20 ms·

Something I think is interesting about this, is that maybe 10-20 years ago, when you heard futurists speak of what the implications of AI would be, it was the a

Something I think is interesting about this, is that maybe 10-20 years ago, when you heard futurists speak of what the implications of AI would be, it was the accounting, driving, warehouse, positions that the scary future AI were going to automate out of existence. The speculation was that we'd all have to become artists or poets, since, obviously creative work would be out of the reach of AI.

throwaway290 4y ago
Creative work is out of reach of AI. There can be no art without intent, and AI is nothing more than proverbial monkeys with typewriters in fancy wrapping. The artists in the equation are whoever gave input to the tool and whoever created the works the tool trained on.
- ambrozk 4y ago
  "Yeah, but computers can't be creative!" is the last line of denial for humans who don't want to face their impending obsolescence in a field. People said the same thing about chess engines, right before chess engines defeated human beings at the game conclusively, and forever. A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do. If you think "creativity" is some magical human phenomenon that can't be learned by a sufficiently complicated artificial neural net, then you either don't get creativity or you don't get neural nets. Will a computer produce the next Rembrandt? Maybe not. But the average human painter isn't the next Rembrandt: they're a schmo with a bit of mechanical talent, practicing their craft. The reason human painting will survive is very simple: because 1) people value human-made objects independent of those objects' objective qualities, and because 2) paintings exist outside the digital world, and there is no robot sufficiently dexterous to match the skill of a painter in applying paint to a canvas. That being said, as this technology matures, lots of currently employed digital artists will no longer be needed.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work Citation needed. We know how all ML starts with an RNG, since we built it. We don't know how human mind works.
  - ausbah 4y ago
    >A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do ok but that's not what these models are doing? they're mimicking training data, and sure it's really impressive how far that gets - but ask it to do something outside of that raining data or where the # of samples is low and it's "creativity" falls apart I think these models exhibit a form of creativity, but not creativity in the vein of say - an art style not seen in the training data
    - andreilys 4y ago
      I recommend watching the video Everything Is A Remix. There are very few artists who you can call “original”, the majority are riffing and remixing based on previous predecessors. Making find tweaks here and there. This is something you can achieve with an AI model just by increasing randomness.
      - crucialfelix 4y ago
        Music is a network. Nobody is isolated.
    - schleck8 4y ago
      > but ask it to do something outside of that raining data or where the # of samples is low and it's "creativity" falls apart That's actually the most interesting cases. And I strongly disagree that it falls apart 'The Edge of the Universe' https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wmu10p/the_edge_of_the_universe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wmu10p/the_edge...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- frankzander 4y ago
  That's the whole point of this discussion. Art is artful and has an intend behind it and transports emotions. AI can't provide it because this thing is "only" a computer ... it doesn't live and will never (sorry to disappoint you future believing SciFi disciples ... I'm also a fan of SciFi but some things will not happen). I also have doubts if AI will anywhere in the far future have the abilities of birds within the size of a bird brain. So AI will do what machines do ... they calculate very fast and at least mixing up things with the help of learned patterns. To me this is all interesting to see but just hype and not art. It's generated image content. Art is different.
psi75 4y ago
The speculation was that we'd all have to become artists or poets, since, obviously creative work would be out of the reach of AI. It's debatable--it goes back to Barthes's "death of the author", whether art's value and meaning resides solely in viewer perception or also in author intention--whether AI art will be "true" art, but it will very soon be good enough to replace artists who work in subordinate contexts (which is, unfortunately, generally a necessity if one wants to survive within the reigning corporate-capitalist totalitarianism). AI is not going to force us to "become artists and poets", because it will make it even harder to earn money (i.e., the stuff most people have to earn through humiliating subordination) at these things. It will force us to become dependent, in the way artists (in practice) already are. This isn't as horrible as it sounds. The rich are already dependent on the state, which enforces their so-called "property rights"--this fact being something so-called "libertarians" are too stupid to realize. The middle classes are already dependent on employers, which turns out to suck a lot more than being a rich person dependent on the state. We already depend on complicated supply chains and national defense practices; it is simply the case that we'll soon (a) be dependent on AI, as it increasingly excels at the menial subordinate work we once relied on other people to do, and (b) be dependent on intelligent management (first coming from nation-states and UBI; later, one hopes, coming from a global entity that can eradicate poverty worldwide) of this weird quantity called "money", because we will no longer be able to reliably earn it through work, machines having taken that over (and thank God).
- visarga 4y ago
  Money will not be meaningless because it does not only represent work, but also the cost of materials. After automating work I think the focus will move to ensuring the supply chain.
  - psi75 4y ago
    This is true. There is no evidence that we're on track for a state in which money is meaningless. Rather, the evidence is strong that we're on track for one in which money represents one's share of the corruptly attained and corruptly retained asymmetric state services called "property rights" [1] and in which labor (of value approaching zero) has nothing to do with it. Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working. ---- [1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.

throwaway290 4y ago

Creative work is out of reach of AI. There can be no art without intent, and AI is nothing more than proverbial monkeys with typewriters in fancy wrapping. The artists in the equation are whoever gave input to the tool and whoever created the works the tool trained on.

ambrozk 4y ago
"Yeah, but computers can't be creative!" is the last line of denial for humans who don't want to face their impending obsolescence in a field. People said the same thing about chess engines, right before chess engines defeated human beings at the game conclusively, and forever. A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do. If you think "creativity" is some magical human phenomenon that can't be learned by a sufficiently complicated artificial neural net, then you either don't get creativity or you don't get neural nets. Will a computer produce the next Rembrandt? Maybe not. But the average human painter isn't the next Rembrandt: they're a schmo with a bit of mechanical talent, practicing their craft. The reason human painting will survive is very simple: because 1) people value human-made objects independent of those objects' objective qualities, and because 2) paintings exist outside the digital world, and there is no robot sufficiently dexterous to match the skill of a painter in applying paint to a canvas. That being said, as this technology matures, lots of currently employed digital artists will no longer be needed.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  > A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work Citation needed. We know how all ML starts with an RNG, since we built it. We don't know how human mind works.
- ausbah 4y ago
  >A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do ok but that's not what these models are doing? they're mimicking training data, and sure it's really impressive how far that gets - but ask it to do something outside of that raining data or where the # of samples is low and it's "creativity" falls apart I think these models exhibit a form of creativity, but not creativity in the vein of say - an art style not seen in the training data
  - andreilys 4y ago
    I recommend watching the video Everything Is A Remix. There are very few artists who you can call “original”, the majority are riffing and remixing based on previous predecessors. Making find tweaks here and there. This is something you can achieve with an AI model just by increasing randomness.
    - crucialfelix 4y ago
      Music is a network. Nobody is isolated.
  - schleck8 4y ago
    > but ask it to do something outside of that raining data or where the # of samples is low and it's "creativity" falls apart That's actually the most interesting cases. And I strongly disagree that it falls apart 'The Edge of the Universe' https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wmu10p/the_edge_of_the_universe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wmu10p/the_edge...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
frankzander 4y ago
That's the whole point of this discussion. Art is artful and has an intend behind it and transports emotions. AI can't provide it because this thing is "only" a computer ... it doesn't live and will never (sorry to disappoint you future believing SciFi disciples ... I'm also a fan of SciFi but some things will not happen). I also have doubts if AI will anywhere in the far future have the abilities of birds within the size of a bird brain. So AI will do what machines do ... they calculate very fast and at least mixing up things with the help of learned patterns. To me this is all interesting to see but just hype and not art. It's generated image content. Art is different.

psi75 4y ago

The speculation was that we'd all have to become artists or poets, since, obviously creative work would be out of the reach of AI. It's debatable--it goes back to Barthes's "death of the author", whether art's value and meaning resides solely in viewer perception or also in author intention--whether AI art will be "true" art, but it will very soon be good enough to replace artists who work in subordinate contexts (which is, unfortunately, generally a necessity if one wants to survive within the reigning corporate-capitalist totalitarianism). AI is not going to force us to "become artists and poets", because it will make it even harder to earn money (i.e., the stuff most people have to earn through humiliating subordination) at these things. It will force us to become dependent, in the way artists (in practice) already are. This isn't as horrible as it sounds. The rich are already dependent on the state, which enforces their so-called "property rights"--this fact being something so-called "libertarians" are too stupid to realize. The middle classes are already dependent on employers, which turns out to suck a lot more than being a rich person dependent on the state. We already depend on complicated supply chains and national defense practices; it is simply the case that we'll soon (a) be dependent on AI, as it increasingly excels at the menial subordinate work we once relied on other people to do, and (b) be dependent on intelligent management (first coming from nation-states and UBI; later, one hopes, coming from a global entity that can eradicate poverty worldwide) of this weird quantity called "money", because we will no longer be able to reliably earn it through work, machines having taken that over (and thank God).

visarga 4y ago
Money will not be meaningless because it does not only represent work, but also the cost of materials. After automating work I think the focus will move to ensuring the supply chain.
- psi75 4y ago
  This is true. There is no evidence that we're on track for a state in which money is meaningless. Rather, the evidence is strong that we're on track for one in which money represents one's share of the corruptly attained and corruptly retained asymmetric state services called "property rights" [1] and in which labor (of value approaching zero) has nothing to do with it. Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working. ---- [1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.