I'm about to go inside to a store that'll help me explain the greatest crisis of the 21st century,
the coming AI apocalypse, the battle between man and machine,
the future of art. That's right, we're going to Joanne's.
So you want to see what i've got in the bag?
It's lace baby.
Should i just do the whole video like this? I don't want to tell you my infotainment.
Do I look more or less credible? How are we going to get this in the video?
For the rest of the video I'll look like I'm in a really low budget boudoir.
The Kubler-Ross model was created in 1969, and like all things psychological
it has been mischaracterized, misunderstood, and misrepresented.
You might know it as the five stages of grief.
I think it applies to AI and the history of lace. Does it look dramatic? Maybe a little.
Denial.
I can't tell you how many articles i've seen saying that AI will not replace
mid-level artists. Okay?
I mean, if I need a generic photo illustration of the Statue of Liberty looking at a picture of
Queen Elizabeth, I guess i could hire a person to do that...but do you really think that I have to?
This is exactly what happened with lace. Full sources are in the description.
But I checked out Bury Palliser's 500-something page history of lace from the 1800s.
I mean, this stuff is complicated. Lace scholars are legit.
If you didn't know, lace made by hand is...well, it's insane.
Um, this scholar and YouTuber makes her own lace using one common method with bobbins, and
as you can see it is crazy looking.
The lace has to kind of connect as it forms a pattern.
Imagine how hard it is to draw something good with Etch-a-Sketch because it all has to connect.
That's a little like the trick of lace. Here are some highly proficient
hand lace makers and look it it's not easy. Handmade lace was a really popular luxury
good — think of every portrait that you've ever seen from that time period
and realize that all these people, they're wearing lace because they think it looks good.
There was a huge workforce of lace makers: hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Here's a clip of just one of those machines to get a sense of the speed and scale. This
is the stuff that would put people out of work. Bury's assessment might sound familiar here.
"Almost every description of lace is now fabricated by machinery and it is often no
easy task, even for a practiced eye, to detect the difference. Still, we must ever be of the
opinion that the most finished productions of this frame never possess the touch the
finish or the beauty of the laces made by hand. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, my friend.
I have no idea if this is the Nile. DAll E 2 made it.
So I found this modern day guide to telling the difference between handmade and machine made lace.
Okay nice. This lace is good.
This lace is garbage. Just kidding, I switched them.
If you make lace by hand move, down the stages of grief to:
anger. About a week ago,
I started seeing these think pieces about how artists should be upset that their images are
being used in training sets for the AI. Have you heard of the Luddites?
I knew that they were an actual group in England, but I didn't know how closely
they were involved to lacemaking's history. Luddites literally destroyed lace-making machines.
It's in Palliser's history as well as this super long history of the mechanization of
lace. I'm telling you, there's a lot of lace books, and it makes sense right?
They were angry that this machine really was taking their jobm,
and it didn't do much to help them, which brings us to:
bargaining. Listen, from the beginning,
you've had people trying to propose that there could be this kind of hybrid market of prompt
engineers who were working with the AI, and I reckon that in some cases that will be true.
But there's a bit of bargaining going on here. This happened with lace as well.
In another history of lace, they discuss how both the handmade and machine made lace industries
were benefited by the combination. They could work together. Think Terminator 2, but lace.
And it's true that even today lace makers will often inspect machine made lace for errors and
they'll do work to clean it up, but it seems a little desperate, doesn't it? That brings us to:
depression. Okay, honestly, I'm not sure if we're
in the depression stage for AI generated art yet. Uh we're probably still bargaining a bit.
But it happened in the lace-making industry, and in that case, depression meant a lot of people
lost their jobs and the workforce changed. I'm sure I could dig up some sad lace workers
for you, but instead I want to give you an example of how this disruption was productive,
as most of these technological disruptions are. This is a Jacquard card.
If you know anything about early computers, you know that they worked on punch cards.
The Jacquard card was one of the first such punch cards, and it told lace machines what to do.
That's right, some of the technology that was behind early computers was invented to make lace.
People like Charles Babbage, who was basically the inventor of the computer with his difference
engine, were really inspired by this. So from the depression of that industry
came a breakthrough that led to a huge surge in human productivity.
So don't be depressed, be optimistic. Which brings us to the stage called:
acceptance. Yeah. Today, lace is just a tool among many.
We accept that it's not handmade most of the time but if it is, neat. If not, that's fine too.
And we don't really care where it comes from either.
Tthis lace up here— that was cool — cost me about six dollars and yes, it was made in China.
Even the machine machine-made lace industry in England has declined
precipitously as a lot of that work goes to Asia. But now we are just left with the possibilities.
Designers can put it in their dresses, I can use it as a veil so that I won't
be recognized and mobbed by my fans in public. Should I just do the rest of the video this way?
So what does that acceptance look like with AI? I think it's about figuring out the creative
possibilities and not stressing about the loss. Okay I can't i can't do the whole thing this way.
It requires us to look at that prompt box and the blinking cursor inside it and not see
certain doom in the face of computerized dystopia, but instead see something like this.
Oh, oh God we're all gonna die.
Alrighty that is it for this one. Uh, I actually got the permission to use this analogy of lace for
AI and visual effects and stuff like that from a user on Reddit, so i've linked uh his twitter
below. And you can go ahead and check that out and see some of the cool art that he's made. Uh,
yeah, otherwise thank you for watching. This is a channel where I post personal
videos, history videos, stuff like that. And I was just really captivated by the idea that
lace was this perfect analogy for what we're going through right now
with artificial intelligence generated art. So yeah, let me know if you think the analogy
breaks down in certain ways, if you think I was being unfair to artists or if you think
that i'm right and everyone is pretty much doomed to lose their job to a robot in the near future.
That's it, thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one.
Okay, bye.