Join us for a philosophical talk by Oliver Palmer

What do we do each day, as artists and philosophers, that AI can’t? We think. 

Since the dawn of humans as a thinking species we have thought deeply and created art. It’s the one part of humanity that connects all generations, not our clothes, or language, or the habitats we build, but the creation of art. And frankly, nothing will ever be as good at it as we are.

Within this talk I shall act as a guide taking us through a range of areas within aesthetics, phenomenology, and critical theory. In doing so, I shall invite you to think and look at art creation differently, consider more deeply why GenAI can (and will) never produce anything of substance, and convince you to become a ‘shit’ artist.

But why should we explore our creative side? Why is it so important?

We live in an age where our data and intellectual property is endlessly harvested to train AI systems and algorithms. And our ever-increasing reliance on these models is cause for concern; the use of LLM’s and GenAI rots our neural pathways, decreasing our capacity to think. This matter is so pressing because a thoughtless society is a controllable society. Yet, in the act of creating art, even if the result is “shit”, by any standard, it forces us to think deeply and grapple with the unknowable; we resist ignorance.

To be thoughtless and ignorant is to be complicit in our decent into totalitarianism, to global injustice, and genocide.

Don’t be Complicit: Be Artists, Thinkers, and Resistors