker 07

  not really part of the, the picture, at least when it's just, when, when the actual process of doing. Because to be clear, yeah, there are people who probably blindfolded themselves and painted. Your hand is still fucking moving. Or they throw something down a wall or something. Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 09

  I think for a lot of these like human endeavors that are so difficult and complex to pick up, that by the time you see the finished product, it's very opaque how to get there. I think, and obviously I'm like very football minded, but like, actually film is maybe a better example. There are a lot of directors who will break the traditional rules of film that you might get taught in your first year at film school about like, you know, composition and the rule of thirds and like guiding lines and stuff like that.

• 45:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 09

  And, and when you watch like one of these directors, one of these outstanding directors, they'll, they'll break those rules, right? And, and somebody who's not invested in or ensconced in that world of film analysis or is an artist, might conclude, oh, the rules don't matter. When really what we've learned is that a lot of these directors only break these rules because they know what the rule is there for, why they learned it, and how they spent a lot of time.

• 46:03Speaker 08

  You have to understand in the box to think outside or to work outside.

• 46:07Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 46:07Speaker 08

  It's like a musician playing accidental notes or whatever, right? If you're playing, you know, you play out of your key.

• 46:13Speaker 07

  Half of my bit is that I do deep financial analysis, but I say fucking shit. And I, I, speaking of, I say, no IT loads refuse come dump and stuff like that. Like, you generally don't, you generally don't say stuff. I know, it's so funny, they gave me a show.

• 46:33Speaker 07

  But it's just, but it's good because it's good because I'm working within the boundaries because it's not entirely me saying stuff like that. It's just those pop up and you go, oh, what a surprise. And then we go back to the analysis. It's the different way of doing, still having a purpose. I mean, Lynch, I just, I, a couple of months ago, I watched Twin Peaks The Return, tons of things that break the rules in that, but they work because they were done with intention. He actually knew what he was doing. Every bit was done with intention.

• 47:01Speaker 09

  Yeah. And you know what the impact is of breaking this particular rule in this particular way? You know it even intuitively when you're a masterful enough, whatever, right? And like, you know, the example in football I was going to use is like these quarterbacks that like break traditional rules of quarterbacking. Do so because they know what those rules are. They can accomplish things within the lines and then they go outside of it. Like Patrick Mahomes is an extremely good traditional quarterback. Sorry, I know both of you hate him.

• 47:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is not going to be great for Caleb.

• 47:28Speaker 09

  But, but the way that he breaks the traditional rules of quarterbacking infuriates people who teach high schoolers how to play football, but works for him because he can play really well within the confines of the system. And then he breaks those rules because it'll work in that particular moment to accomplish a specific goal that he wouldn't have been able to do within traditional football. But like, just like a bunch of kids learned how to shoot 26 foot threes from Steph Curry, or scramble and do insane stuff from Patrick Mahomes. It's not actually helping you to, to try and replicate that end process of the rule breaking. It is much better to learn what those rules are so that when you have the capability to break those rules, you know what you're doing, what you're sacrificing and what you're accomplishing.

• 48:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I mean, people are really, the, the people really don't like the sports stuff. So I'm going to keep going. But also.

• 48:17Speaker 08

  I didn't say anything because not, not the time, right?

• 48:19Speaker 07

  Oh, I don't give a, oh, these people would take what I give them. I like, I love them, but they will enjoy my show on my terms. But Steph Curry, for example, he's not just shooting threes arbitrarily from the, the middle of the court. He has a proficient understanding of how defensive formations might look. He understands what, what his own body can do. There is a fundamental understanding of the structure of humanity and human beings and basketball players and the rules of the NBA and so on and so forth that allows him to break those rules. These L L Ms when creating anything are words, whatever, don't understand rules. They, they may understand consistencies within stuff.

• 48:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, they understand relationships as they've been like historically defined through averages of text. Yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 07

  Yeah. But they don't understand why decisions are made, just that the decisions have been made, which I think is significant and also is what ultimately makes creating anything frustrating. Like I think that the frustrated, like one, like for example, when I began this show, I could not read a balance sheet. I had never learned. I found every time I looked at one, I felt like my head was full of sand. And I eventually just with the help of Matt Hughes broke through it and I learned and actually being able to understand these nuances with, and not from a traditional finance background, actually allowed me to do some really interesting shit because I don't come into it with predispositions of the system. Nevertheless, the process of learning that stuff was what made me good.

• 49:48Speaker 07

  It wasn't anything to do with anything other than having built, having understood the system, built my own system, and then doing things with that knowledge and the process. I, this is kind of a fucked up point, I realize, but it's very, it's very much about actually doing stuff to get to a point. And I, to be clear, I get it. Like, learning is fucking annoying. Like, I don't, I don't think, like, it's not like fun sometimes when you, especially when you don't understand something. It's very frustrating when you sit there and you look at a concept, you're like, I, what do we do? I don't get it. And smashing your head against it sucks. The same with making your annoying meat suit do stuff. Make it

• 50:30Speaker 07

  do thing that you want it to do. When you can't make it do the thing that feels so crystal clear in your head. But that is creation, Jesus Christ.

• 50:38Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 07

  Uh, well, you know what? I think that's actually a good point to wrap us up. Where can people find you, fine fellas?

• 50:47Speaker 09

  Uh, you can find me on Twitter at @ArifAssanNFL, on Blue Sky, at @Arif.BSky.Social. Uh, and my newsletter, uh, wideleft.football, where I talk about, sometimes I talk about football, but a lot of times I talk about this shit.

• 51:04Speaker 07

  And Caleb?

• 51:06Speaker 08

  Uh, you can find me at birdrespector.bsky.social or killthecomputer.com. Uh, if you're interested in sort of like more of the first half of the discussion we were having, uh, that's kind of what we do over there.

• 51:18Speaker 07

  And Kill the Computer was of course the actual progenitor of OpenAI, of OpenAI, Jesus Christ, of Better Offline. They're gonna have my ass in the comments for that. It's been a long week, fellas. It's actually genuinely Robert Evans heard me on Kill the Computer. And that's how he found me and not OpenAI, Jesus Christ. They're gonna really get me for this.

• 51:36Speaker 08

  If we created OpenAI, they would be.

• 51:39Speaker 07

  You created OpenAI. Yeah. No, they really would have our ass for that. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with the monologue this week, of course. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. Good night.

• 51:58Speaker 07

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:03Speaker 10

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