4 ms·

There's no algorithm that generates artistic meaning. These neural nets allow you to employ arbitrary styles and techniques, but no AI can't come up with meanin

by mxkopy 4y ago

There's no algorithm that generates artistic meaning. These neural nets allow you to employ arbitrary styles and techniques, but no AI can't come up with meaningful messages on its own...yet I imagine at its height, AI would make "commodity art" less valuable. But stuff like Rhythm 0, Black Square, The Lighthouse; that sort of art, by definition, can't be generated. Maybe we'll start valuing the more obscure stuff, not dissimilar to how I value the Google result that actually shows the Julia error I'm getting that only 3 people have seen more than the docs page that matches a quarter of the string I pasted directly from the terminal

atemerev 4y ago
You just need to set up a generalized adversarial model that optimizes for meaning!
mkaic 4y ago
I'd agree with you, but I have yet to come across a salient, non-circular definition of "meaning" in this context that makes it somehow unobtainable by robots. What is the meaning you speak of? This isn't meant to come across as snarky either, I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  I think of meaning in terms of Saussure's sign and signified. "The Earth orbits around the sun" for example, is literally a string of characters. As a sign, however, its correspondent signifier could be a diagram of the solar system or something like that. In general meaning is the parts of an experience that are salient to its representation as a sign. It's a sign's signified. Robots lack an embodied experience that would be necessary for them to understand human meanings. They don't know what it feels like to step on a Lego, so a whole class of memes and meanings are unavailable to them as a result. There are probably things that we, as humans, don't know that we feel but still impart meaning. It would be very hard to get a robot to say something like "as the blood rushed to my ears" in a truly meaningful way. Most who end up using that phrase in a sentence don't use its full meaning when thinking about it (so there's higher than normal pressure in the head, etc) but if pressed can expound on it in a way that would be obviously different than a robot's (GPT3 would say, the meaning of this sentence is [0.5435, 24.2352, 1.3245], nearby sentences I've seen have embeddings [1.5532, 0.3552, 4.2442])

by mxkopy 4y ago

atemerev 4y ago

You just need to set up a generalized adversarial model that optimizes for meaning!

mkaic 4y ago

I'd agree with you, but I have yet to come across a salient, non-circular definition of "meaning" in this context that makes it somehow unobtainable by robots. What is the meaning you speak of? This isn't meant to come across as snarky either, I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

mxkopy 4y ago
I think of meaning in terms of Saussure's sign and signified. "The Earth orbits around the sun" for example, is literally a string of characters. As a sign, however, its correspondent signifier could be a diagram of the solar system or something like that. In general meaning is the parts of an experience that are salient to its representation as a sign. It's a sign's signified. Robots lack an embodied experience that would be necessary for them to understand human meanings. They don't know what it feels like to step on a Lego, so a whole class of memes and meanings are unavailable to them as a result. There are probably things that we, as humans, don't know that we feel but still impart meaning. It would be very hard to get a robot to say something like "as the blood rushed to my ears" in a truly meaningful way. Most who end up using that phrase in a sentence don't use its full meaning when thinking about it (so there's higher than normal pressure in the head, etc) but if pressed can expound on it in a way that would be obviously different than a robot's (GPT3 would say, the meaning of this sentence is [0.5435, 24.2352, 1.3245], nearby sentences I've seen have embeddings [1.5532, 0.3552, 4.2442])