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Comment by rhcom2 | Hacker News Reader

> Authoritarian societies don't produce great creative work.

Is that even true though? Off the top of my head I can think of the art of Soviet propaganda posters, Leni Riefenstahl, Liu Cixin.

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Eastern European science fiction would be a better example. Authors like Stanislaw Lem or the Strugatski brothers had to adapt to sneak critical ideas past censors, and readers had to adapt and read between the lines.

(also, categorizing propaganda posters as art, ewwh...)

"(also, categorizing propaganda posters as art, ewwh...)"

Heinrich Heine, the german Poet declined working for the socialist party despite symphatising saying something like:

I want to remain a poet, you want a propagandist. A poet cannot be a propagandist at the same time.

Art for much of human history was devotional, a lot of our greatest artworks today are still religious in nature. The idea that art solely is an act of rebellion rather than say worship, is a pretty modern idea that has produced some rather questionable art by the way.

Of course a great artist or poet can be a propagandist. Riefenstahl, Mann, a lot of German nationalists were great artists. One of the most famous works of Western poetry, The Aeneid is literally a propaganda work establishing a mythological foundation for the Roman Empire, Augustus and Caesar.

"The idea that art solely is an act of rebellion rather than say worship"

I did not say that and neither did Heine.

Most of his works were political. But this is not the same as propaganda, which is more like advertisement. With the tools of lying, deceiving and manipulating.

And whether "Triumph des Willens" and alike qualifies as art, I have a different opinion.

There is a difference between devotional art inspired by religion / mythical events long past (Aeneid etc.), and between the sort of propaganda that the modern totalitarian state demands, which usually centers around some living or freshly dead leader.

I'd be open to discussion where the exact limit is. Lenin died in the 1920s, Marx even earlier, but those two were frequently depicted in Communist propaganda of the 1980s.

So it is probably "hundreds of years".

I would sort propaganda posters in the same category as commercial advertisements.

Some are good, some are bad but there usually is a certain degree of artistic skill involved (think about "keep calm and carry on" or "I want you")

E.g: scrolling through this list one can see examples for both cases.

https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/propaga...

In my view, such skill with painting is largely mis-labelled as creativity. It's pretty much a technical skill. The design and subject matter of the posters are where the creativity lies. The two things often get conflated, perhaps because of their joint use in the creation of great paintings, but they're fairly separable.

I would put it a bit differently: A lot of great art has simply been applied craftsmanship. The idea that art has to make a statement or the like to be art, per se, is a fairly modern notion, and often helps excuse zero craftsmanship nonsense like a Finnish "artist" dumping a bunch of blood and shit into a washing machine and calling it art.

Soviet bus stops are another great example. Most Soviet architecture was forced to be very utilitarian, but bus stops managed to be the rare exception and thus got a lot of creative energy

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/wild-architecture-soviet-era-b...

https://www.boredpanda.com/most-peculiar-soviet-bus-stops-ch...

on your parenthetical, you can see the artistry in the pure visual expression no matter how loathsome the subject matter.

"Authoritarian societies make great propaganda" is true. And these aligned AI system would do the same for our own society. It's a type of art.

There was a lot of great art produced in the Soviet Union, you cannot just erase human creativity. It was heavily censored, a lot of stuff was forbidden, but the statement is clearly false.

A million paintings of Stalin?

It's important to understand that if we 'align' an LLM, then we are aligning it in a very total way.

When we do similar things to humans, the humans still have internal thoughts which we cannot control. But if we add internal thoughts to an LLM, then we will be able to align even them.

There's something to be said for constraints leading to higher levels of creativity, but it's also possible that those artists could have achieved much more in a free society. We'll never know.

But in any case I think they were just speaking generally when they made that absolute statement.

I recommend you watch the children's cartoons.

They were made by true artists who snuck quite a bit past clueless censors at personal risk.

It had to be quite subtle and takes on a very poignant heartbreaking meaning if you understand the context fully. They were talking to you in the here and now. Listen.

"What is Good and What is Bad" (Что Такое Хорошо, и Что Такое Плохо"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05eK8ADtHc&list=PL822BFF108...

The Bremen Musicians:

https://youtu.be/_1i9oZR6Rns?si=1Q989v4O_GXR4p_K

I watched it but I don't get your meaning. Perhaps I am as clueless as the censors. Could you enlighten me?

Could you give some examples on the "What is Good and What is Bad" cartoon? I am fairly interested in getting their "message" but I am sadly not getting it.

Italy has great architecture from fascism days

That means nothing. You are bending the intended meaning of "creative" as per the poster. Authoritarian powers commit pruning - this is the point.

Cixin Liu is a despicable human being for his advocacy of repression and worse of the Uyghurs in Cinjiang, and the comparison to Riefenstahl is more apposite than you seem to think.

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