• kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    3 months ago

    Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott hypothesize that the figurines may have been created as self-portraits by women.[12]This theory stems from the correlation of the proportions of the statues to how the proportions of women’s bodies would seem if they were looking down at themselves, which would have been the only way to view their bodies during this period. They speculate that the complete lack of facial features could be accounted for by the fact that sculptors did not own mirrors.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, I saw that rebuttal and it seemed pretty strange to me.

        They couldn’t have been sculpting from their own perspective, because they technically had access to viewing themselves from a third-person perspective?

        We technically had access to drawing with linear perspective all along, but somehow until only a few hundred years ago, this is the best we could do:

        It just seems like a very modern-biased way of thinking about depiction. Mapping objective reality (rather than subjective perception) into art is a relatively new concept.

        • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          It’s missing some of the argument. Part of the idea is pre writing humans passing down successful pregnancy and reproductive information. Women obviously died from childbirth back then as they do now. One theory is that these women were trying to pass down some information of perhaps considered successful childbirth.

          There have been times in relatively recent history where incorrect information about pregnancy was being passed down, plus a larger woman would be getting more nutrients in that time than malnourished women. An easy conclusion to make may uave just been to eat alot and be larger.

  • Mastengwe@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I’d totally watch a documentary on simps throughout history. It would be hilarious!

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    I’ve always liked me a big woman, but those ancient boys may have liked too big of a woman. Who am I to judge, though? Probably sign of a real good harvest, and I bet that made everyone horny back then.

    • Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com
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      3 months ago

      Up until just a few decades ago the hardest thing for people to get was food, not housing as it is (for most of the people on Lemmy) today.

      Because of this, being fat was seen in various societies as a sign of wealth or beauty, sometimes both. As late as a hundred years ago the US and Great Britain had “fat man societies”. Here’s an article on that:

      https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/03/07/469571114/the-forgotten-history-of-fat-men-s-clubs

      We can’t really know why the “fertility idol” sculptures look that way, but if you’re an early human spending your life going through cycles of feast and famine as you follow prey animals sticking around with the fat person you ran into was a good way to stay alive.

    • Evrala@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      They were most likely made by women, the proportions make sense when you think of a woman looking down at herself. It is just that when the first men to uncover the artifacts looked at them they said “wow, these were obviously made by men and are ancient porn!”

      There are ones that have been found at various stages of pregnancy so were likely an educational tool.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      Define art? I once saw a piece of fruit in a cage that was supposedly art. All seems like bullshit to me.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Been thinking about it quite a bit

        I’ve come to the conclusion that to me, art is a play on your senses.

        A painting plays with your sight

        Music plays with your hearing

        Food plays with your taste

        Dance plays with your sense of balance

        Poems plays with your mind

      • huginn@feddit.it
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        3 months ago

        It’s art because it’s intentional.

        The point is to make you think it’s bullshit. That was the artist’s intent.

        AI has no intent. The person prompting it might… But usually it’s not intent so much as “I tried until this was pretty”

        Which is still art - just not noteworthy.

        • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          So it is art then due to the prompt engineering.

          So if the artist’s intent was to create something that is art but not seen as noteworthy to people of your opinion it’s art right? As that was their intention.

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            3 months ago

            Yes. That’s why I said it was art. That was the closing statement.

      • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Art is the conscious use of imagination to create something with the intention of it to be appreciated, experienced, and/or evoke an emotion in the observer. It requires one or two way communication between the creator and the person experiencing it.

        AI generated images aren’t art because there is no conscious creator who intends to create an experience for the viewer. If a future AI is conscious and self aware enough to have a will of its own, and will use it’s own creativity to create something to be experienced or appreciated by the viewer, we would have AI art, but until then these aren’t art.

        Also, the banana taped to a wall or a fruit in a cage is art, though it doesn’t mean it’s good or not. Art that sucks is still art.

        • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          Is the prompt used not that then?

          Seems the process of creating the correct prompt fits your definition.

          So the ai is more like the sculpting tools or paint right?

          • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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            3 months ago

            I can go to an online artist and commission a piece of art, but it doesn’t make me the creator, and similarly, if I prompt an AI to generate the image, it doesn’t make me the creator of the image.

            • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Digital art is a thing. Just because something takes text input and not a mouse doesn’t change the fact you are using a tool to create art.

              • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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                3 months ago

                You misunderstood me, of course digital art is art when created by an artist, but if I pay an artist to make something I want, it doesn’t make me the creator.

                If I prompt an AI, it doesn’t make me the creator either.

        • guitarist123@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          I have a thought experiment for you and anyone else who might read this. If I spent months teachings dogs or monkeys to recognize art and replicate it to the best of their abilities, would what they created be art?

        • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          Why do you interpret Fountain as being an example of why AI generated art is not art?

          I interpret it like this -

          Spoiler tag, so my thoughts don’t influence yours

          Fountain was a reaction against artistic snobbery, and it kicked off a movement of people who create art, not for review boards, nationalistic purposes, or rich patrons, but because they themselves find it appealing - the whole ‘art is in the eye of the beholder’ thing.

          But I still regard it as art. Someone had an idea, and used tools (“AI”) to execute that idea. Sure, those tools remove certain kinds of skill from the equation (but they do require others, such as prompt engineering), and image generations definitely copy from others - but so do artists.
          If someone makes something that pleases them, who am I to say it’s not art?

          • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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            3 months ago

            Because AI art, as it is commonly used nowadays lacks intentionality (the thing that makes a urinal art).

            If I read a book, I used to know that every word was put there by the author with intent. If iI read AI generated text, it doesn’t convey anything that a human has put out there for me to experience. I’m looking at formatted output of stochastic models.

            • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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              3 months ago

              That’s a good point.

              I’m thinking of art in the visual sense, and of the creator being a person who is prompting the image generator - which I think meets the intentionality standard.
              But, there are a lot of ways folks can use AI tools that aren’t intentional, and I haven’t been considering that.

              My stance isn’t 100% changed, but I will start considering intentionality.


              Related, but maybe not.

              Some years ago, I was a slightly older student with a deep well of photography experience entering a newer graphic design program, and some of it seemed amaturish to the point of being a joke to me. My “Digital Art” class was like that, where the average assignment was to cut and paste things together and apply x number of Photoshop filters to them. It was an easy A, so whatever. I remember for one of those assignments, I just took it as an opportunity to digitize some prints I’d made. I had taken some black and white shots at night of a local train station, which is pretty scenic, and considered a landmark. They were moody, and foreboding, also slightly soft because I don’t have great darkroom technique. I pumped up the brightness, threw on like a papercut/rough edges filter, and layered the whole thing with a not transparent blue gradient that made for this sort of cyanotype3 effect. Later that year, we were told to submit something to a student art show, and I printed that assignment out on the student printer. I might have been first, because the printer hadn’t run in awhile, and the blue print head was sort of clogged, so the thing came out this shade of green instead, because the cyan didn’t print heavily. (But it didn’t band, either, so…) I submitted that because I didn’t want to pay to reprint it, and that was that.

              At the art show, someone asked me about it, and I told them that I had initially done it this way for a project. I liked the blue for some reason I now forget, but then it printed incorrectly, and I liked that too, so I didn’t reprint it. I may have even said something cute about not being able to intentionally reproduce that print failure (they cleaned the machine right after my ‘failed’ print), so it’s sort of bespoke.

              A peer later asked why I didn’t just say that was intentional, and make up an excuse. And I sort of lost respect for him. Because that wasn’t my intent.

              Which is to say I guess I respect even unintentional screw ups, so long as their presentation isn’t wrapped in falsehoods.

              A book that is AI generated that was minimally edited and not really written by the person on the byline, then passed off as human work is not art, it’s just fraud. An AI generated book created with prompts from someone who knows how to write, then edited well to eliminate the AI weirdness, and then indicates the writing was largely done by LLM’s - well, I guess I think that’s art.
              AI art passed off as traditional art, or AI art that’s not intentional and passed off as intentional is a fraud.

              I guess that’s how your very good point fits in my conceptual framework. If it’s not offered in good faith as art, and explained as art, then it’s fraud. But AI art offered in good faith is art.

              Edit:
              I’m sorry some folks are downvoting you. You’ve been respectful and open minded our whole interaction.

            • Asafum@feddit.nl
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              3 months ago

              But how would you know an AI generated the text? Some current technology isn’t 100% perfect, but they’re trained to recreate human linguistic patterns based on actual human inputs. If we had a model that was only trained on the “great works” of history I wonder how difficult it would be to determine if an AI wrote it or a human.

              • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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                3 months ago

                Why would you want that, except for maybe putting authors out of a job while still making money from regurgitated drivel?

                I don’t want to read AI generated text, because that doesn’t put me into a state where an author communicates with me.

                • Asafum@feddit.nl
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                  3 months ago

                  I never said I wanted it, I was more curious about how you would know that there was intent or not if you couldn’t tell an AI made it.

                  If you enjoyed what you read you might believe there was intent when there really was none and I don’t know if that really matters. Your interpretation of the media could still be important to you if it had any impact on you.