EP8: Artificial Intelligence, Art, the Protestant Work Ethic

Listen, listeners—you spoke, and we listened. For today’s episode, Tertiary hosts Heaven-Leigh and Justin dive head first into our first-ever listener question: “ What do you think it will take for art-based platforms to regulate/condemn AI ‘art’ over profit?” For a topic as gargantuan as artificial intelligence, it should come as no surprise that our conversation covered a lot of ground—from publishing industry scandals and algorithm-driven slop factories to the ineffable, untouchable thing that separates manmade art from clunker junk. While it’s clear that regulating AI is somewhat out of the question (thanks, capitalism), that doesn’t change the fact that protecting what makes art quintessentially human is important. Don’t worry, we also made plenty of time to debate the Alien movies and gush over Jeff Have a follow-up question about AI? Send us an email at [email protected] and fill out our Google Form and we promise (we really do!) to answer in a future episode. We want to hear from you! Assigned Reading Watch The Drey Dossier’s recent YouTube episode on “The Shy Girl AI Scandal Is Way Worse Than You Think” here. Read Nabeel S. Qureshi’s Substack, “What Makes Art Great?” here. Further Reading Read Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” here. Read Britannica’s summarization of Machiavelli’s contributions to historiography here. Read Jay Caspian Kang’s article for The New Yorker, “Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?” here. Listen to The Grey Area’s podcast discussing “Machiavelli on how democracies die,” here. Our intro and outro music comes from “Cloud Dancer” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.