i think a big driver of this (and reliance on AI in “evaluative” situations broadly) is that the evaluator’s goal is often less “make the right call” than “avoid being responsible for making the *wrong* call”

lmao

i'm kind of a doomer about this too but the x-axis *does* seem to mysteriously end right around the year 2020

i think of these as “target callers” and have been contemplating ways to autodetect them (see thread) bsky.app/profile/maxk...

ya i’ve only gone a couple times but it’s so huge that i mostly just find it draining

🫡🤠

tempted but not sure, soooo much travel coming up this fall. UIST + Portland + Northwestern for sure, plus maybe COLM EMNLP AIIDE NeurIPS. hbu

wait this is kinda profound tho. a trace of the true self remains in the false self

howdy

yeah, the currently online version is correct as of the last time i checked! didn't see that correction language tho, points for internal consistency i guess

i’m biased bc Noah was one of my phd advisors, but i still think his take on “alternative”, “expansive”, and “inventive” approaches to relating mechanics and meaning (from How Pac-Man Eats) provides a good theoretical framework for addressing these questions manchestergamecentre.org/blog-db/2021...

what provokes that kind of reflection, though, seems really hard to predict. so it's very unclear to me that this particular mode of engagement will reliably push people more in one direction than the other, especially when you change the framing around the basic interaction

i think it also depends on whether we stop at "wow, cool!" or actually start reflecting on how the experience of the riff relates to that of the original work. the Nighthawks instance was presented as "wow, cool" but it got *me* thinking about the scene from literal angles i hadn't considered before

as an artist i’d much rather a world where people are making all kinds of stupid riffs on my work a few decades or centuries or millennia from now… than a world where people have Figured Out The Meaning + stopped really engaging with it

this is why i tend to think of it as good to get people *playing* with art by whatever means. mere defamiliarization of the monumental is sometimes enough to revive the meaning-making process around a work previously thought to be Fully Understood & thus interpretively ~dead

obviously not all riffs on monuments are equally good or interesting – a riff that serves only to reinforce the original received meaning of the work, for instance, might do little of note. but even *careless* riffs can serve to get the blood pumping again through a monument’s calcified veins

one thing i’ve always appreciated about artists as a group is their irreverence. art history is full of explicit challenges to the monumentality of past monuments; when artists play around with or riff on monuments, they paradoxically *reinvigorate* these monuments, imbuing them with new life

but a monument can also be *pulled down*, back to the level of a document – for instance if we examine its specifics closely, discard or challenge the fixed interpretation of its meaning, open a new chapter in its interpretive history. this is a core activity of humanistic research

a document that is sufficiently widely circulated & debated tends to *calcify*: an interpretive consensus develops around its meaning & we start referring in our discussions to this interpretation of the work rather than the original work directly. it becomes a monument