The girl you are looking at isn’t real.
She has never breathed a single breath. Has never taken a single step. She is a figment of someone else’s imaginative prompting and AI’s assistance towards realization. While AI is improving dramatically and will continue to do so for commercial and military applications into the future, the question arises of what the limit of imaginative perfection is and what the consequences are if AI ever manages to achieve it.
This is the next article in the Society Series. If you haven’t read the previous article regarding seeking Perfection within the Meta, you may want to read that first.
For this article, I will refer to these images as Aesthetic 9, or A9 for short. Objectively, she is a pretty woman. Imagined along Nordic attributes, which are highly sought after in many cultures. Yet, what she lacks is most telling, as she isn’t an Aesthetic 10. She isn’t perfect, at least not yet.
Knowing now that the image you’ve seen isn’t real - does it change your opinion? Do you feel disgusted? Enamored? Perhaps you feel nothing at all. Just another image in a daily slew of images, billions of images all around us, ever new images every day begging to be seen by as many eyes as possible.
If you examine the pictures, you’ll notice a few strange defects, such as an odd hairline and thickness, a pixelated ear, and a smile that doesn’t entirely break the face into lines. A9 looks airbrushed, to be sure, but what she lacks is most telling of her lack of humanity. All of A9’s pictures, and most AI-generated pictures, truly lack the one thing that is most difficult to replicate or fake, but which is undeniable when witnessed. A9 doesn’t radiate a glow of life, even faintly.
We’ve all seen that glow. Whether from a spouse or partner whose face breaks into a laugh or smile or from a pregnant woman who radiates the life she is creating within her - that glow has captured creatives and painters for the millennium. A difficult glow to snare upon canvas or photograph, and in the rare opportunity, something to behold as the life of the individual radiates beyond the moment, causing a near slowing of time to the Observer, which is famously captured in Hollywood as the ‘slow motion entrance’ of the pretty girl onto the scene.
Those images of old, dear reader, were human. Whether human-generated or created or captured, they were all human. Now, our world grapples with the infiltration of the inhuman and, indeed, artificial. Dead is the guarantee that behind every action or result is a human face. Those human faces are merely representatives until the void learns to represent alone.
In this modern era of modern ideas, does the faceless void indeed stare back at us? Or does it merely project instead of reflect?
Table of Contents
What is Perfection
The Dangers of Perfection
Taste and the Cataloging of Perfection
Writers, Content Creators, and Inescapable Replacement
Imperfection
Conclusion
What is Perfection
As most of you can relate, assuming you aren't trapped within the Meta already, I've seen a lot of real men and women throughout my relatively short life. Whether walking down the street, picking up groceries, traveling far from home, or mindlessly scrolling infinitely rendered digital pages online, human beings' presence has invaded almost every corner of our waking lives. Over the course of these travels, I can honestly say I have only ever once, just once, witnessed what I call an Aesthetic 10 - a perfect human.
This particular woman, whose name is irrelevant, was gorgeous in her own right. She was already discovered and filmed across screens and glossy covers worldwide as an international model and actress. Unfortunately, none of those photos or films captured true perfection - except once.
Scrolling along some society page on a nondescript and generic publication, a short clip of this model and her newest fiance autoplayed. Then, it happened - the light struck her face just as she flirtatiously gazed upon her beau, set aglow by her passions and captivated interest. For less than a second and a half, she was aesthetically perfect. A moment never to be repeated and one that could never be replicated. In that second and a half, I felt like I saw the articulate handiwork of God himself - only to be just as quickly forced back into that encasement of imperfection and subjective taste. The human herself is not truly an A10, but she was for that singular moment.
I want to be very clear here, as there is within most societies the idea that men are functionally animals as it relates to sexuality and desire. This moment transcended any attraction or sexual impulse. To assault that moment with sexual desire is to figuratively rape God's magnificent creation itself. This moment I'm attempting to portray to you was not one of heated interest or inflamed passions. It was something beyond, to the degree of being entirely inexplicable outside of the word and understanding of "Perfection" itself.
Just one moment, that's all there was and ever will be for her. She was never so aesthetically perfect and never will be again. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what I call a Perfect Aesthetic 10: An impossible pinnacle that is so unreachable by man or woman that it is not even worth the attempt unless your God owes you a favor - or unless you are capable of programming future AI systems.
To imagine perfection along the aesthetic is to imagine a person or thing that cannot be bettered with any addition or modification in even the slightest way imaginable. In a world such as ours, which has slipped into the celebration of the aesthetically odd, malformed, or manufactured to view something of magnificence, it is truly a spectacularly rare sight to behold: A sight that captivates the senses and arrests logic from the viewer.
That, dear reader, is truly the issue - the arresting of logic and captivation of senses, which, if performed at arm's length, isn't harmful, but with intimate connection and rising emotional attachment, this could end up being one of the greatest dangers of perfection.
The Dangers of Perfection
I want you to imagine a future, perhaps soon, when AI perfects perfection. Whether that perfection is expressed as a written article, a waterfall, or images of unbelievably attractive Men and Women. Imagine with me, as that future is quite possible, where the mathematically difficult becomes probable.
On the surface layer, a perfect waterfall or artistic rendering would be something to behold, to be sure. Though, on its surface, the perfection of the thing would be enough to captivate and then cause withdrawal or disgust at the thing. Something so perfect, it’s too perfect, and therefore lacking in the very thing it is supposed to represent, which is that underscore of chaos and beauty of chaos. Tis the ordering of chaos and happenstance into a seemingly meticulous arrangement that blends from the banal and exotic into the inspiring and majestic.
Perfection is perfection. Therefore, perfect perfection would counter disgust with its prefaced pontification of the purest perception.
I want this perfection. I want it in every element and aspect of my life. I want to muse myself by it, view it, and behold it most religiously. I want perfection from every angle the eye can see, the mind can imagine, and the heart can feel. An ageless perfection that brings tired eyes and sore bones once again to life, as life is its essence and inspiration.
I want to soil this perfection in all the grime of life and watch its veil of mystique fall softly and then suddenly away from the eye that is captivated by it.
Destroy it!
Hide it from view so that no others may ever enjoy its godly magnificence!
I want to steal from your eyes this perfect potential and burn it from all memory. To feel once more that connection to a divine which is beyond our feeble understanding…
Ah! Arrest me of my rhetoric, dearest reader, for I am detained by the potential of the perfect perfection I piously pontificate upon! Ensnared by that which isn’t even yet possible artificially.
I digress…
Heaven, to many, is that perfect place of perfect perfection.
Alas! Is it the Christians who believe not that they will inherit Heaven but rather re-inherent the earth itself? As if perfect perfection is far too much for our tainted and stained mortal souls to be enveloped by.
Imagine a perfect horror movie. A movie so horrifying it doesn’t merely haunt your dreams and waking thoughts but disturbs your entire life to the point of clinical madness. To drive you, dear reader, into perfect insanity, anxiety, and abject terror. In the theaters, audiences worldwide would die of fright, perceiving its perfect petrified perfection.
A perfect painting would drive the world of creatives into a madness of dread and sorrow at their inability to compare or compete.
A perfect poem would splinter the minds of those fragmented individuals who write in such prose, having nothing left to be said or ever said as well as.
To stare into that void of perfection is to stare back into oneself at all that lacks and all potential lost to that dissuasion over time.
→ A perfect woman would drive young men to insanity as they drunkenly navigate their natural hormonal intoxication, only to direct their angst towards means of capture or destruction, if not pious reverence to the sulking, seething, sultry seduction of the senses. Men, must it be said, are visual creatures. Attraction starts at the visual, except in those cases where this is denied to us, in which imagination plays its part. Captivated, if not arrested, by a natural intoxication, we are driven to the game of pursuit when the pathway to pursue is fathomable.
Given the above, it is in visual perfection I worry about for my fellow man. How, so easily, many will succumb and have succumbed to those tempest temptress temptations in our digital era and before. How many gold miners have been made millionaires by those lowly sorts in pursuit of pathways to navigate forward?
Where that pathway is made easy, and cheap, so will men be towards its utilization. Attempts at applying social corrections against the lowly amongst them will only see further entrenchment and defense as the technologies become more refined towards hyper-realism. Men’s proclivity towards tradeoffs within arrangements, in direct opposition to women most generally, will further facilitate adoption.
→ A perfect man would drive daggers of anxiety into the hearts of women, only knowing full well they may never attain, even for a moment or night, the attentions of such a creature. They would throw at his digital feet all the wares they curate yet be unable to stir the slightest notice or hope of ensnarement. At this point, things could get really dark.
We know of women, through the study of them, that they exhibit a variety of behaviors, best viewed as social collectivism or social calibrations. Though some of them break free from these conventions due to previous trauma or social isolation, the majority are quite conforming. Not only do these creatures check each other into conformity, but they also reinforce through cunning positivity and direction towards actions and attributes, which help eliminate perceived competition, especially if those social cues lead to the destruction of the threat. What is most fascinating here is when those cues fall on deaf ears, such as an AI system, which cannot be so easily modified to align with the interest of women, is where the cues become internalized by the perception of competition and established standards. What they can’t write off, they will attempt to rewrite - all else fails, they will mimic the standard created.
All of this is to say that AI that cannot be guilted out of objective standards will reinforce the standard and thus lead to the societal manufacturing of women within the collectivism, much to their own self-proclaimed anguish. A fate to continue until those inevitable counter-movements spring forth from the dejected, as it was before and will be again.
The ultimate danger of perfection is stagnation. People will see beauty as cheap and plentiful, available in everything, including garbage and grime. It will drive people to madness, where they will pursue only perfection and drug the senses from anything less than that standard.
Men will starve themselves before it.
Women will starve themselves of any world without it.
If a later withdrawal is accomplished, those pains will be felt across the ages to come.
Taste and the Cataloging of Perfection
Cataloging taste to determine the most significant degree of acceptance toward the greatest amount of perceived perfection is the most challenging aspect. If one runs a poll on taste, the results can trend towards dominant choices, such as Chocolate versus Vanilla, with many people preferring other flavors entirely, such as bubblegum or cherry. The other funny aspect of taste regarding more personal selections, such as vehicles, attraction, or art, is that taste isn’t always so well defined. Sometimes, we like what we like. In the truest sense, for us to determine taste, it must come from blatant appeal. Users must be shown something before they can assess taste, especially if that established thing is different than their defined or believed tastes.
Where things will get interesting is the formation of a direct feedback loop, which has already begun to occur. Content creators will search for particular flavors and be presented with various options. From that extensive list, they will select the flavor they enjoy or that they believe their audience to enjoy. Those content creators who get the flavor choice most correct are affirmed through success, which will lead to even further generation of that particular flavor, perhaps with some added sprinkles, which will teach the AI more about the flavor profile of specific content. If that flavor begins to trend among communities, then the AI that uses those images for training will directly train itself on the images it created. This loop will eventually inform the AI about the best flavor profile, mapped across millions of similar or nearly identical images until a perfect profile is mapped.
Take this collage of images you’ve just seen, which present the same or similar face across multiple angles, slight alterations in expression, and other aesthetic choices. If we ran a poll on this particular collage asking not whether there is an attraction but rather which picture within them is the most attractive, we would probably have a majority among one or two images, with the remaining having a minority of votes for various reasons.
If we included within that poll an option for none of the above and then linked to alternative images across various cultures, representations, and the like - we could effectively grab a swath of data from that group that has no immediate attraction to the first sample.
From both these data sets, AI could begin the construction of similar features and aesthetic choices to form an understanding of the highest desirability. At first, its impression would be abstract, if not biased, but eventually, over billions of the same or similar images and features of natural and AI-generated men, women, and waterfalls, a baseline across almost all tastes could be drawn.
What is most fascinating here isn’t necessarily the proliferation of perfection, but rather, what forms does its initial societal realization take?
One could imagine it would be the art world and its first exhibition of the greatest AI creations as a public gallery. However, I would lean towards the pornographic or publication industries based on the held narratives of the time and the attempts at further proliferation.
For instance, if AI becomes capable of near-perfection in this period, this perfection might likely be showcased within the encasement of a social progressive narrative - such as the most beautiful face you have ever witnessed on a plus-sized or transgender model. However, it appears more likely the model of perfection would be morphed into the socially progressive and not instead built from it. In such a case, it is likely the outright pornographic or sultry sort of content that will find the initial success. Therein, your typical eGirl or Waifu digital avatar conformed to user preferences, featuring fully customizable hyper-realism.
The question then, which rings across almost every blog and digitally printed press worldwide, is what of the creative types? What happens to all the painters, writers, and actors in this new modern world?
Writers, Content Creators, and Inescapable Replacement
Since the launch into the public eye of the OpenAI project, the inescapable truth that AI wasn't coming for the blue-collar occupations first, but rather, it was coming for the creatives has finally touched home in the hearts of those types. Almost every week since, I've seen some headline or article discussing job replacement and downsizing threats at monolith newspapers, studios, and tech conglomerates worldwide. What AI can do in milliseconds, an artist or writer does in days. Indeed, not just the creative types but also those cubicle warriors spending countless hours upon countless days hammering physical keys for digital representation upon pixelated white screens.
I don't want to use rose-colored glasses at this point - AI will replace most creative types, potentially myself included, and it's a damn good thing.
We have, in our societies, a rot of mediocrity. An endless infectious rot that threatens not just taste and sensibility but also the destruction of all passioned people before and after.
We live in a world now of Journalists with Black Car service and 6 figure incomes who dress in multi-thousand designer dresses and outfits for ballroom affairs to hobnob with the upper classes. Artists are living in designer lofts, running designer brushes across artisan canvasses. Even here on Substack subsists the same-old deluge of commentary of commentary, of niched-into-obscurity blogs and opinion pieces that lack a foundational, objective, or even nuanced opinion. Of artists who imagine the beign and boring and spend countless hours recreating it in excess for an endlessly recruited audience to the point of market saturation.
A matter that doesn't just infect online creators. As I can testify, the last three Art Galleries I've had the misfortune of visiting were nothing but modern garbage - literally, many of the pieces were made with actual garbage. Which didn't attempt to hide this fact or obscure it for artistic points from the viewer - but rather, the entire point of the pieces themselves was nothing less than "Look at this garbage, isn't Capitalism horrible?"
The truth is, there was always heaps of garbage of all sorts of content across all the ages of man. To the benefit of the previous eras, mankind didn't remember all the garbage but rather carried the best pieces into the future, leaving the garbage where they found it. How many philosophical treatises, poems, paintings, and stories were lost not in vain but rather in vanity towards the preservation of greater ideas and creations? This isn't to speak of the great creations lost to accident or otherwise.
There has always been garbage across the history of humanity, but now, in our modern era, it's all cheap garbage. Where 95% of the "netizens" of the internet spend 100% of their time on 5% of the platforms, garbage is bound to accumulate. To sterilize and innoculate against thought while promoting acceptable feelings is the nature of modern man. A cold, comforting sort of numbness that most prefer over vibrancy.
Imperfection
American Painter Jackson Pollock isn’t for everyone’s taste. Many of his pieces are pretty strange, to be sure. This particular piece caught my eye, and I’ve found myself staring at it for hours. My initial reaction was that this piece felt angry. Then, I thought maybe the piece was more representative of frustration.
Slowly, my perspective developed, and I considered whether this was an abstraction of war and carnage, as one almost sees pike arms and blades skimming across the black background. Then I considered whether the shadow near the bottom was a child, standing in a lit doorway staring into the void of chaos. The child’s mother near the top of the painting cast aglow, helplessly reaching. Or perhaps this is meant to capture that moment when one wakes up in a pitch black room, sleep still in their darting eyes, as objects once enveloped by shadow recede from the viewer as color returns. What at once appears as monsters and weapons are merely friendly toys or artfully chosen decor. Perhaps still, the painting is simply random chaos and nonsense and inherently means nothing.
AI has been trained in various styles and types of art, and it can replicate the styles to shocking degrees. Artists such as Pollock or Rembrandt can truly ‘live again,’ at least in artificial fantasy. What can’t live again is Pollock and Rembrandt within their experiences and expressive natures. We could clone a Pollock and even try to reinvent his upbringing or artificially program his brain to believe himself to be Pollock - but Pollock is no more. The perfect imperfection of Pollock is gone, leaving us with only a dash of the color his vibrant internal world left behind.
If I were to make a prediction, it would be this - Where most concepts, abstractions, and theories move through seasons across centuries, such as political ideas and grand beliefs of human potential and orientation, so does art. As our world moves forward, the distance between us and Pollock will greatly increase until the tension within that invisible band is near breaking - then, it will snap back.
Just like the creatives of old who worked the mines during the day and stooped over candles frantically scribbling upon parchment at night, so too must our future creatives pursue their craft. The fire within them must burn with an intensity threatening to ignite their entire selves. They must toil that soil until it is ready for a few good crops to sprout. They must prune and tend those crops, reducing their number from many to only a few. From that few, they will produce as little as one, which will be their Masterpiece.
Conclusion
Every time I watch that scene, it tears a wound open inside me. A wound I never knew I had and I know will never heal. A wound I should be too young or too numb to feel. Kudos to the writers of that scene, as the truth within it is almost unbearable to witness.
I wouldn't say I like writing. It's an annoying sort of thing. I'd rather sing other people's songs, except I can't carry a tune. Or paint a waterfall someone else made, except I can't paint at all. I'd rather return to my books than spend so many days and weeks of my life typing these words onto blank digital pages for black digital eyes.
I'm cursed, you see. I have to write. I've tried to stop writing before; all it does is swell within. Boiling up and threatening to boil over and out, those endless words.
Those damn words.
If I hold them in, I feel like they will burst out of me. If I hold my tongue, they endlessly plague my head. If I silence my mind, I feel them ever bubbling to bursting as if my very veins will spill most violently with words.
Damned words.
And yet, how many words do I have left to write? This endless pool of words shall far outlast my mortal coil to type them; therefore, I am in a rush to type the words before I run out of typing time. The time to type takes time, which is ever fewer words to be typed.
There is never enough time,
and too many damned words.
Perfection has its risks and concerns, but the thing artificial perfection can't achieve is a painting that makes Jackson Pollock want to quit painting.
AI can't achieve the perfection that destroys excellent writing.
AI can't pour its digital soul into a work, musical composition, or canvas that leaves behind a piece of its creator for everyone to embrace, mourn, and muse.
AI will perfect perfection but never replicate the imperfect human spirit. The glow will always be a little pixelated compared to the real thing.
AI will never do what you and I can do better than anything else - be human in all our gritty, unpolished, and imperfect designs and endeavors.
What AI will do is kill the very thing that must be killed, which is mediocrity. That ever-present slap to anyone with any passion who witnesses all those before them with half the passion and only a slightly more refined skill or network or better marketing.
Perfect Perfection will not kill the Masterpieces of mankind's tortured creatives. Perfect Perfection can only make the Masterpieces of tomorrow far better than they have ever been.
AI, without you, cannot glow.
And due to you, its glow will forever be dim.
As always,
Farewell, and Good Luck.
-Dark Philosopher
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