Questões de Concurso

After years of inattention, the whole world has just awaken to what is happening in the Amazon. “Save the rain forest” is the cry of conservationists, politicians, and rock stars. The movement has already sparked a confrontation between rich industrials nations, which are new converts to the environmental cause, and the poorer nations of the Third World which consider outside interference as an assault on their sovereignty. Scientists think that destruction of the Amazon could lead to climatic chaos. Because of the huge volume of clouds it generates, the Amazon system plays a major role in the way the sun’s heat is distributed around the globe. Any disturbance of this process could produce unpredictable effects. As an American Senator has just said: “The devastation is unbelievable. It’s one of the great tragedies of all history”. (Adapted from Playing with Fire, by Eugene Linden)

     There is nothing new about the concept and creation of ‘artificial intelligence art’ or ‘generative art’. However, discussion of its legal and ethical or societal implications (both intended and unintended) hit the headlines last week.

     Boris Eldagsen refused his Sony World Photography Award 2023 prize in the creative open category on the basis that his entry was the product of artificial intelligence. Mr Eldagsen himself has sparked the latest debate by claiming that “AI is not photography” and that the rationale for entering the Awards with the work in question was “…to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not”.

     The reaction of the World Photography Organisation (running the Sony Awards) has been to acknowledge the need for an element of human involvement, which is the crux of the debate: “While elements of AI practices are relevant in artistic contexts of image-making, the Awards always have been and will continue to be a platform for championing the excellence and skill of photographers and artists working in this medium”.

     […]

     The conventional (and long assumed) approach has been to recognise the importance of the human hand to an artwork. The question then is: to what extent is the human creator or inputter the ‘artist’ as opposed to the generative system or is the system merely representing the human creator or inputter’s artistic idea? Flowing from that question is what that might then mean in terms of the ownership and value of such works. The debate looks set to continue in this particular context of imagery creation and reproduction coinciding with the increasing availability and use of consumer-grade AI image generation programmes, and the natural inclination of artists to continue to create.

Adapted from https://www.rosenblatt-law.co.uk/insight/generative-art-whats-real/

     In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty years. He had inspired two generations of Indian patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a revolution which was to change the face of Africa and Asia. To millions of his own people, he was the Mahatma — the great soul — whose sacred glimpse was a reward in itself.

       By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he had to face, when he first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and utopian, had begun to strike answering chords in some of the finest minds in the world. “Generations to come, it may be,” Einstein had said of Gandhi in July 1944, “will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon earth.”

      Though his life had been a continual unfolding of an endless drama, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men. It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings of political eminence or with less of the popular image of a heroic figure. With his loin cloth, steel-rimmed glasses, rough sandals, a toothless smile and a voice which rarely rose above a whisper, he had a disarming humility. He was, if one were to use the famous words of the Buddha, a man who had “by rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint and control, made for himself an island which no flood could overwhelm.”

        Gandhi’s deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did not — as had been the custom in his country — retire to a cave in the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within him. He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human activity; the spiritual law did not work in a vacuum, but expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life.

       This aspiration to relate the spirit of religion to the problems of everyday life runs like a thread through Gandhi’s career: his uneventful childhood, the slow unfolding and the near-failure of his youth, the reluctant plunge into the politics of Natal, the long unequal struggle in South Africa, and the vicissitudes of the Indian struggle for freedom, which under his leadership was to culminate in a triumph not untinged with tragedy.

B. R. Nanda. Gandhi: a pictorial biography, 1972 (adapted).