The beauty of a chair. An instantly recognizable object. But what makes this so? This is a discussion as old as time itself. It’s straight forward to define a few criteria as to what qualifies as a chair. This may work for everyday life, but these things don’t hold up under scrutiny. They never do. Four legs? What about single legged chairs? Is it the seat itself? Wouldn’t that turn everything with a seating surface into a chair? And then why wouldn’t a table also be a chair?
The Istigkeit or thingness of an object cannot be fully grasped by us humans. Upon closer inspection, nothing is what it seems. An entire world can hide inside the wrinkles of your favorite chair. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a highly trained computer model try? Of course, these AI art generators are trained by humans, or at the very least, they rely on human taxonomies. But there is still something magical about having artificial intelligence show me what a chair really is.
I have opened up a new section here on the site, the gallery. There you can browse all the AI art pieces and check out the corresponding blog post. Most of the paintings you will find on this blog have been generated by various AI models. My wish for these paintings is to augment and accentuate the ideas presented in the text. I want to give them an extra dimension, like having an extra voice chime in on what I have to say.
Can a highly trained computer model better understand what a chair truly is? And by extension, and much more importantly, can artificial intelligence help us to better understand ourselves?
