u/Salad-Snack

Just to preface, I’m a writer and a visual artist, so believe me when I tell you I take no pleasure in this position. Well, maybe a little bit of spite, but the kind of spite where you’re stabbing your self and the other guy at the same time.

The way I see it, the task companies are trying to achieve with generative ai is the creation of a general purpose problem solving machine. As we’ve seen in the past few years, general models have gone from barely being able to consistently solve 2+2 to winning gold medals in the International Math Olympiad and solving or helping solve Erdos problems autonomously (regardless of potential contamination, this is not a feat that I would be able to pull off). It has progressed leaps and bounds with regards to coding, even if you don’t take Anthropic’s claims about mythos at face value, and moreover I don’t see any real reason why it won’t continue to get better at both of these tasks (an argument that I’m sure many of you will make).

For whatever reason, the art they produce has lagged behind. Part of this, I’m sure, is because companies have not been focusing on this as much as they have on replacing jobs that actually make people money. But I would like to believe that part of this is due to the genuine complexity of art and the human experience.

However, at the end of the day, ai is a general purpose problem solving machine, and art is a problem. The only conceivable difference I have been able to imagine in my brain, if you don’t assume magical things about human consciousness or art or whatever, between art and a very hard math problem is complexity. With the right amount of parameters and the right amount of compute, what exactly is stopping gpt 7 or Claude 8.3 (or whatever) from finally cracking the problem?

There are no good tattoos

Just to be clear, I don’t actually judge people when they have tattoos, especially if they don’t have many and it’s just a conversation starter type thing. I mean, if their whole body is covered in them, I find that weird, but I’m not offended by it in anything other than taste (which I think such a thing demonstrates a lack of).

That out of the way I don’t think there’s a single good justification for tattoos, even ones that are actually tasteful.

1. The social utility is at best a net wash. If you have a tattoo somewhere people can immediately see, some people are inevitably going to think that’s trashy. You can easily say you don’t care what they think, but impressions like that are important in life, regardless of what you claim to “care” about. Moreover, it can be bad for jobs, et cetera. Everyone’s heard these points a million times.

But also, the positive benefits are limited. At best you get a semi-cool story when someone asks about it, but that’s only if the tattoos have meaning. I knew a girl who had a tattoo of a chair, and she could talk your ear out about the philosophy of that decision. That’s maximum social utility right there—immediately arresting (why a chair?), and fun conversation.

Most people are not putting that much thought into it. And, even if they are, I just don’t see the benefit ultimately being worth it over the negatives.

2. There’s no actual reason, independent of social utility, to get a tattoo, at least that I can discern.

Let’s say you really like a piece of art. Great, frame it on your wall. It’ll look better that way.

In my estimation, the desire to get a tattoo has nothing to do with the quality of the artwork—that’s a secondary effect. It rather appears to be the result of some inexplicable desire that some people have, seemingly just to do something transgressive.

See, it can’t just be a hobby. I like chess (actually I hate it—horrible hobby). Chess doesn’t involve me permanently altering my skin (that I know of). If there was something I liked that required i do that, i would stop doing it. So, it just being “fun” doesn’t suffice as the sole explanation, similar to being like an adrenaline junkie. Even in the case that I enjoyed life-threatening activities, actually justifying doing them requires an extra level: that level can be, and probably is psychological, but therein lies the problem.

If you look at the negatives, and you wonder what psychological forces might inspire someone to ignore those and get a tattoo anyway, almost none of the explanations make me think higher of the person.

It could be that they think it’s cool, but cool is relative to who’s looking, so that means that they’re willing to alter themselves permanently for the sake of others finding them cool.

It could be that they wanted to rebel against society’s standards (or their parents) in some small way. That one requires another analysis, which also doesn’t come out good 9 times out of 10.

It could be any number of things, but my ultimate point is that most of them are not great.

Conclusion:

Now, I don’t go around psycho analyzing people with tattoos, but I do think for these reasons they’re a mild (very mild nowadays and in my age bracket because there’s more social pressure to do impulsive, mildly transgressive things) red flag.

This of course also conforms to my experience of people with tattoos. I have friends who have them, but are they the most stable people I know?

The answer is no.

Sidenote: this only applies to modern western culture. If you have some sort of religious reason to have tattoos that’s a different story. I