https://x.com/ARTiV3RSE/status/1743827905342226580?t=-F2_OaRdfP_t0p_PgMvOlA&s=19
the glaring superficiality of the semantic and contextual understanding of what cyberpunk is delimits the limitations of current artificial intelligence that people try to hide
11 Comments
I think it’s called ecopunk
Tbh I don’t think this says anything about AI. I left various ‘cyberpunk’ forums a while ago when it became clear that the tropey aesthetic had crystallized so much that people really thought “waifish woman, neo-80s neon” was the genre. If a definition of cyberpunk is set by looking at all images with that tag online, it’s not surprising that this is the output.
That first one is a solar punk kind of offshoot if anything.
As someone who has used Midjourney a fair bit for personal use, my assumption here is that they literally prompted the phrase “cyberpunk Carthage” and posted the first few results. There’s low effort and then there’s this kind of weightless Buzzfeedian “content,” which is, to me, somehow more cyberpunk dystopian than anything you could get out of the artificial intelligence that harvests human labor to generate endless simulacra.
Too much light. The real grab with cyberpunk is how the bright popping colors and neon lights contrast to the dark, sometimes dingy and brutalist world.
please tag this as nsfw for all us historians here
Is it not cyberpunk because there are plants? What‘s not cyberpunk about it? It‘s gross capitalism, doing it’s thing, advertising on the wonders of the world, that‘s scathing enough a critique on capitalistic behaviors for me. Even as a light aesthetic layer on something. The fascination with categorization and excluding it from the genre for whatever reasons puts me off. Of course, this is all my opinion, and I‘m just as qualified as anyone else in subjective art criticism.
While I‘ll shit on “ai“ generated art, it‘s enough of the aesthetics to read, and when prompted to make a statement, it made the intended statement. It’s made by a computer iterating on existing artists, prompted by some bloke, seems fairly cyber, and punk, enough for me. Unethically plagerized existing art aside, for the near meaningless categorization.
Gatekeeping any blank-punk as archetype to make something more niche really doesn‘t add to the genre or statements within it, solar, atom, eco, etcetera will have more niche statements but excluding something from the generalized categorization doesn‘t really seem to do anything. It reduces art to being single-minded in a way that very few broad statements can coexist in a genre. It‘s peculiar is all.
Sorry for writing an essay-novella, but I think it’s important to say. It‘s just an opinion, so hate or agree, it‘s cool with me. I think this post is reductive, filing something away, as not cyber enough, therefore disregarding it. At least “Lmao“ makes me think that. Again, I hate defending generated iterative art thievery, but here I am, I guess.
Techno-chtitlan
What is it with people that are allergic to phone chargers taking screenshots of their damn phones?
*Technochtitlan*
None of the images represent cyberpunk as much as the fact that “art” is done by machines while menial labour is done by humans.
Also, Atlantis was not a historical place.