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Brendon Marotta

The Gods of AI is Out Now

November 23, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

My new book The Gods of AI is out now.

What is The Gods of AI?

The Gods of AI is a 400-page art book that uses an AI-image generator to visualize Gods and spiritual concepts.

God of Language

To create this book, I put phrases like “God of Language” or “faith” into an AI-image generator, produced over 20,000 images in two months, and edited the results into a cohesive book that explores our collective unconscious.

Collective Unconscious

What do you mean by “our collective unconscious?”

I say our collective unconscious because the AI draws from every visual image created by humans in its dataset. That data is greater than any one human consciousness. It includes the collective consciousness of every person or artist who created those images.

When I enter “Goddess of Love” into the AI, it draws from every image it learned from in its dataset that pertains to our concept of love and the divine and synthesizes them into a new image. Like so:

Goddess of Love

If one artist drew these images, they would come only from the consciousness of that artist. Instead, images come from the collective unconscious of ALL recorded artists.

In this way, AI can be used as a divination tool. What does humanity collectively think about an idea as shown in their art? Let’s ask the AI.

AI Oracle

Each section includes a tarot-style description interpreting the images reveals about our collective unconscious. If you dwell on these images, they have insights into how we perceive spiritual concepts.

Can you give an example?

I created images based on both the prompts “Heaven” and “Hell.” Images of hell had lots of people. Heaven was empty clouds. What does this reveal about our ideas about both concepts? There is a saying that “hell is other people.” Perhaps the reason we haven’t been able to create “heaven on Earth” is that we can’t image it with others.

Hell / Heaven

Stronger images come from using the prompt “God of [concept]” rather than just the concept by itself. If you prompt “science,” you’ll get stock images in labs. If you prompt “God of Science,” you’ll get electric energy exploding into a mushroom cloud out of the head of an archetypal labcoat-wearing Einstein genius. That is a closer representation of the power of science in our world than just someone holding a beaker.

How did you create these images?

Every image used only the concept as the prompt. If a section is titled “faith, then the only text I gave the AI was the word “faith.” This is rare in AI-image generation. Most creators use a series of words to tell the AI exactly what subject, artistic style, medium, etc. to create. Instead, I let the AI determine what “faith” looked like.

Faith

That said, I still made artistic choices. Every image was repeatedly upscaled, remastered, and had variations created of it. According to Midjourney AI, the image generator I used for this project, I created over 20,000 images during the period I was working on this book. There were between 50 and 500 per prompt. Each section only has 3-5 pages of images in the final book. This art is as much mine as anything I’ve created.

Buy the Gods of AI here.

  • Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMTFSNQ5
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Filed Under: AIArt, Blog

A Father Is A Child’s First Friend

June 22, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

Some of the best advice I got before becoming a dad was:

A father is a child’s first friend.

When a child is born, they see their mother as a part of themselves. The child was a part of mom for nine months. It takes time for infants to learn that they are their own person.

Dad is the first person the child regularly interacts with who is not mom, and therefore not them, who regularly cares for them. Dad is their first friend.

The way mom treats the child informs how they will relate to themselves. The ways dad treats the child informs how they will relate to their friends.

While I am still my son’s father and that role has responsibilities that go far beyond a friend, I am happy that our friendship is growing as well.

Originally published here.

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice

What Is The Complicity Principle?

March 7, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

“The ‘Complicity Principle’ emphasizes that one is accountable for what others do when one intentionally participates in a collective that causes the harm together. One is accountable for the harm we do together, independently of the actual difference an individual who intentionally participates in such group action makes. Participatory intention is intention to act as part of a group in collective action of agents who orient themselves around a joint project.”

– Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy.

Who is responsible for systemic social justice issues? While no one person is to blame for society-wide injustices, many people participate in harmful systems. The Complicity Principle is a concept in critical social justice that suggests that although no single individual is responsible for systemic issues, each person who is complicit in a system of harm is responsible for their role in that system.

Take for example the issue of circumcision. Parents say the doctor told them to circumcise. Doctors say they have to circumcise because of their job at the hospital. The hospital says they have to offer circumcision because parents want it. Who is responsible?

Genital cutting is a systemic issue. No one person created the entire system that led to a child being harmed, yet they all were complicit in that system. The Complicity Principle would suggest that everyone, including parents, doctors, and hospitals, is responsible for their role in the system, regardless of how significant that role was to the harmful outcome.

Complicity in a systemic problem can take many forms. For example, suppose a parent tells children that they can’t say no to adults who want to touch them or hug them goodbye and then gets mad at the child when they disobey. If an abuser uses that cultural conditioning to tell the child “you have to let me touch you, or your parents will be mad at you,” is the parent complicit in that abuse? From an individual perspective, no. From a systemic perspective, the cultural ideas they shared contributed to the harm of children, so they were complicit in a larger social and cultural system that lead to pedophilia.

In my book Children’s Justice, I call the system that leads to children being sexually harmed systemic pedophilia. Systemic pedophilia does not describe individual desire but an entire system of culture, ideas, language, institutions, etc. While an individual might not personally harm children, they might be complicit in systemic pedophilia through the language they use, people they contribute money to, or cultural ideas they share.

The Complicity Principle explains why critical social justice activists often speak about systemic issues in a totalizing way. If social justice issues are systemic, there is no neutrality. Every choice either contributes to those systems or doesn’t. When people protest that they personally are not to blame for a systemic issue, they ignore the ways that they might be complicit in that system, even if they have no individual bad intentions. This triggered defensive reaction is an attempt to avoid seeing their own complicity in systemic issues known as fragility, and on the issue of systemic pedophilia, pedophile fragility.

Avoiding complicity in systemic issues requires developing a critical consciousness, which means seeing how every action, idea, or aspect of society you interact with either contributes to systems that harm or creates the better world we all desire. On children’s issues, this means looking at how the larger systems we participate in impact children. It means recognizing that there is no neutral, and you are either complicit or antipedophile.

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice

Mastery Does Not Come From A 60-Second Video

March 5, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

One challenge I’ve found promoting my new book Children’s Justice is that people want complex ideas in a short attention span. They want mastery of an issue in a 60-second video.

This is literally impossible. Short-form content can communicate an idea, but mastery requires your time. If you want to change social issues that have existed since the earliest recorded history, you might actually have to read a book.

If I could have delivered the ideas I share in Children’s Justice in a short video, I would have done that instead of spending all the time it takes to write a book.

I recognize the need to build interest. It’s why I go on podcasts and write these articles. It’s why I’m looking into producing an audiobook and turning some of these ideas into short-form videos. However, once that interest is gained, it has to translate into action. There is no other way to get the social change desired. You must read.

If you find an idea here interesting, read the book. If you don’t understand an idea here, read the book. It’s all there. I’m not going to put every bomb in the book online. Some you will have to discover when you read.

By the way, the same is true of creating. If you want to change the world, you have to regularly create. Have you noticed these articles come nearly every day? I write that much because I care that much. If you care too, you can support this work here.

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice

The Existential Threat To Intactivism

February 28, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

Intactivism is currently based in human rights. Specifically, it is based in the idea that human beings have the right to their own body, and to cut off a part of someone’s body without their consent is a violation of their human rights.

This argument was at one point an appeal to the shared values of Western liberalism. Now, human rights are no longer dominant shared values.

Even adults do not have the right to make their own choices about their body. The medical overstate believes that if your choices about your own body put others at risk – like choosing not to take a vaccine – that they have the right to make decisions about your body for you.

Do you see the looming threat?

If Western governments drop human rights and hold that “medical benefits” trump individual choice, the primary Intactivist argument becomes a dissident one, rather than an appeal to dominant values.

In this new medical overstate, “risks” and “benefits” are entirely socially constructed by the medical system. It doesn’t matter if an intervention does not actually prevent the disease it is vaccinating against, only that it can “reduce risk,” with “reduce” and “risk” both defined entirely by those in power.

Circumcision proponents have already argued that circumcision is a “surgical vaccine.” If the medical overstate can trump human rights in one area, then they might use the same discourse to expand their power in others. Even if you believe that one medical intervention, like vaccines, “works” while circumcision harms, it doesn’t matter – the medical overstate is the one who will define what “works” and does not work.

At the same time, a new set of values has emerged that trumps even the medical overstate: critical social justice or social justice based in critical theory. During the height of medical overstate lockdowns, mass social justice protests were allowed and endorsed by the dominant hegemony, including the medical system, even in violation of previous advice to “socially distance” and stay home.

As the threat of the medical overstate trumping human rights looms, an opportunity emerges in the form of critical social justice trumping the medical system. Every major institution has accepted social justice values. Social justice now holds so much power that it constitutes a new hegemony or dominant power.

If we want to appeal to dominant values, human rights are not the dominant values. Critical social justice is. However, critical social justice is an entirely different way of seeing the world that is explicitly skeptical of individual human rights. You would have to completely reimagine the underlying ideology and arguments of the movement against circumcision in order to use critical social justice.

Fortunately, I already have. I read all I could on critical social justice and created Children’s Justice, which views the treatment of children as a social justice issue. It uses the methods and values of critical social justice to do more than the human rights framework ever could. I believe if used, Children’s Justice solves this looming threat and ensures that the movement for children will be dominant rather than eclipsed by new powers.

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice

Is Critical Theory Actually Critical?

February 28, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

There are two dominant responses to critical social justice. One is to accept it entirely and “do the work” that critical social justice demands. The other is to reject critical social justice, become “anti-woke,” and oppose critical social justice. All of American politics is polarized around these two positions.

I’d like to present a third option.

Both the “woke” and “anti-woke” have accepted the idea that critical theory is critical, and not a neutral tool. To be a critical theory, a theory must not only explain the world but attempt to change it. Critical theories contain an inherent political incitement by design.

Yet the process by which these theories are developed is itself not critical. Critical theory could also be thought of as a tool for analyzing power and language. One could create a theory that explains what is wrong with the world and attempts to transform it for any purpose or end.

In my book Children’s Justice, I break down the process of critical social justice theory into five principles and apply them along with many other social justice ideas to children’s issues. Based on this analysis, I conclude that American society has a problem with systemic pedophilia that can only be solved through a radical transformation of the way we treat children, which I call Children’s Justice.

This analysis is different than any previous critical social justice theory, yet it is very clearly critical social justice. The ideas of the book are based in previous critical social justice thinkers such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Michel Foucault, Miranda Fricker, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Herbert Marcuse, etc. Yet, many who consider themselves “anti-woke” have responded positively to the book and left glowing reviews. Why is this? Do the critics of theory really hate theory or just the conclusions of theory?

Imagine for a minute that you had only seen the scientific method used to build bombs. A person who had only seen science used to construct bombs might believe that they hate the scientific method. Yet, the same method could be used to improve or extend life. Not keeping the scientific method would also remove the possibility of the benefits that method might bring. Likewise, there might be benefits to theory we can only know if we explore it as a method, rather than focusing on the cultural bombs it drops on society.

Critical social justice is already the dominant power in society. Why not understand it and use it as a tool for good?


To learn more about critical social justice, read Children’s Justice here: https://brendonmarotta.com/childrensjustice/

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Filed Under: Blog

“Regret Parents” Are Actually Coerced Parents

February 23, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

Regret parents is a term used to describe parents whose children were circumcised and now regret that they were not kept intact.

Parents often come to regret the circumcision of their children due to learning new information about the harm of circumcision. Parents are given so little information by the medical system that it is a common experience for parents to not find out the truth about circumcision until after their children have been harmed.

So many parents have come to regret their child’s circumcision that these parents have formed their own online communities. Many of these parents feel grief or guilt over the role they played in allowing their children to be harmed. Since circumcision is viewed by the dominant culture as a “parental choice,” many see themselves as having made the wrong choice, which they now regret.

Yet was circumcision actually their “parental choice” or were they coerced? These parents were not acting as independent decision-makers. They were within a system.

One of the core ideas of critical social justice theory is that we are not merely individuals but interact with social systems. These systems include culture, socialization, language, etc. These parents were not just influenced by larger cultural assumptions, but in a system that literally has the word system in its name: the medical system.

The parents did not train medical students to perform circumcisions, manufacture circumcision devices, create billing codes for health insurance, place a sales funnel for circumcision in hospital birth, use high-pressure sales tactics, and frame those selling circumcision as experts that parents should trust. The parents’ only role in the circumcision of their child was to sign a consent form at the end of a large multi-million dollar cultural process that had already taken place.

If we include the medical system as a character, it is clearly the primary actor in the circumcision of children. “Parental choice” is a fiction that the medical system uses to hide their role in circumcision. The medical system is often invisible because it doesn’t act through a single person, whereas parents see themselves as the most important characters in the story of their child’s birth. And they are — just not the most powerful.

Is consent possible with this great power imbalance and this little information given? In my book Children’s Justice, I use this analogy:

Imagine if this situation was between a man and a woman instead of an institution and family. If a man in a position of authority was to repeatedly pressure a woman for sex while she was under the influence of drugs, continue asking after she said no, claimed she was required to have sex with him, shame her when she wouldn’t, prevent her from leaving, and hold someone she cared about hostage during the whole process, could we really call it “consent” if she eventually broke down and said yes? The woman might regret giving a “yes,” but we would not frame the sex that followed as consensual. We would say it was coerced. Parents are at an even greater imbalance of power in the medical system… A better name for these parents would be coerced parents.

Given the power imbalance between the medical system and parents and the way the medical system wields that power over parents, consent is impossible. These parents are not “regret” parents. They were coerced parents.

The dominant cultural narrative about circumcision is that it is a “parental choice,” when the power imbalances between parents and doctors reveal that it is a medical coercion. The medical system frames parents as the culprits for its own actions to hide their role in perpetuating harm. In doing so, they cause cultural trauma to coerced parents, who struggle with feelings based on false beliefs about who is responsible for the actions of the system. While parents are responsible for the role they play, that role is much smaller than they might imagine.

Once parents see the larger system that acted upon them, they might be able to let go of some of the regret, guilt, or shame they might feel and work towards getting justice for their children.

To learn more, read my book Children’s Justice.

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice

The Path to Children’s Justice

February 22, 2022 By Brendon Marotta

Recorded during the development of Children’s Justice, in this episode I talk about the events that lead to Children’s Justice,  my reasons for the book, and the process of writing the book.

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Resources

  • Children’s Justice

Children’s Justice is out now. Get the book here:
https://brendonmarotta.com/childrensjustice/

Subscribe and support the show directly:
https://brendonmarotta.com/show/

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Filed Under: Blog, Children's Justice, Show

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