let's THiNK about it Ryder Richards

Ryder Richards talks about his exhibition based on Salvador Dali's (1969) illustrations of "Alice in Wonderland." Considering them un-Dali, he asks DALL-E to draw inspiration from John Tenniel, the original illustrator, and re-invent them as a Dali-esque blend.

After several "failed" attempts to achieve his goal, Ryder used ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Claude to rewrite "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" utilizing Dali's surreal symbology. The resultant illustrations became more compelling and odd, and with practice at developing blended consistency, character, and style, Richards offers a re-envisioned version of the tale.

Lecture delivered at West Texas A&M, Canyon, Texas, on March 25, 2024

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/aiices-odyssey-in-dall-e-land/

0:00 AI-generated art and its applications.
2:36 AI's potential impact on society.
7:55 Cybernetics, control systems, and the future of humanity.
13:11 AI-generated art and its impact on human creativity.
17:36 Art, AI, and creativity.
20:03 Using AI for art generation and creativity.
26:43 Using AI for art generation and consistency.
31:40 AI art, creativity, and ownership.
36:29 Using AI to generate art, limitations and creative choices.

A lecture diving into the promises and perils of AI in art through artist Ryder Richards' recent museum lecture on technology's impact on creativity, humanity, bias, consciousness, and our shared future.

Beyond near-term hype, as AI increasingly penetrates cultural realms like art, urgent questions arise around human creativity versus artificial generation. This lecture traverses philosophical tensions from Cybernetics to Marxism to Silicon Valley god-complexes shaping our AI future, as well as considering aura, human dignity, and the limits of technology.

Ryder Richards discusses how Kant bypasses the conundrum of fate vs. determinism, vouching for the transcendent realm.

Kant introduced a philosophy that actually does have a square grid, with the influential idea of a priori knowledge in one quadrant. This abstract knowledge exists in Kant’s unknowable "noumenal" realm. This marked a departure from Hobbes and Newton, who emphasized submitting to the laws of reality discovered through science and experimentation to uncover the secrets in this realm.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-81-kant-and-the-rise-of-subjective-realism/

Ryder Richards explores the spectrum between truth and lies, arguing that humanity uses abstraction and catastrophe fantasies to bypass reality and construct dangerous universal rules that validate our desires.

In this podcast, Ryder Richards uses the analogy of a ping pong game with reality as the net to examine how truth and superficiality can become untethered abstractions that escape reality. He explores how truth-seeking can turn into rigid ideology and superficiality into manipulative propaganda. Richards suggests reality should act as a filter to catch the excesses of these abstractions.

He highlights Plato's cave and Disneyland as examples.

The podcast offers two potential solutions - Isiah Berlin's "communicative rationality" based on logic and definitions and meditation to become present. Overall, Richards cautions against abstractions divorced from reality and our reactive desires to blindly believe them.

The Parallax View is an approach by Slavoj Zizek to reconsider Hegelian Dialectics; instead of sublation or overcoming, what if we can adjust perspective and the seeming antagonistic opposition (an insurmountable deadlock) can be seen in as "short-circuiting" - that is, providing an inherent explanation from a new point of view. It is not synthesizing ideas (melding them into One) because the subject needs tension as part of its functioning.