P.D. Magnus

Can AI let me see Karl Marx?

After recent posts about AI image generation, I’ve been mulling over whether there are any interesting philosophical lessons. Despite the title, this is not a post about AI and the twilight of capitalism. Instead, it’s about the would-be transparency of images.¹

Why I love my publisher

My book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs, was published by Open Book Publishers. They are, as their website says, “a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality and prize-winning research available to all, and… the hub of choice for a rapidly increasing international network of scholars who believe that it is time for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible.” They were my first-choice publisher for the book, and my experience with them has been great.

Robot overlords win blue ribbon (not really)

I’m teaching Philosophy of Art this semester, and a student pointed me to an Ars Technica story with the headline AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans. Jason Allen used Midjourney (the same AI that I was playing with recently) to make some images and enter them in the Colorado State Fair art contest. One of those images won first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category.

There’s lots of discussion about whether this is the end for human artists (it’s not), whether this shows that AI are now making real art (no), and whether the submission of AI-generated images to the State Fair was dishonest (maybe).

Icons and symbols

Two unrelated things.

One of my longest-running things on the internet is The God-Man Fan Page. I updated it today with a recent adventure— by my count, the 74th appearance of the character.

In preparing for tomorrow’s class, I discovered Raphaël Julliard’s 2005 work 1000 Chinese Paintings. She commissioned a Chinese factory to make square canvases painted a uniform shade of red and reserved a booth at a Paris art fair to sell them. All of the canvasses were sold by the end of the pre-show, so the result was an empty booth during the fair.

I for one welcome our new robot watercolorists

Today I discovered Midjourney, an AI image generator that’s rather more high-powered than other free ones which I’ve tried. Riffing on prompts by other users, I had it generate a Frank frazetta painting of a wombat newscaster. The result was pleasant enough that I’ve adopted it— for now— as the blog header.

Presumptuous invitation

It feels a bit cringe to think in terms of professional networking, but a few recent posts have me thinking about the personal and professional connections that maintain philosophical life.

TL;DR: 1. I should be better about keeping in touch and attending on-line events. 2. If you feel like you’d benefit from being in touch with me, feel free to reach out.

Pretty much pop up

I mentioned last month when I recorded an appearance on a podcast, talking about cover songs. That episode has now appeared.

Pretty Much Pop #129: Wherefore the Cover Song?

Maybe it’s because recording videos and Zoom classes has made me accustomed to hearing myself, but I mostly feel OK about what I said and how I sounded.

Polite interviews King on Swift on Swift

In a recent episode of Polite Conversations, Brandon Polite interviews Alex King about the appreciation conditions for Taylor Swift’s mimic rerecordings of her earlier tracks.¹ A couple of really nice points come out in the episode.

Appreciating out now

Appreciating Covers, co-authored with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock, is out now in the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics.

So very meta

During a commercial break while streaming the most recent episode of Would I Lie to You, I saw a new commercial for Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook). It concludes with the line, “The metaverse may be virtual, but the impact will be real.”

The jarring thing is the ad’s utter failure to imagine anything useful. It offers three examples of what’s coming. All of them involve people putting on goggles and gloves to enter virtual realities, which all feels very 1990s.