I like it. Artsy, sure, but a fun experiment with AI. The author took a long description of a mysterious abstract painting from Moby Dick and got dall-e to generate it, then iterated with the proceess over and over with nautical-sounding language, choosing variations on the image to shape it into a heart
Humanity is going to be fine in the world of AI. There has always been a distinction between fine and commercial art. Commercial art will certainly take a big hit, but fine art like this will be here as long as there are humans to make it.
I'm not convinced that the invisible hand of the market was ever a good fit for creative works. It would be better for the free expression of ideas if we go back to patronage through things like Patreon, Kickstarter, etc. or even better, public works projects like the WPA [0][1].
> the WPA is celebrated today for the employment it offered to millions during the darkest days of the Great Depression, and for its lasting legacy of smartly designed, well-built schools, dams, roads, bridges and other buildings and structures—many of which are still in active use across the United States.
>The project employed more than 5,000 artists at its peak in 1936 and probably double that number over the eight years of its existence. It produced 2,566 murals, more than 100,000 easel paintings, about 17,700 sculptures, nearly 300,000 fine prints, and about 22,000 plates for the Index of American Design, along with innumerable posters and objects of craft. The total federal investment was about $35,000,000.
Well, none of those images came close to what Melville's prose evoked for me.
And I'm afraid I found the author's prose pretentious, perhaps like what ChatGPT might spit out if you asked it to write like a pompous literary critic.
