Origami, and artistic values

Sketch of an origami turtle

Origami Turtle, a pencil sketch by me, of an origami model folded by me. Someone at an origami meetup taught me how to make this. I do not know who designed it, possibly he did.  ETA: I have identified the model as Baby Sea Turtle by Neige A.

Since I’ve been writing about AI art, I want to talk about the implications on my own artistic medium of choice: origami. Since I do not draw (although I have the ability to make a sketch), I’m not directly impacted by AI.  But there are some distinctive artistic values that emerge from origami, and I think it might help explain where I’m coming from.

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Link Roundup: May 2023

FYI, my last post about AI art got a lot of comments on Pillowfort, if you’re interested in that conversation.  And, I have another post queued up, so look forward to that.

Free Stuff is Good, Actually | Unlearning Economics (video, 1:24 hours) – An economist runs down the evidence in favor of social spending such as education, healthcare, and universal basic income.  It really is a free lunch, so there’s no excuse not to take it.

I don’t have much to add except that, in the US individual market prior to Obamacare, the adverse selection death spiral ran its full course for some populations.  People like my husband would not have been able to purchase individual health insurance at any price because of adverse selection.  People complained about how insurance companies loved Obamacare, and yes I expect that insurance companies do not like adverse selection, and I happen to agree with the insurance companies on that one.  Restore the mandate to buy health insurance.

Games and Online Harrassment Hotline, Take This Heads Explain Why the Industry Needs Another Culture Shift | IGN – The author speaks with Anita Sarkeesian and Eve Crevoshay about current work trying to improve company culture, going beyond standard DEI initiatives.  Employees’ fear of doing something wrong, and companies’ fear of liability appear to be major obstacles.  It’s also interesting that when they made a Games and Online Harassment Hotline, they got a lot of calls from the people who had caused harm and didn’t know what to do about it.

Sexism certainly comes in all sizes.  There are acute examples of sexism and abuse that need to be handled by firing people–but workplaces can also have a chilly climate arising from a hundred small behaviors.  I think when people only hear about the acute examples of abuse in the news, they end up being very defensive even about little things–and that makes it difficult to improve workplace culture before the crises occur.

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Tagging AI art

In an earlier essay, I discussed three arguments about AI art, and why I disagree with them. First, it is argued that AI art violated the consent of artists used in training sets; second, that it hurts the livelihoods of artists; and third, that it is bad art.

Part of what inspired me to defend AI art was that the social network Pillowfort polled its users on what ought to be done about AI art. I was surprised to hear that more than half thought that AI art should be banned from the platform, and the vast majority thought it should at least be mandatory to label it as AI-generated. I’ve said repeatedly that I am not personally interested in AI art, but it feels so wrong to single out one particular category of content just because a lot of people don’t like it. I myself produce content that plenty of people don’t like (analytical essays), and there are plenty of popular varieties of content that I dislike but no one would ever think to ban. So I defend AI art not on its own merits, but because I am opposed to efforts to homogenize social media content.

However, let’s consider a couple of things about AI art that might make it particularly annoying or corrosive to a social media platform. Even someone who creates or follows AI art might be concerned about these, and advocate measures to control them. We’re talking about deception and spamming.

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Origami: Aperiodic Chevron Tessellation

Aperiodic Chevron Tessellation

Aperiodic Chevron Tessellation, designed by me

Did you hear?  Someone discovered an aperiodic monotile!  Obviously, these are origami life goals.  And, I’m making it out like a joke, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only origamist who was thinking that.

Oh, but this origami isn’t the aperiodic monotile.  Instead, I read their paper, and was inspired to create a different aperiodic tiling.  And in the mean time, I learned how an aperiodic tile ticks.

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Spam bloggers get

There’s a certain kind of spam that bloggers get, which is mostly invisible to non-bloggers. So many people may not recognize it as spam, for lack of experience. Let me describe it for you.

The end goal of the spammer is to create links back to a website. I don’t pretend to know how their business model works, but I’d speculate that these spammers are paid by some website to boost their search rankings. The websites are generally disreputable shoestring budget operations, filled with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and other nonsense, and absolutely do not deserve to have their search rankings boosted.

The most common way to create links is by leaving comments. I get about 30 spam comments a day, but I never look at them because WordPress has a very effective spam filter. Many comments don’t bother trying to trick you, they’re straight up ads. Other comments are generic “I loved reading this!” type stuff, with a profile link back to the target website.  Perhaps it’s no wonder that cranky old bloggers like me don’t appreciate generic praise.

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A Chinese-Filipino family history

My grandfather died, so I read his memoir.  It had been published when I was 11. You will not be able to find this book, and anyway it’s not the sort of thing that is of interest to people outside of his family. But I found it valuable to understanding my heritage, and there are some interesting historical bits I’d like to share.

My grandfather was born in the Philippines in 1929. He was part of the Chinese-Filipino minority, which entailed going to a separate school that used Chinese as a primary language. Like many Chinese-Filipino people, he came from a Fukien background.

When he was 6, he moved to Shanghai. This was because of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life” campaign, which (among other things) sought to attract Chinese expats back to China to build its industry. My great-grandfather owned a tobacco company, so he moved to China to start a Chinese branch. The cigarette packs explicitly advertised that they were made by returning overseas Chinese—a patriotic cause.

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Link Roundup: April 2023

Some links on AI art – I included some of these shoutouts in my comment section, but might as well include in my link roundup as well.  The reason I was thinking about AI art was because Great American Satan has been writing in its defense.  I also saw a video by Jack Saint (21 min), which was in opposition to AI art, but also concluded that the problem was capitalism.  I thought one of the interesting points Jack Saint made was about the use of AI in animation, which is an art form that arguably takes too much work.  Most people will basically never animate anything, and when people like Jack Saint do solo animation projects, it can take a major toll.  This is why I’m not very convinced by the idea that AI makes things too easy.  Maybe it makes some things too easy, but other things it could make more reasonably easy.

Adastra: The Best Furry Visual Novel Made Me Come Out as Gay and Now You Have to Hear About It | Keith Ballard (video, 3:14 hours) – So, funny story.  I thought I’d watch some Myst Let’s Plays so I could see what I remembered wrong about the series.  And I got sidetracked because the player was obviously a furry and probably gay.  Clearly that’s what Myst was missing–furries.

Anyway, this is the sort of media analysis that includes a summary of the visual novel being discussed–that’s why it’s so long.  Adastra is a political drama where the player character is abducted to an alien society and participates in a contest between two successors to the throne.  It’s also an 18+ romance.  It sounds like this story has a great alignment of text and subtext: the characters are literally gay, but also metaphorically gay in their relation to society.  Despite the common prejudice against furries, some of the smut they write just sounds so sincere and wholesome.

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