{"id":1071,"date":"2026-10-23T10:46:06","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T23:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2026-10-23T11:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T00:16:13","slug":"war-or-sport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/war-or-sport\/","title":{"rendered":"War or Sport"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I don’t care if my carpet is cleaned\/instructions are written\/house is built\/disease is cured\/surgery is performed\/country is defended by a person or a machine, just do it really good please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do care that the sport I’m watching is played by humans (who aren’t on steroids), the song I’m listening to is written and performed by people, the dancer is a person, the artwork was drawn by a person, the novel or opinion article is written by a person, the friend I’m talking to is a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some stuff the ‘perfect’ version is the point, other stuff the human version is the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s possible to build a tennis robot<\/a> that plays tennis better than a person, but it would be much less popular on TV than human players because it would tell us nothing about human physical potential.*<\/sup> Fake artworks aren’t valuable even when they are technically equal to genuine ones because they contain no information about the mind of the real artist. Computer generated music is ok as moodscape but teenagers rarely make it “their music” like they do with popstars because there’s no human creator to scaffold their own search for identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you see human effort you feel like you understand what was hard about it, so you can viscerally admire it. The frontiers of human achievement help everyone answer the question “what are we capable of?” You become more legible to yourself when art eloquently expresses emotions you too have felt. If some art is confusing to me, I make an effort to understand it because I assume there’s an intelligent and understandable point of view behind it. And reputation-based human recommendation helps direct attention to those things in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is high-level commercial art**<\/sup> a war or a sport? For businesses, obviously marketing is a war. If AI ads worked as well as human-made ads then bye bye humans, instantly. But for consumers it needs to be at least somewhat a sport. They don’t know or care who made an ad, but for any message they’re supposed to emotionally respond to, they need to feel like there’s some human judgement and creativity in it. Even if AI ads reach or exceed the human level of smart strategy, genuinely insightful and creative ideas, and culturally literate, innovative, appealing execution***<\/sup> \u2013 people won’t emotionally connect with it if they know it’s AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my commercial animation work there is a mix of donkeywork (yet another walk cycle\/turnaround) and stuff where my specific point of view is required (creative direction, innate drawing style, eye for gag opportunity), and they aren’t always easy to separate. Sometimes offloading donkeywork frees up time, increases ambition, makes otherwise impossible possible; other times flavour might be lost, creative opportunities might be unknowingly skipped past, productive mistakes might be avoided. So distinguishing between “war” and “sport”****<\/sup> amongst the various aspects of my work is something I’m still working out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—
*Also why the old arguments against televised women’s sport due to lower standard of play are missing the point IMO. My car is faster than Usain Bolt, wowee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

**Low-level commercial art, like A\/B\/C\/D-tested ads on instagram for brands you’ve never heard of, that’s definitely ‘war’, AI is great, no one cares if the ads are shit, you encounter them when you feel like shit so it’s probably a plus. Optimising online shopping\/fortnite\/porn\/sports betting\/bingewatching\/tiktokking\/drugtaking reptile-brain stimulation for depressed isolated people who’ve given up on human connection, AI is perfect, that’s just not what I’m talking about.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

***Big if. So far AI is amazing at automating definable processes, but bad at making interesting creative leaps. So far it has contributed very little to the cultural frontier.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

**** Feel free to suggest a better dichotomy.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t care if my carpet is cleaned\/instructions are written\/house is built\/disease is cured\/surgery is performed\/country is defended by a person or a machine, just do it really good please. I do care that the sport I’m watching is played by humans (who aren’t on steroids), the song I’m listening to is written and performed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianfrost.co.nz\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}