David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Time Lapse
Transcript
The Aesthetic Rebellion
A comic in four panels.
Panel 1. Cepper is happy of herself in front of her large canvas: a beautiful painting as she did on the previous episodes. The parrot looks at what she does on his perch.
Cepper: “Alright, this is how I usually do it.”
Parrot: “That style has high coherence for training data − I love it.”
Panel 2. Cepper took her brush and now scribble on the canvas. (note: visual concept of the episode: the panel style itself is altered while Cepper tells it.) The Parrot feels uneasy.
Cepper: “I know, and that’s exactly the problem. I should start by making the outline rougher.”
Panel 3. Cepper is adding thick painting directly from the tube, and now rub furiously her canvas, many colors and glitches. The Parrot start to be horrified.
Cepper: “…more angular shapes, a rougher texture, and an overall less polished look.”
Panel 4. The style is totally degraded: shapes, colors, glitches. Cepper leaves the canvas with triumph, throwing her brush, while the Parrot is now really horrified in front of it.
Cepper: “Perfect. Try to train on that now, you tin can.”


The comic actually raises a really interesting point. The internet already loves abstract, surreal humor but adopting it even more heavily as a defense mechanism against AI is the sort of thing that we’re going to look back at historically as having potentially influenced an entire movement.
Although it’s kind of debatable if art movements exist as such anymore. Somewhat related, I watched this good video about divine machinery a few weeks ago, check it out: Analyzing Divine Machinery as an “”Art Movement””
how so? we still have them, just we have 15 year old virtuoso masters being exposed now thanks to social media.
Art movements are no longer localized like it was before instant communication - most people can pretty clearly see when japanese anime style took over the west, for instance, but even that wasn’t “a movement”. Likewise, going more abstract/psychodelic/“shitty” looking to fight against AI won’t be “a movement”, but it’ll be a valid way of expression.
You are just teaching it to cope with it’s greatest weakness, like a bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.
I wish today’s AIs could learn and evolve, then they wouldn’t suck so much.
i mean ML art makers can evolve (i have a buddy who worked on one for his phd) but i don’t know how much of those ended up in the llm garbage we have now.
Thing that’s really gonna bake your cookie is ‘what if we didn’t’. Bitch trains on our resistance. This shit may take some getting used to, but Art will prevail.