Warp and Weft
A traditional silk or wool Persian Carpet takes years to create from start to finish.
It involves acquiring raw, natural material, dying, designing, knotting, weaving, and finishing. The skills needed to make them requires intricate handwork and precise workmanship, learned over years of apprenticeship, and thousands of years of accumulated experience, handed down across generations. There are machine-made carpets, but none match the quality of a hand-made traditional of say, an Isafahan Rug.
Edo Sashimono is the art of traditional Japanese joinery. It is one of precision, using only mortises and tenons (but no metal fasteners) with amazing results. Reminiscent of the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy, it teaches that perfection is an aspiration, not an end-goal. Contrast that with wabi-sabi which appreciates and celebrates imperfection as a virtue.
“Seven centuries ago a sickly English friar dispatched a strident missive to Rome. Addressed to Pope Clement IV, it was an urgent appeal to set right time itself. Calculating that the calendar year was some 11 minutes longer than the actual solar year, Roger Bacon informed the supreme pontiff that this amounted to an error of an entire day every 125 years, a surplus of time that over the centuries had accumulated by Bacon’s era to nine days. Left unchecked,
this drift would eventually shift March to the dead of winter and August to the spring . More horrific in this pious age was Bacon’s insistence that Christians were celebrating Easter and every other holy day on the wrong dates, a charge so outrageous in 1267 that Bacon risked being branded a heretic for challenging the veracity of the Catholic Church.”
The Calendar, David Ewing Duncan
In the world of AI, we are seeing a different attitude: The Cult of Mediocrity.
This is where inaccuracy is accepted through hallucinations, where obviously derivative works like Studio Ghibli style images are presented as technological achievements.
This is where partly functional code generated by an LLM is accepted as vibe-coding, risks and all.
In academia we assign a higher level of credibility to a peer-reviewed article. But search engines and LLMs return them equally weighted alongside an opinion piece or blog post on Medium or LinkedIn. What Pareto’s Principle tells us is that last 20% is the hardest. Some think that’s good enough. They may be right. Others think that’s not enough. They may be right too.
I know where I stand.
In 1985, the Dire Straits released Money For Nothing as a single. The music video for it was one of the first to use the nascent technology of Computer Animation, combining pop music and 3D Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) graphics. The graphics appear crude by modern standards, but the
- Dire Straits Money for Nothing video embed.
- Talk about the first 3D graphic presentation
- Uncanny Valley
- How it’s improved, but it’s still not there
- AI and mediocrity
- Hallucination, uncanny valley, video clips
- Posting junk
- DuckDuckGo is now filtering it
- AI Slop (history and examples)
- Browsers that include AI
Covering the cult of mediocrity.