Toward a shallower future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

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Yes, this post starts with the latest ridiculous contretemps on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But I promise, it gets more interesting! The latest contretemps revolves around a famous painting: Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting. Painted in 1989, it represented the artist’s impending death from AIDS. Haring died the following year, at the age of 31. It’s an incredibly haunting, tragic image. The streaks of paint falling from the fragment of a pattern immediately evoke tears, blood, disintegration, futility; they emphasize just how much of the canvas was left blank. It’s a reminder of how much of our potential as individuals is wasted, and of an almost-forgotten pandemic that claimed 700,000 lives in the U.S. alone. The other day, a pseudonymous account named DonnelVillager1 posted an AI-generated image that “completes” the pattern in the upper left of Haring’s painting: DonnelVillager’s post — perfectly calculated to simulate ingenuousness, while actually poking f

Art by GPT-4. Prompt: “an image that evokes ‘The Triumph of Death’, with similar buildings and a similar layout, but where everyone is healthy and happy” “I would love to live to be 50 years old.” — Keith Haring Yes, this post starts with the latest ridiculous contretemps on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But I promise, it gets more interesting! The latest contretemps revolves around a famous painting: Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting. Painted in 1989, it represented the artist’s impending death from AIDS. Haring died the following year, at the age of 31. It’s an…

Toward a shallower future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

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