I am hesitant to shoot down anyone's work in Show HN but this is deliberate obscenity in service of (I assume) rage baiting. It's all well for art to be transgressive and offensive but if it's not in service of a goal remotely worth having then it's juvenile. Breathing life into a vile monster who remains a contentious subject is just gross and not worth publishing.
OP, I think your work on integrating with iMessage is cool, I think it's cool that you set out to build an iMessage agent and succeeded, but I think this is not your best work. I look forward to seeing what you publish in the future but this one gets two thumbs way down from me.
You simply don't know what the goal was. I would think that breathing life into a vile monster would, among other things, tend to make his monsterism more obvious to observers, and perhaps elicit responses exactly like yours. For all you know, maybe that was the goal. (I'm entertaining your whole "goal" rubric for a minute, but since you brought it up in the context of art, I don't feel comfortable with the idea that art needs to have a goal other than "art itself." Art with a goal is arguably propaganda or advertising. But I don't hold that view rigidly either.)
Added a few minutes later:
Not knowing someone's motivations, and making up something to fill the blank, leads to errors, most of which seem to lean toward shallowly trivializing and dehumanizing the one whose motives are unknown and guessed-at. Could it be that they are a fully-functioning adult with an actual rationale for their actions that you just don't know of?
Allegory: A motorist sees a cyclist on the road, can't understand why they would do that to themselves, and assumes, in the blinding light of their own opinion and car-only experience, that it must be because of a death wish. Based on that shitty reasoning you could go all sorts of places - for example, thinking it would be OK to run over the stupid asshole since they're obviously some other species that is too dumb to protect itself inside a car as do all good folk like me.
That's my interpretation, yes - it's rage bait. It was meant to be upsetting in a vacuous, meritless way (with all due respect to OP).
> Not knowing someone's motivations, and making up something to fill the blank, leads to errors, ...
I'll hazard that. I'm interpreting the art. I'm open to hearing a different interpretation. I'm open to hearing OP's objections to my interpretation (should they have any). I'm not open to the idea that we simply can't analyze or interpret.
I'm not simply "making something up." I gathered what evidence I could find (eg I read OP's comment history), I thought about the piece, I reasoned my way to a conclusion, and I went through several drafts of my comment to remove any swipes and hone my criticism. Could I be wrong? Sure. Again, I will hazard that. I pondered this already and decided I would rather be wrong than silent.
> ...thinking it would be OK to run over the stupid asshole since they're obviously some other species that is too dumb to protect itself...
Wild, wild leap. This is not remotely the same reasoning I am employing. This is just a slippery slope fallacy. I'm not in danger of dehumanizing and murdering someone because I told someone exactly why I didn't like their art. I went out of my way to be respectful. If someone didn't like my work I would want to hear it and I would want it to be expressed respectfully and without malice. So that is what I did.
To be frank, I think you should reread your comment and consider if it is not you that is imputing my motives in a shallow manner.
>Breathing life into a vile monster who remains a contentious subject is just gross and not worth publishing.
No, it is absolutely worth publishing, because that's exactly what AI does.
People already model celebrities and their dead children with it, and they have deeper and more intimate relationships with it than with any real person. People already allow AI to form their reality. The human "soul" (however one wants to think of it) is already a commodity. And the entire Epstein affair is already a circus. It's just another memeplex. That's the world we live in now. Sure, let's have an Epstein app. Why the fuck not? Why pretend we're serious people living in a serious society where Epstein's crimes have serious consequences?
It's art because it reflects the nature of reality.
OP, I think your work on integrating with iMessage is cool, I think it's cool that you set out to build an iMessage agent and succeeded, but I think this is not your best work. I look forward to seeing what you publish in the future but this one gets two thumbs way down from me.