I have a 1 hour video from a digital artist/ programmer that will tell you essentially why it being lifeless matters.
Essentialy, everything before AI was either of mechanistic natural beauty, derived from biological chemical, physical processes, like the leaf of a plant the winding of rivers the shape of mountains etc. ,or it was made by human desicions, there was intentionality thought and perseverance behind every sentence you read, every object you held or owned, every depiction you would look at.
And this made the thing made by humanity inherently understandable as a result of human descion making, creativity, you might not agree with the causes and the outcomes of those decisions, but there was something there to retrace, and this retracing this understanding, made it beautifull, unique or interesting.
Same with the natural objects and phenomenon, you could retrace their existence to causes, causes that unfold a world in their own right, leading you to ask questions about their existence, their creation, their process.
In this retracing, these real links to people, to land and to nature lies the real beauty. The life so to say is them being part of this network for you to take a peek into, through their art, their creation, their mere existence.
Now we have a third category a thing or text or image that exists solely because an imitation machine, an AI is able to crate it, and it can fulfill some profit motive, there is no thought and no intentionality behind this writing this art and so on, it’s a result of statistical models which are built on what existed in the real world, and robs most if not all of these building blocks by just existing. It fills their place, it takes the energy they needed, the intelligence and decision-making they can create, and uses it to replace them, gradually over time.
And it doesn’t really give back, it doesn’t create value in the sense that we can retrace and understand what it makes, it’s a statistical result, there are no causes to peek into besides pretty boring math, and a collection of data it was trained on, a collection so big and varied that looking at it’s entirety might as well just be looking at everything, it tells us nothing, it doesn’t lead us to ask what there is behind it in the same way.
The sad thing is that it is buyable but not in places below like 200k population. In Europe idk how far third wave type coffe got everywhere else but I’d imagine in international cities it’s largely available all over the world.
It’s frankly insane how different a specialty coffe place is from a Caffe. And how many specialty coffe places there are in big cities/ university towns.
The provinces seem to not be able to sustain good coffe unfortunately. Unless there is someone who doesn’t care about the balance sheet.