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Artificial intelligence is poised to suck the soul out of art — and make artists’ already precarious existence even worse.

An AI-generated “larger format” of Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. (Lee Brimelow / Twitter)

In the 2013 film Tim’s Vermeer, libertarian actor Penn Gillette documents his friend Tim Jenison’s efforts to reproduce the techniques of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. To this end, Jenison, a software company executive and visual engineer, develops a series of elaborate methods that make use of mirrors and light to replicate Vermeer trademarks like field depth and chromatic aberration.

The film itself is reasonably entertaining, and Jenison’s recreation of Vermeer’s 1660s work The Music Lesson is certainly not unimpressive as an effort in engineering. Both Jenison and Gillette, however, ultimately mistake the creation for something it is not. In the narrow conception of art offered by Tim’s Vermeer, it is simply a technology like anything else — a method, or a series of methods, that aspire to represent reality with as much fidelity as possible. There is no social or cultural process involved, no inspiration beyond an act of mechanical production, and no higher purpose to Vermeer’s own project beyond photorealism.

In his commentary, Gillette gushes about the “photographic” and “cinematic” qualities of Vermeer’s work without ever grappling with its much more interesting and abstract dimensions. “My friend Tim painted a Vermeer! He painted a Vermeer!” Gillette exclaims of something that is no more or less than an extremely elaborate experiment in painting-by-numbers — a derivative simulacrum of something beautiful whose existence misconstrues the very idea of beauty.

 

Both in thesis and execution, Tim’s Vermeer was the perfect forerunner to the effervescent news cycle that continues to surround generative AI. From paintings to AI-generated podcast conversations to script writing and beyond, a concerted effort is currently underway to supplant human-driven creativity with computerized automation — while dispensing with the entire notion of art as we know it.

Like any technology-driven industrial process, the introduction of AI may well end up having profound social and material implications. Beneath the transhumanist utopianism of Silicon Valley is invariably found the same imperative that has driven capitalism since the nineteenth century — namely, a relentless drive toward ever-more efficient production at ever-lower cost — and there is little reason to believe AI will be any different.

In the cultural realm, the results will be exceptionally crude: ersatz paintings crafted by computer (sold, perhaps, in a marketplace of artificially generated scarcity like cryptocurrency or NFTs); formulaic music recorded by CGI pop stars who do not actually exist; writer’s rooms replaced by generative algorithms that reduce the nuances of dialogue and plot construction to a Fordist production process with few or even no actual writers involved.

there is something almost charmingly stupid about this particular application of this technology imo. a six year old’s concept of what creation entails. walking into a museum and seeing starry night and going “i bet i could make that bigger” https://t.co/XeTkhdEIjK

— sorrel (@sorrelquest) May 30, 2023

Such developments are a threat to artists and cultural workers. As artist Molly Crabapple recently observed, existing apps like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can already generate detailed images based on nothing more than text prompts for next to no money. “They are faster and cheaper,” she writes,

than any human can be and while their images still have problems — a certain soullessness, perhaps, an excess of fingers, tumors that sprout from ears — they are already good enough to have been used for the book covers and editorial illustration gigs that are many illustrators’ bread and butter.

What these fabrications are not, however, is anything that can ever be called art.

Like Jenison and Gillette, the most effusive boosters of AI culture fundamentally mistake reproduction for creation and incorrectly see realism and artistic expression as synonymous. In this conception, creativity is ultimately a mechanistic endeavor, art of every kind — paintings, films, music, poetry — being nothing more than the aggregation of granular data points; quite literally, the sum of its component parts.

In their techno-utopian enthusiasm, they also elide the extent to which the brave new world they seek to create is already here. Accelerated by corporate monopolism, mass entertainment has increasingly become a wasteland of derivative and algorithmically generated “content,” very little of it meaningfully new. Aided by technology, corporate conglomerates have already honed a zombified mode of cultural production in which existing intellectual property (IP) is endlessly recycled and churned out in the form of sequels, prequels, reboots, and schlock pastiche. Insofar as AI represents a revolution, it will therefore mainly be one that refines this process further, which is not really much of a revolution at all.

It’s tortuous and complicated to make qualitative judgements about what constitutes good or bad art. But it can safely be said that making a creative process more “efficient” is not the same thing as making it better.

Art, music, and virtually the whole of human life and thought beyond the basic business of sleeping and eating, exudes an essence or Geist that is not reducible to mechanistic processes. Whatever we decide to call this — intelligence, humanism, creativity, the soul — it by definition yields something that cannot be quantified or taxonomized at the point of origin. Once it’s been created, a painting or a piece of music can be subsequently broken down into its component elements — which can, in turn, be rearranged or reconfigured to produce something else. Barring the introduction of some new creative element, however, the result will only ever be an ersatz reproduction.

In a world where machines are allowed to replace artists, the entirety of culture will simply be an ever-narrower and more derivative version of what already exists.

On Sunday at about 8 pm, a tragedy in Columbia, South Carolina, echoed nationwide. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott announced that Rick Chow, the proprietor of a gas station and convenience store in the area, had been charged with murder in the death of 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton.

After learning the facts of the case, Lott clarified that the gravity of the situation was “very disturbing.” He stated there was no evidence that the victim had taken any merchandise, including the water bottles, from the store or pointed a firearm at the store owner.

It all started when the young man and Chow’s son had a verbal confrontation in the store. The 14-year-old, after a heated exchange of words, took off running. Chow and his son then chased the teen to the nearby Springtree Apartments.

A gun was discovered near the victim’s body. The sheriff made it clear that, even though the deceased had his own firearm, the suspect was not justified in shooting him- as he did not pose a deadly threat.

Richland County Coroner, Naida Rutherford, reported that the deceased’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to his lower back, which caused considerable damage to his heart and heavy bleeding.

Rutherford also revealed that, based on the evidence, there was no physical altercation before the shooting; the confrontation had only been verbal. Chow’s bond hearing is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, followed by a first court appearance set for the 23rd of June.

The public was offered a statement from Richland School District Two, which revealed that Cyrus Carmack-Belton was a student at Summit Parkway Middle School; their condolences went out to the family for their loss.

On the night of the announcement, the store belonging to the suspect was vandalized with graffiti, broken windows, and looted merchandise. Sheriff Lott reminded people that defying the law and incorrectly using a firearm could lead to devastating consequences. He reminded everyone that while defending yourself or another’s life requires using a firearm in some instances, shooting someone who is only running away and not threatening you with a gun is not a valid reason to shoot someone.

In the wake of the incident, this case serves as a precipitating reminder that everyone is responsible for their actions. It is a pressing call to protect our own lives and the lives of our fellow citizens, no matter the cost.

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Yariv Levin excoriates judicial activism in Israeli court system, prompting former Justice Minister to urge Levin to ‘get hospitalized.’

By World Israel News Staff

Israel’s Justice Minister took aim at the country’s activist judiciary Wednesday, while vowing to rein in the court system by bringing back the shelved overhaul plan.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Knesset plenum debated a proposed amendment to the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.

The amendment, proposed by the Opposition faction Yesh Atid, would officially insert the principle of equality into the Basic Law. Thus far, the principle of equality has never been written into the Basic Law, though the Supreme Court has read it into the quasi-constitutional code.

The proposal, drafted by Labor MK Gilad Kariv, was easily defeated in the Knesset plenum.

During the preceding debate, Levin castigated Yesh Atid for endorsing the measure to the Knesset, accusing the party of hypocrisy after having vociferously protested the government’s attempt to reform the judiciary.

“We are not allowed to do anything, but you are allowed to promote a Basic Law that is at the core of the issues in dispute and at the core of what is being discussed at the President’s Residence,” Levin said, referencing negotiations brokered by President Isaac Herzog to reach a deal on judicial reform.

Levin told Opposition lawmakers the government would bring his judicial reform plan back to the agenda, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelved it ahead of the Passover holiday, amid nationwide protests.

“We have stopped being naïve. We will fix the judicial system. We are not impressed by the threats you make against us.”

The Justice Minister went on to accuse the Supreme Court of “post-Zionist” judicial activism, and Israel’s court’s of betraying Israeli victims of Arab terror in Gaza.

“The blood of the victims murdered in terrorist attacks in Gush Katif cries out to us till this very day, after the judicial system – which you want to give even more unlimited tools and power to – turned its back on their blood.”

“We all have a problem that post-Zionist agendas have entered the judicial system and the Supreme Court in particular, which are used for completely different things, to erase Zionism.”

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The Right never seems to stop talking about “Marxism” and its wily tricks. But for all their denunciations, conservative pundits really just keep proving they don’t even know the basics of Karl Marx’s thought.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (newspaper published in Cologne, Prussia, at the time of the Revolution of 1848–49). Painting by E. Capiro. (Roger Viollet via Getty Images)

On Monday, Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis gave a lecture at the How the Light Gets In festival in the Welsh village of Hay. Here is a condensed and revised version.

Karl Marx deserves a better caliber of critics. I’ve thought that many times in the last few years, but perhaps never more so than in March when I saw the conservative James Lindsay post a picture of himself pretending to pee on Marx’s grave in London.

In honor of Karl Marx being dead 140 years today. pic.twitter.com/svL28YRQ9l

— James Lindsay, cowardly saboteur (@ConceptualJames) March 14, 2023

I couldn’t help but notice the lack of any actual stream of urine in the picture. In a way, that made it a perfect metaphor for the Right’s approach to their greatest intellectual adversary. They’re making a show of desecrating his grave. But they know too little about his ideas to even make contact with the target of their critique.

Lindsay, Levin, Kirk, and Peterson

Lindsay isn’t some obscure right-winger. He’s a globally prominent figure. He testifies before state legislatures explaining why they should ban “critical race theory,” which he sees as Marxism in disguise. His book, Race Marxism, was a bestseller.

So was Mark Levin’s book, American Marxism. Levin was never quite as popular as his colleagues Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but his talk radio show has blared out from hundreds of AM stations around the United States for many years. Originally, I was slated to cowrite a review of American Marxism with Matt McManus, but after many attempts to get through it, I ended up admitting defeat and letting Matt write it by himself. The book feels like the transcript of an endless, breathless, incoherent rant. I’d be surprised if Levin even cracked open Marx’s magnus opus, Capital.

Right when I was trying and failing to ingest Levin’s book, I did a public debate with one of conservative media’s most omnipresent figures: Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. At one point, Charlie asked me what I thought about Karl Marx. I responded that while I didn’t think Marx was right about everything, he was right about a lot of important subjects — in particular, his theory of history.

Charlie seized on that to say Marx’s theory of history was “basically Hegel’s” — after all, he said, wasn’t Marx the “president of the Young Hegelians”?

This could hardly be more wrong. G. W. F. Hegel had an “idealist” theory of history — he saw it as driven by the progressive self-realization of what he called the “World Spirit.” Marx did start out as a Young Hegelian, but this was the name of a philosophical current, not an organization with membership cards and a president! More substantively, Marx — though deeply influenced by Hegel’s methodology — came to reject idealism in favor of a “materialist” theory of history in which the primacy is given to economic factors: the “forces of production” and “relations of production.”

Lindsay, Levin, and Kirk aren’t the only prominent conservatives who insist on prattling on about Marx despite not knowing the ABCs. In Jordan Peterson’s 2019 debate with the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Peterson said that he’d prepared for the debate by rereading the Communist Manifesto for the first time since he was eighteen.

That in itself was an astonishing admission. Here you have someone who wrote mega-best-selling books that contain strenuous denunciations of “Marxism” admitting that he hadn’t read the Communist Manifesto — a short pamphlet that can be consumed in an afternoon — in decades.

But even more striking was how little understanding Peterson seemed to have of what he’d read. He expressed surprise that Marx and Friedrich Engels “admitted” capitalism had spurred more and faster economic development than any previous system — when in fact they devote pages to the observation because it’s a crucial part of their analysis. And in a swipe at the first sentence of chapter one of the Manifesto, about how all “hitherto existing history” is a “history of class struggle,” Peterson argued:

Marx didn’t seem to take into account . . . that there are far more reasons that human beings struggle then their economic class struggle. Even if you build the hierarchical idea into that (which is a more comprehensive way of thinking about it), human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that’s inside themselves, with the evil that they’re capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them. And we’re also actually always at odds with nature, and this never seems to show up in Marx . . . . (my emphasis)

But the way that humans are “at odds with nature” is right at the heart of Marx’s theory of history! Marx thinks the “legal and political infrastructure” of any society is downstream from the “relations of production” — i.e., the relationship between the immediate producers (whether slaves or peasants or modern wage workers) and the class in charge of the production process (whether slaveowners or a feudal aristocracy or capitalists). And Marx thinks these relations are themselves, in an important way, downstream from the level of development of the forces of production — roughly, the capacity of a society to transform what we get from nature into products that meet human needs.

Marx’s Theory of History

Marx’s account of history goes something like this:

Early hunter-gatherer societies lacked a class of nonproducers because there wouldn’t have been enough to eat if there was a ruling class that wasn’t out hunting or gathering. Absolute scarcity reined. The agricultural revolution boosted human productive capacity to the point where it could support a ruling class, but only if some of what was created by the “immediate producers” was directly taken by force — as in modes of production like slavery and feudalism.

The development of modern industry creates (and requires) a different mode of production where the immediate producers are “doubly free”— free in the sense of being free citizens with a legal right to move around and make contracts with any employer who will have them, and also “free” from any means of supporting themselves except for selling their working time to a capitalist employer — so they end up submitting themselves to a new ruling class. And yet, Marx says, capitalism pushes the forces of production to such advanced heights that there’s a new possibility: workers themselves can take over the means of production and create a better future.

Marx is very clear that having to work to transform the deliverances of nature into human “use values” is a necessity originally imposed by nature and not by any particular social system. But those systems force immediate producers not just to produce to meet their own needs, but also to spend additional hours doing unpaid labor on behalf of the ruling class.

This happens right out in the open in a system like feudalism, where serfs are legally forced to spend part of their time toiling in the lord’s field instead of the little plot of land with which they feed themselves and their families. But Marx thinks the same thing happens in a disguised form in capitalism — officially, you’re being paid for every hour you work, but in practice some of the work you do creates the goods and services that are sold to pay your own wages, and some of it goes toward your boss’s profits. Under socialism, when “free associations of workers” run the show, workers themselves would get to decide how the proceeds of their labor would be divvied up. Some portion would go to nonproducers like children, retirees, and those unable to work, but none would be taken by a capitalist class.

One of the crucial differences between Marxism and earlier forms of socialist thought is that Marx doesn’t see capitalism as an avoidable moral mistake. However ethically abhorrent, and however desirable surpassing it might be, capitalism to Marx is a necessary stage of historical development. That’s why Marx and Engels devote such space at the beginning of the Manifesto to talking about the amazing ways the forces of production have been developed under capitalism. For the first time, there’s the possibility of something better — not the combination of freedom and material hardship experienced by early hunter-gatherers, or even by independent small farmers who have to work all day every day just to produce the necessities of life, but an egalitarian and democratic version of high-tech modernity.

There are real criticisms you can make of Marx’s vision. Some people argue, for instance, that to deal with the climate crisis we need to roll back our industrial infrastructure — we need “degrowth.” I disagree, but that’s at least an argument with people who know what they’re arguing against. That’s not the argument we’re having with the Right.

One way you can tell as much is that they’ll cite the failures of authoritarian state socialist governments — starting with the Soviet Union — as a great refutation of Marx. But what did Marx actually say about Russia?

As Steve Paxton points out in his book Unlearning Marx, Marx specifically wrote that it would be impossible for undeveloped, semifeudal Russia to skip capitalism and leapfrog into the socialist future unless a revolution in Russia was accompanied by a revolution in industrialized western Europe. Don’t get me wrong. I know twentieth-century Marxists would have preferred to see a politically democratic and materially prosperous form of socialism take root in the Soviet Union than see Marx’s theory confirmed. But that theory being confirmed is exactly what happened.

Better Critics, Please

I actually want better critics of Marxism. Everyone should want that. Anti-Marxists should want it because they clearly think criticizing “Marxism” is important — the contemporary right never shuts up about it! — and you can’t do that effectively if you don’t know what Marx’s theory of history even is. Marxists should want it because the best version of our view will come through engagement with the smartest criticisms. I want critics who can make us think hard about our premises and revise the parts that need revising. That’s how intellectual progress works.

Give me conservative intellectuals who’ve carefully read Marx — who can formulate critiques that make me squirm. I might not like it in the moment, but we’ll all benefit from the process.

Instead, we get the kind of right-wingers who say environmentalists are secret Marxists and that the crypto-Marxist plan is to make us all eat bugs for the sake of conserving the environment. Or who express confusion about why Marx and Engels talk about rapid economic development under capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. Or who think Marx thought Tsarist Russia could skip to socialism. Or who, dear God, say things like, “We’re also actually always at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in Marx.”

Real critics can serve a useful purpose. The would-be grave desecrators, though? They’re just wasting everyone’s time.

Erez Shimoni, an ex-Mossad agent who died in a boat accident in northern Italy, was laid to rest in a military cemetery in Israel.

By World Israel News Staff

The former agent of Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency who was killed in a boat accident in northern Italy on Monday was laid to rest at a closed ceremony at the military cemetery in Ashkelon Wednesday afternoon.

Fifty-four-year-old Erez Shimoni, a retired Mossad agent, was among the four killed when a boat capsized in Italy’s Lake Maggiore, on the southern edge of the Alps.

According to a report the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, 10 other Israeli intelligence agents – both active and retired – were also on the boat, along with a number of Italian agents.

The report claimed the remaining 10 agents were quickly flown back to Israel after the incident.

Just before Shimoni’s funeral Wednesday, the Mossad released a brief statement through the Prime Minister’s Office, eulogizing Shimoni, while offering no details of his personal life or career and declining even to confirm Shimoni’s identity.

“The coffin of the Mossad retiree who was killed in the boating tragedy, due to inclement weather, on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, arrived in Israel this morning. Due to his service in the agency, no further details are available,” the statement read.

“The Mossad has lost a dear, dedicated and professional colleague who, for decades, devoted his life to the security of the State of Israel, even after his retirement. The Mossad mourns the loss and shares in the grief of the family, which it will continue to support and embrace.”

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