psychology

False Geniuses And Not Idiots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My friend Serdar had another banger post “Maybe we need fewer not-idiots.” He discusses many things, from how we keep the worst out of power to our weird worship of so-called geniuses. It’s worth reading on it’s own, but I want to zero in on something – America’s worship of supposed “geniuses” and treating them like divinely-appointed rulers. I find this strange because America also has a strongly anti-intellectual streak that you’d think would make people wary about such “geniuses”

Thing is, the worship of “genius” in America isn’t about intelligence.

Let’s take a look at the “lauded genius” of the last few years. Inevitably a “move fast and break things” person. Iconoclastic yet somehow worshipped by those who are supposedly “conservative.” Also, inevitably, kind of an a-hole. Also, sometimes dumb and clueless and even self-destructive, with an unsurprising side of drug abuse. Also on top of that, why do they have a business major yet talk science and so on?

Those following these supposedly superior humans sound suspiciously like the “cult of the auteur,” where someone is a creative genius, supposedly above us all, and thus not bound by our rules. It’s often been applied to artists and writers, excusing bad or even horrific behavior. “What would we do without them,” is what said cult essentially says, while the truth is such people’s destruction destroys more than it creates – if said creation was even worth it.

Yet this praise of geniuses (and thus auteurs) exists alongside anti-intellectualism. We are in an age where science and education is under attack by people who will them praise ketamine-fueled techbros and their supposedly brilliant ideas. Scientists who raise valid concerns on health or the environment are sidelined, while a business major who spends a family’s inheritance to buy a company is considered our intellectual better. The love of the genius and the hatred of intellectualism seem to go hand in hand.

I think this is obvious when you look how the cult of the “genius” and the cult of the auteur are similar – they praise someone for being an asshole. It’s not about brains, it’s about cruelty

These cultists do not want someone civil or functional, but someone brutal and uncaring. They want something “muscular” in the most insulting way, someone who is about force not thought, someone to hurt the other and rally the us. Saying such people are “geniuses” is a way to provide the veneer of intelligence while valorizing behavior that should land someone in therapy, rehab, or jail – or all three.

Such people see actual intelligence as weak, you know all beholden to facts, understanding, and – horrors – empathy that helps them understand how people work. Those worshiping the faux geniuses don’t want actual knowledge or wisdom, but a regressed-adolescent image of strength. Which is why so many lauded geniuses turn out to be both not that smart but remarkably weak as they are performers first and foremost.

We don’t need these “geniuses.” We need real intelligence of all kinds, from the understanding of math to the understanding of people. We also need the maturity to step outside of the games of the emotionally arrested who want a “genius” to worship.

And that, to go back to my good friend Serdar, is why we need less not-idiots.

Steven Savage

Make My Pain Original

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve been contemplating Artificial Intelligence producing art once again. Many of my friends are creatives, so it’s a subject of near constant discussion and we wish it wasn’t. Honestly, there are moments I wonder how people like tech critic Ed Zitron keep their sanity.

To level set what is called “AI” these days has existed for decades, collections of math and data that allow computers to perform certain complex behaviors. It’s been in medicine, in graphics programs, and so on, we just didn’t call it “AI” until recently. What we’ve got now is a bunch of language-and-drawing aping tools that burn huge amounts of power and water and are marketed by companies that aren’t profitable or fear there’s no more “big new thing.”

With that out of the way (and it will be doubtlessly be repeated in my works), let me focus on the idea of AI being a substitute for artists and writers. To get more specific, let me note that AI isn’t going to make me feel, and one thing they can’t do right is make me feel unpleasant.

Some of art and writing involves discomfort. It is a new idea that sits in your mind, warping it around conclusions you’re afraid to make. It’s a realization of disturbing truths in your past, revealed by fictional characters acting out something unpleasantly close to your own life. This discomfort can be horrific or a pleasantly painful sense of walls shattering, but art can make you uncomfortable in a good way even if it’s bad.

To give an example, I was watching the anime Headhunted in Another World, something in the sent-to-another-world isekai genre – but with a businessman so you can guess why I watched it. One element involved a species with poor reproductive capacity who were really more crossbreeds because those were more viable. That led to all sorts of disturbing elements of family, ability, and even personality affected by genes. For a “fantasy office comedy” with romcom bits, that little revelation was thought-provoking and disturbing.

Not an original show in many ways, but the creator clearly had ideas. Imagine having siblings that are ALL half-siblings, imagine having a relative who is alien to you. As is a common trend for the unkillable Isekai genre, there are some very good ideas embedded in the tropes – hough to be fair Headhunted does a lot more with the subject than some, but I am biased.

I am not for gratuitous disgust or horror or unsettling weirdness of course. However sometimes unpleasantness is a key part of creativity. You need to feel horror or you have a strange insight or something is off in a mystery or in art. Sometimes you need to look over the edge of the canyon to realize how deep it’s going and know it is deep.

I’m not saying that AI or AI-aided work can create discomfort, and when it appears to it won’t be original. AI is simply about recycling the past ideas it’s accumulated, it has no experiences or life to draw up, nothing to create new insights. That vital need for art to unsettle will, at best, be recycled disturbing ideas from the past and at worse be unsettling because AI sort of is terrible. I’m not sure we can have the proper level of disruptive insight and experience.

It’s like horror movies, which oft seem to recycle the same ideas in huge repetitive bursts. In some ways we’re still remaking Friday the 13th (though I’d argue really that’s remaking Black Christmas). One reason I tend to avoid horror films is the endless fall into sadism, jumpscares, and the same tropes. It’s why work like Radius and The Ritual really hit me, those do it right.

In short, one of the problems of AI is that, as it repeats things and has only the past, it’s not going to have that proper razor-edge feel that requires me to feel or is a sign of an unpleasantly fascinating realization. If there’s no person there there’s no one to connect with me in ways that’ll knock me off my perch and make me think and feel.

And that is just if AI has anything that might make me think or ponder disturbing truths. How easy would it be for automated scripts and novel to sheer off anything disturbing or offensive. It mighty cosplay as something original, but tweaked algorithms and careful queries can slice away anything that may anger an audience.

So, ironically, as much as AI is a pain to deal with, I feel it’s not going to unsettle me in the right way. It’s not going to make me think, confront, ponder darkly. It’ll be the same insights and weirdness and horrors and sadness of before. There’s nothing new there.

AI hype is painful to deal with, but it doesn’t seem AI can hurt in the right way.

Steven Savage

On The Couch In The Art Studio

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My good friend Serdar has a smart discussion on the idea that one’s artistic creations can be therapy. I won’t comment per se because his piece stands on its own. Instead, I want to explore my own thoughts on the matter.

I am automatically suspicious when someone says that their public art is therapeutic – the art on display, that is sold, etc. Some of it feels disturbingly exhibitionistic in an uncomfortable way, someone sharing things that are very intimate with you and everyone else all together. Some of it feels manipulative, trying to affect your feelings or demand you have a certain reaction or you must react. To share very intimate things very openly makes me suspicious and uncomfortable, and thus “here is my therapeutic art” is not an announcement that immediately compels my attention.

This is not to say that one cannot share very personal and intimate experiences in art – indeed for some artists that is the goal, to connect and share. In cases like this the sharing is part of the experience, the revelations and experience are communicated in a way that reaches me and the audience and treats us as people. Some “this is my therapeutic release” art in public gives me the feeling that I am not a participant, but someone there to nod, or acknowledge, or just feed attention.

Now can one do art for therapeutic purposes? I’d say entirely yes, and in fact it can be very positive. To explore expression, mediums, and so on is very useful. So often we can’t reach what we want to say, and art can help us do it – some things can’t be done in words but can be done in paint or dance or music. I am all for different modes of therapy – but I think there’s a question of when and how you share what comes out.

I don’t ask to see your therapist’s notes, and it might not be healthy to share them. Essentially publishing them makes me suspicious unless it’s done in a way that communicates with me as a person.

There I think is the difference between therapeutic art that makes me suspicious or uncomfortable and art that is, well, art – that the artist is taking on the role of an artist as well as expressing the issues they are coping with. If an artist is able to explore their issues and present them as an artist, connecting with an audience as artist and a person I’m for it. It might even be more inspiring than something with less connection to the artist’s issues.

Art therapy is great. Producing art is great. It’s when you have both that the artist may need to pause and ask where they’re coming from – because they might not be going where they intended.

Steven Savage