‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like

--- Ben Davis, in Art in the After-Culture, quoted by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei in Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His  ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever, Art in America, Jan 8, 2024

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In his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis writes, “‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like.” Accordingly, the loose definition of art has changed to keep pace with the advancement of machines. Craft is not really art because machines can make tables and sweaters. The advent of cameras, which made rendering a realistic image as simple as pressing a shutter button, initiated Impressionism, Cubism, and the long arc of conceptual art. In contemporary art, the institutions, galleries, and other gatekeepers have increasingly clustered around the figure of the artist and the individual life story, and run away from the material object, which can always be replicated anyway. We are left clutching that indefinable spark as some final differentiator between humans and machines.

this is not my new forever

--- via Paul S on Substack, in Trying to see a bigger picture, 4 May 2024

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However, I have been told multiple times that recovery is not a straight-line process, and that I must not let a few bad days distract from a long-term upward trend. Or as one of my oldest friends said to me last summer when he visited me from Houston, a good mantra to repeat at times like these is “this is not my new forever”. And he learned that from his wife. And she learned it from NASA. Because that's what she's taught in astronaut training. Yeah, seriously. Anyway, the point being: if that's what they teach the best people in the world, someone of her calibre, then it is clearly good enough for me. In which spirit, I will try to concentrate here on positives, rather than wallowing in self-pity.

Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers

--- Brandon Sanderson, #2 of Sanderson's Laws of Magic (Wikipedia).

From Wikipedia (references removed):

Sanderson's three laws of magic are creative writing guidelines that can be used to create magic systems for fantasy stories:

1. An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
2. Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers.
3. The author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world.

Additionally, there is a zeroth law:

0. Always err on the side of what's awesome.