We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: On the first Monday of April, which is not this coming week but the week after that, paid subscribers will get ET Leave Home, a monthly travel recommendation. No, I do not yet know where we’re going.
All subscribers to this newsletter also now get The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India, and the wider world, ad-free and directly to their inboxes from me. My co-hosts and I are trying to broaden its reach and sending it out to all of you is one way to do that. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
A report I worked on for the Nexus Project, “Fighting Antisemitism, Protecting Democracy: A Strategy for the Trump Era,” published this week. Axios has a write-up here.
From the AP: “Trump’s new tariffs lead to the biggest Dow wipeout since 2020.” Well, at least it’s for a good reas—oh. Hm.
Also from the AP: “India’s parliament passed a controversial bill moved by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to amend laws governing Muslim land endowments while Muslim groups and opposition parties protested the move.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…AI and art!
The immediate prompt for this little rant is the AI Ghibli phenomenon—where people generate images in the style of Hayao Miyazaki movies even though Miyazaki once said that AI was an insult to life itself—but the more general reason is that there is an argument about why AI is good, actually, that has bothered me for a while.
The argument basically says that AI makes the creation of art more accessible. That it lowers the bar for entry to making a painting, or a cartoon, or a piece of literature, and that that’s good, actually.
My argument is not that that’s bad. It’s that it’s not true. It hasn’t made art more accessible, because the person putting the prompt into the bot is not, in fact, making art.
I think some people call or think of this as gatekeeping. But I’m not gatekeeping, say, writing. I’m writing; you, a person pulling the answer to a prompt from ChatGPT or whatever, are doing something entirely different. “Now anyone can write!” Okay. So do it. Write.
Or, to put it another way: The one and only AI generated art experiment I’ve ever done was to ask one of these things to show Beagles painted in the style of Chagall. I won’t lie: it amused me for a few minutes.
The thing is, though, Chagall didn’t actually paint Beagles. And I didn’t learn how to paint Beagles in the style of Chagall. Was there a product at the end? Sure. I guess so. But is that really what it would have looked like had Chagall painted Beagles. No, of course not. In real life, his paintings drew on childhood and stories he’d read and heard and experiences he’d had. It wasn’t really in the style of Chagall. It was the style of someone without any of that copying Chagall. Which is a neat party trick, but that’s all it is.
This idea that AI makes the act of creation more accessible is simply untrue. It gives more people the opportunity to have an end result, I suppose. But it cannot get you around the stubborn fact that, to make art, you actually have to make art.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I encourage you to read this letter from the children of Michael I. Sovern, first Jewish president of Columbia, who, they write, “would be disgusted by the government’s coercion of Columbia, purportedly in the name of our religion.”
From the New York Times: “American Jews have watched with both alarm and enthusiasm as strong-arm tactics, including arrests of activists, have been deployed in their name” (this, too, has a Nexus mention).
From ynetnews: “Omri Boehm, an Israeli-German philosopher, has been disinvited from speaking at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event at the Buchenwald concentration camp following the intervention of the Israeli Embassy in Germany. Boehm has drawn controversy in recent years for comparing the Holocaust to the Nakba and accusing Yad Vashem of whitewashing what he described as racist Israeli politicians. ”
From Jewish Insider: “The House Judiciary Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee are jointly investigating six organizations that received federal funding during the Biden administration to determine if those grants were intended to target Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political standing during the 2023 judicial reform protests.”
-ET
"Hayao Miyazaki cropped 1 Hayao Miyazaki 201211" by 大臣官房人事課 is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Hi Emily,
I appreciate your AI take. I also want to add that I can’t help but think of a Jewish connection to the topic.
I read Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” for the first time just a couple of years ago and was surprised/thrilled to find that he spent some significant time in the book commenting on how art relates to his central conceit.
In short, if I’m not misunderstanding, Buber essentially says that art, real art, is when someone earnestly and truly expresses themselves in a piece AND when someone views/approaches a piece with an earnest openness to understanding the other that created it or at least an openness to the perspective that brought the art into being.
In other words, art is (or can be) a method for creating the I-Thou connection between two beings that Buber believes is central to a humane way of living and, ultimately, how he conceives of the divine.
It seems pretty clear to me that generative AI art, as conceived by the view you mention on today’s post, precludes art in the Buber sense of things.
By “creating” the art via the middle-man of AI the output can never approach the unvarnished honesty of the I (to your point, it is not the “I” creating the art at all) and could never then be received even by a “Thou” that wants to engage with whomever put themselves into a work.
It’s definitionally what Buber calls an I-It relationship.
It’s bridge with a middle but nothing actually tethering it to either side. The promise of passage between A and B but not the actuality of it.
Thanks as always for the excellent newsletter!