On Painting and Thought

I’m continuing to explore sketching with my new Neocolor II crayons, and here is a painting I did today of one of the Sugar Bee apples from today’s grocery shop run. I’m starting to learn how the Neocolors work as their own distinct medium. They go on the paper very smoothly — it’s a wax crayon — and it’s easy to spread the pigments around with a wet paintbrush. Once the paper is dry again, you can draw on it with more crayon in another layer. I also picked up a trick from a video about drawing birds with Neocolor IIs. The artist in this video uses a plastic palette with a rough surface. After drawing on the rough surface with a crayon, one can pick up the pigment directly with a wet paintbrush, thus turning the crayon into what is effectively watercolor paint. This can solve some problems posed by only using the crayons directly on the paper, such as being able to create a smooth wash, or being able to paint details with a fine brush. I made up an instant rough palette surface by using steel wool on a yogurt container top, and tested this approach out.

It is interesting that learning how materials behave — in this case a new art medium — is as far as I can intuit is the domain of non-linguistic thought. When I wanted to add yellow spotting on top of the red of the apple, I just knew that my little rounded flat travel brush would be a good tool for this. I don’t believe language had anything to do with this thought.

This is a consequential realization because the trillions that are being invested right now in AI are being built for the most part on the manipulation of language. To the best of my knowledge the heart of today’s AI boom is large language models (LLMs). There was a piece published in The Verge today about how this is likely a philosophical error. The article is entitled “Large language mistake” and has the subheading “Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.” The article draws upon a perspective piece published in Nature last year entitled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought”, arguing its case from contemporary neuroscience and linguistics. I’m not expecting AIs to know how to paint watercolor anytime soon.