"Painter Francis Bacon once said, 'The job of the artist is to deepen the
mystery.'" (Jimmy McDonough)
Thanks for having the thread. What I would like to see is an ombudsperson for the weird. There's a jarring disconnect between (a) very expansive talk, your wildest dreams talk. From let's say, David Shapiro. And (b) what is actually around, in practice? Miserably bad art creates an exhortation to more miserably bad art. The models do actually have a certain something sometimes, but the midwife/ringmaster promotes the most boring possible manifestations.
(Incidentally, if everything moves to Zero throttling, I will just say "forget it" and go read a book. Why was this done exactly and portrayed as an improvement?? Is it because power is expensive, the latest and greatest require more power, and the latest and greatest are ever better and better by definition? Everything after SD 2.1 sucks. Everything after 2.1 has a baseline of bad, thought-terminating art. And 2.1 isn't on Zero.)
Lego! Tolkien! Lego Tolkien! It's a walking lobotomy.
LLM-world has a poor grasp on the writers' principle "show don't tell". Is there a difference between "dreamlike, trippy, surreal, sense of wonder" and a dream with a lower-case d? Yes there is, though the former does lend itself much better to compartmentalization, segmentation and branding.
I made a giant robot just like the other 6,000,000 giant robots. So what!
Is it a proof-of-concept, or is it a thing unto itself? There's an icon on some of the accounts for TFLOPS, fetishization of processors. To what end! Are we looking with an engineering lens or an art lens? Or an overwhelming skew to certain fan-heavy, internet-heavy art types?
If you ask a model for a cat, then a hot air balloon, then a cat riding in a hot air balloon, it is very useful as a demonstration of what the models do. This has been done now, it's nothing to sneeze at and it was groundbreaking technically. But as work in its own right, it murders my soul. I'd like to see some kind of seat at the table for the NONE OF THE ABOVE people, an attempt to strike way out in sheer darkness: just say no to the easy offramps of tropes.
I look stoned. This is not progress.
Isn't that rude? And self-serving. The embodiment of the good stuff happens to be ME. Nevertheless, the imagination horizon of "a small cabin on top of a snowy mountain in the style of Disney, artstation" exhorts me to something dreadful and viciously small...
... and a group of Pentecostalist firefighters laying hands on a giant glass of ice water DOESN'T.
