Things got off to an awfully slow start today. Right now the prospect of writing out an entire page of prose seems challenging. It does not feel like it is going to happen. Slowly typing out one phrase at a time is how this is about to get going toward something. At this point, I don’t even have a title in mind for this weblog post. This could very well be the post without a title unless things turn around. This post is probably not going to be built working around the title. It will be built one sentence at a time without continuity or clarity of purpose. I’m considering taking a break and getting a little more coffee and a glass of water…
Interrupted. Waking up.
Drinking about 8 ounces of water from my Nalgene bottle helped. The volume on my Pandora station has been turned up to about half from a fourth. At some point along the way, Pandora has rebranded the product to be music and podcasts. Apparently, podcasts have become ubiquitous and dare I say rather de rigueur. We live in a time where making and publishing content has become essentially commodicatized. At the same time, the methods to be compensated for that production are increasingly consolidated for the most part. A handful of key distribution systems and payment structures exist for those people electing to produce content online. Outside of those larger frameworks for monetization people do have paths to direct compensation like Patreon and sponsorships. That always makes me think back to learning about the Renaissance and the practice of patrons. People commissioned works of physical art in a variety of mediums and a lot of music. Today that is a commonly shared piece of knowledge. You can search for art or music of the Renaissance and find images or sounds that are familiar. Given that a lot of that work was completed over 500 years ago it has proven to be memorable. Unlike this blog post those paints for sure are going to stick around. Much like the written history of Rome remains accessible in print and online, the Renaissance will probably continue to stand out on the walls of museums, within galleries, and online.
I’m not entirely sure how drinking a glass of water helped me intellectually wander into the foundations of the previous paragraph. Maybe that is one of those things that just happens. At the moment I’m completely awake and thinking about the world around me. At the forefront of my thoughts is the historical context of things and how we are progressing along a catalog of shared experience. Maybe that large of a timeline of events remains itself challenging to comprehend or work with reasonably well given the nature of its expanse. Beyond keeping a retrospective account of antiquity we could think about the nature of art being created by artificial intelligence. I’m now wondering if using art in that context might be controversial. It would be very easy for the catalog of both paintings and music created by artificial intelligence to quickly surpass the total output of anything created by hand or by a spark of imagination. Maybe at some point it might be considered controversial to draw the distinction by a brightline noting if a spark of imagination existed for something created by machine learning it was separate and distinct or wholesale discounted as art. At the moment, you could very clearly say algorithmically derived paintings or music would be an extension of a model (ultimately a tool or extension of something creative) and the output of that model is not created purely from the grand spark of imagination that drives creativity.
That last paragraph probably needs to be reworked at some point. The point I was trying to make deserves a little deeper consideration at some point.
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