The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.
…Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
In fact what solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.
That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of that language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.