[phreeza]

I wonder how much our sense of aesthetics has to do with the perceived scarcity or effort of creation needed. I remember the first HDR photos looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, but now, as the process has been automated and is ubiquitous, it just looks tacky.

[Grazester]

HDR only looks tacky when it's done tacky, ridiculously amping up the saturation and removing all the shadows

[samlevine]

"fashion is clothing so terrible we have to change them every six months"

[Govannon]

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

[zaaakk]

read adorno

[yusee]

Have you read him? If so, why not synthesize his arguments so we can all understand?

[mccoyspace]

Here goes: Aesthetic Theory is a posthumous book by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and is one of the most important works on aesthetics in 20th century philosophy. In it, he combines elements from Kant, Hegel and Marx. From Kant's 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, he draws on the idea of the Sublime and the notion that art has formal autonomy (which Adorno modifies). From Hegel, he takes a dialectical understanding of the ultimate goal or aim of art, and from Marx he approaches art as being inseparable from society as a whole.

He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx).

Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre-categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability.

edit: links.... http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theo... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/

[ibuildthings]

Author here. Just to clarify, motive of this work is to ease curation, with the massive amount of content being created; but by no means an attempt at creativity or originality.

The work is not at all contradictory to Adorno, especially in the sense that it is explicitly trying to as non-reductionist as possible, and assuming notion of aesthetics is a dynamic entity .

There is a finite pattern in the dataset; more interesting, it has its interesting share of subtleties ( for example, as opposed to a image classification problems), and the technological question is whether we can capture these.

But there is another interesting data question. For our work, we curated our training set with the help of expert curators. But the dataset itself is a metamorphising entity; i.e. it is subject to revision ( it is a continuous process for us at the moment), but more interestingly it is a chance for open debate between our curators. In some sense, technology allow to codify and challenge our notion of aesthetics ( especially with the evolution in our training sets) at a given point of time.

[mccoyspace]

Thanks for the followup. I enjoyed reading the article and it is a very interesting project and a great effort. I did read at the end that it was about how to amplify the efforts of the human curators -- a great problem to tackle.

[zaaakk]

kudos for doing the work, I forgot about this post

[phreeza]

Care to elaborate? Does he go into this?