Made by Mechanical Means

> One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

> Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935 https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Edit: to put a finer point on it, AI art like this is, through it's rigorous application in almost every previous medium, showing that there is a demand and energy for a new art form that depends on the changing technical standard and capabilities that AI has introduced. I don't know what it will be, but you can see some of the edges of it with how it is making waves in all the other mediums.

What did it cost, everything included?

I loved the finished work. I'm looking forward to more art in the world.

Agents allow you to produce more, even the silly ideas you can't put too much effort into.

I really loved the Herzog parody, the overall taste and the parts I explored (I'm sure there's more). Well done!

There's a tangible quality to mechanical creations. Miss that hands-on feel when debugging distributed systems all day.

Great article, though if the author ever reads this: please choose "artificial", next time! It's already the first half of AI. If I'm bound to be an irrelevant spec in an irrelevant backwater of an irrelevant galaxy in the moments between abiogenesis and abioterminus, I can at least hope to make one obvious adjective a "thing".

That one Anthropic engineer made "vibecoding" happen overnight, so I write this with full confidence that they have magical influence over the ever-forming neologisms.