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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

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.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Humans get to choose which images to use and which to discard, which might be just enough feedback. That said there’s nothing to say progression of the world requires humans in the process, perhaps eventually it will be AI all the way down.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    I deleted a section of the last reply (I seem to keep doing that) because it was a bit of a "toke of the bong" sort of take. Yes, you can imagine a situation where it's just "AI all the way down," that is, you recreate a community of artists which are only AI and no human draws anymore. The thing is I feel like that situation, the AI looks a lot less like the NNs which are just matrices today and it looks a lot more like actual AI which is closer to what someone could imagine are people. That is what I can imagine in the future, which is a community of artists still, just not of humans. Regarding an "all knowing" NN sort of black box that literally models the whole social process itself, I don't think is possible due to chaos, that is, sensitivity to initial conditions, like the weather. Large social systems are probably as sensitivity to initial conditions too and cannot be a priori modelled completely. That's kind of what I'll still stake as impossible in my opinion.

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.

hnfong 4y ago
Humans get to choose which images to use and which to discard, which might be just enough feedback. That said there’s nothing to say progression of the world requires humans in the process, perhaps eventually it will be AI all the way down.
- noobermin 4y ago
  I deleted a section of the last reply (I seem to keep doing that) because it was a bit of a "toke of the bong" sort of take. Yes, you can imagine a situation where it's just "AI all the way down," that is, you recreate a community of artists which are only AI and no human draws anymore. The thing is I feel like that situation, the AI looks a lot less like the NNs which are just matrices today and it looks a lot more like actual AI which is closer to what someone could imagine are people. That is what I can imagine in the future, which is a community of artists still, just not of humans. Regarding an "all knowing" NN sort of black box that literally models the whole social process itself, I don't think is possible due to chaos, that is, sensitivity to initial conditions, like the weather. Large social systems are probably as sensitivity to initial conditions too and cannot be a priori modelled completely. That's kind of what I'll still stake as impossible in my opinion.