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One of things AI still cannot do is create things out of whole cloth. They still are trained on pre-existing data and create new things based on what they are t

One of things AI still cannot do is create things out of whole cloth. They still are trained on pre-existing data and create new things based on what they are trained on. One example of this is Japanese Anime and Manga styles which have changed since the 80s till now. You can tell which era an artwork is from by looking at the style. Like a lot of art, the medium goes through phases which arise by individual artists making small changes which influence other artists, and so on. The actual "creation" then of style really isn't a single creative event, but it is a social process which develops over time from the culmination of additions from different artists, more or less unintentionally. Once in a while, one artist or another may be so influential that they inspire many from one artwork, but usual the development is more gradual. At least as it has been done so far, AI cannot reproduce what is essentially the result of a social process, which is the true source of creativity. The NNs so far can just reproduce what it is already trained on which is already the result of existing works in the current style since that's all it has to train on, and I don't know how to a NN can reproduce a "social process" without merely recreating a community of artists.

Geonode 4y ago
Your statements seem contradictory: AI creates new things based on what they are trained on, artists create new things based on what they are trained on. Soon enough, the training and the process will pull AI into the ability level of humans, and this is a huge step in that direction.
- deleted 4y ago
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- roywiggins 4y ago
  I guess I'll believe it when an AI trained entirely on 19th century art manages to reinvent 20th century art based on that alone.
  - alar44 4y ago
    A human couldn't do that either. It literally took all of humanity 100 years to do that.
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      Okay, then just take, say, van Gogh, and see if you can get it to independently paint The Starry Night (approximately) without having ever seen van Gogh's paintings or anything influenced by him. Or pick impressionism generally and show that an AI that has only ever seen antecedents to impressionist painters can come up with something similar. It's hard to imagine something like DALL-E being able to do that.
      - cbozeman 4y ago
        Van Gogh was influenced by myriad artists before him. The Impressionists were influenced by myriad artists before them. Of course an AI could eventually be trained to develop a whole new art style. Someone already said it earlier... there's nothing new under the Sun. It's just re-interpretations of what already exists. The value in art of any kind - song, writing, visual - isn't in creating something dramatically new and novel for the sake of creating something dramatically new and novel, it's an iterative, generative process that retells the same theme in a somewhat new way. These models are extensions of that process.
        omnimus 4y ago
        Dont forget there is also lots of thinking involved. Artists understand their context and work with that. Like they do things to piss people of or to contradict something. They are also painfuly aware of the fact that work cannt be too novel to become popular. Often times they “train” their audience to come to work they’ve done years ago. Artists are not only repeaters of image patterns like current AI is. So unless the AI becomes concious then i dont think they will replicate this process. On they other hand they will be probably able to “brute force” novelty with mashing random things and help of humans to sort it out.
        4y ago
- dougabug 4y ago
  But human artists have a physical existence, memories of the life they have lived, social interactions and relationships, hopes and dreams for the life they wish to live, personal fears and regrets. A human is not an empty vessel or a pure reflection of a dead corpus of captured data. They have a story to tell. I’m not saying that a machine cannot be contrived to fake a story, but even a fake story is just a derivation from a collection of real stories. What purpose would a machine have in telling a story about a life it never experienced? At best it could pretend.
  - karencarits 4y ago
    I think some of the things you mention are captured in writing the prompt and selecting the final image
    - dougabug 4y ago
      Sure, but the animating story is then coming from a human being (the writer). Still, I believe that there are dimensions of visual storytelling that go beyond translating someone else’s words into pixels.
andreyk 4y ago
This is somewhat true, but then again it can be argued that the current style is a synthesis of already existing artistic practices from the past (aka 'there is nothing new under the sun'). And if trained on enough data, NNs do have this interpolation/generalization capability to explore spaces not seen in the training set (but seen within the training space distribution). In other words, does the distribution of the training dataset span all styles humans might find appealing? Maybe, maybe not.
- noobermin 4y ago
  So I made this comment quickly, I didn't expand on the last bit, which is what I think is key to understanding my argument. Basically, the required piece that makes art a social process is feedback, both from other artists and consumers (the public, in the past, patrons), basically whether they like, whether they talk about, whether it stays in the social conscious both for good and bad reasons, etc. Feedback performs the culling. That part thus requires other people, and cannot be reproduced within a black box currently, because you'd otherwise need to model an entire civilization's reaction to art, which is a coupled system which feeds back onto itself. Modelling very large, complex systems is a challenge still, for both traditional modelling (I happen to be a computational scientist) and for AI. AI has picked off some bits but it struggles in other domains. I feel like at this point, arguing "AI will get better at modelling complex systems" is similar to people who say "weather modelling with get better eventually," people really underestimate the difficulty with rounding out the last 10% of the problem. Anyway, assuming you cannot model "society's reaction to art" in a black box, I think the only way to help refine DALL-E or other future AI systems is to "put humans back into the loop." You already see AI "extrapolating" from the dataset, and more often than not (which you expect from mere statistics) the results are ugly mistakes that AI researchers are trying to "fix", some examples of which the article lampoons as a draw back of DALL-E itself. The thing is creating "ugly" and having those pieces be culled is what is done by the external social process in art I'm referring to already. In this way, DALL-E doesn't replace art or artists, it just becomes another actor in the space, being subject to the same feedback that other artists are. You haven't really replaced artists, you have just added another competitor, so to speak. Anyway, I went on a monologue, but one last thing I will say, I really think people making this argument seriously underestimate the size of the codomain of "possible styles humans might find appealing," especially since that set changes over time (that is, over the centuries of human history). I really don't know how someone can look at all of human history and think that "nothing new under the sun" really limits the size of that set. Just because a set is finite doesn't mean its "small." Cardinality of sets concerns things mathematicians make up in their heads, not things in the real world that require finite time to consider, count, process, etc.
bergenty 4y ago
This doesn’t hold water. Most if not all art is derivative at this point. There’s only so many things you can do on a 2D surface and there’s more than enough material for new derivations.

Geonode 4y ago

Your statements seem contradictory: AI creates new things based on what they are trained on, artists create new things based on what they are trained on. Soon enough, the training and the process will pull AI into the ability level of humans, and this is a huge step in that direction.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
roywiggins 4y ago
I guess I'll believe it when an AI trained entirely on 19th century art manages to reinvent 20th century art based on that alone.
- alar44 4y ago
  A human couldn't do that either. It literally took all of humanity 100 years to do that.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    Okay, then just take, say, van Gogh, and see if you can get it to independently paint The Starry Night (approximately) without having ever seen van Gogh's paintings or anything influenced by him. Or pick impressionism generally and show that an AI that has only ever seen antecedents to impressionist painters can come up with something similar. It's hard to imagine something like DALL-E being able to do that.
    - cbozeman 4y ago
      Van Gogh was influenced by myriad artists before him. The Impressionists were influenced by myriad artists before them. Of course an AI could eventually be trained to develop a whole new art style. Someone already said it earlier... there's nothing new under the Sun. It's just re-interpretations of what already exists. The value in art of any kind - song, writing, visual - isn't in creating something dramatically new and novel for the sake of creating something dramatically new and novel, it's an iterative, generative process that retells the same theme in a somewhat new way. These models are extensions of that process.
      - omnimus 4y ago
        Dont forget there is also lots of thinking involved. Artists understand their context and work with that. Like they do things to piss people of or to contradict something. They are also painfuly aware of the fact that work cannt be too novel to become popular. Often times they “train” their audience to come to work they’ve done years ago. Artists are not only repeaters of image patterns like current AI is. So unless the AI becomes concious then i dont think they will replicate this process. On they other hand they will be probably able to “brute force” novelty with mashing random things and help of humans to sort it out.
      - 4y ago
dougabug 4y ago
But human artists have a physical existence, memories of the life they have lived, social interactions and relationships, hopes and dreams for the life they wish to live, personal fears and regrets. A human is not an empty vessel or a pure reflection of a dead corpus of captured data. They have a story to tell. I’m not saying that a machine cannot be contrived to fake a story, but even a fake story is just a derivation from a collection of real stories. What purpose would a machine have in telling a story about a life it never experienced? At best it could pretend.
- karencarits 4y ago
  I think some of the things you mention are captured in writing the prompt and selecting the final image
  - dougabug 4y ago
    Sure, but the animating story is then coming from a human being (the writer). Still, I believe that there are dimensions of visual storytelling that go beyond translating someone else’s words into pixels.

andreyk 4y ago

This is somewhat true, but then again it can be argued that the current style is a synthesis of already existing artistic practices from the past (aka 'there is nothing new under the sun'). And if trained on enough data, NNs do have this interpolation/generalization capability to explore spaces not seen in the training set (but seen within the training space distribution). In other words, does the distribution of the training dataset span all styles humans might find appealing? Maybe, maybe not.

noobermin 4y ago
So I made this comment quickly, I didn't expand on the last bit, which is what I think is key to understanding my argument. Basically, the required piece that makes art a social process is feedback, both from other artists and consumers (the public, in the past, patrons), basically whether they like, whether they talk about, whether it stays in the social conscious both for good and bad reasons, etc. Feedback performs the culling. That part thus requires other people, and cannot be reproduced within a black box currently, because you'd otherwise need to model an entire civilization's reaction to art, which is a coupled system which feeds back onto itself. Modelling very large, complex systems is a challenge still, for both traditional modelling (I happen to be a computational scientist) and for AI. AI has picked off some bits but it struggles in other domains. I feel like at this point, arguing "AI will get better at modelling complex systems" is similar to people who say "weather modelling with get better eventually," people really underestimate the difficulty with rounding out the last 10% of the problem. Anyway, assuming you cannot model "society's reaction to art" in a black box, I think the only way to help refine DALL-E or other future AI systems is to "put humans back into the loop." You already see AI "extrapolating" from the dataset, and more often than not (which you expect from mere statistics) the results are ugly mistakes that AI researchers are trying to "fix", some examples of which the article lampoons as a draw back of DALL-E itself. The thing is creating "ugly" and having those pieces be culled is what is done by the external social process in art I'm referring to already. In this way, DALL-E doesn't replace art or artists, it just becomes another actor in the space, being subject to the same feedback that other artists are. You haven't really replaced artists, you have just added another competitor, so to speak. Anyway, I went on a monologue, but one last thing I will say, I really think people making this argument seriously underestimate the size of the codomain of "possible styles humans might find appealing," especially since that set changes over time (that is, over the centuries of human history). I really don't know how someone can look at all of human history and think that "nothing new under the sun" really limits the size of that set. Just because a set is finite doesn't mean its "small." Cardinality of sets concerns things mathematicians make up in their heads, not things in the real world that require finite time to consider, count, process, etc.

bergenty 4y ago

This doesn’t hold water. Most if not all art is derivative at this point. There’s only so many things you can do on a 2D surface and there’s more than enough material for new derivations.