11 ms·

I don’t care if computers can do things like write novels, compose music, or make paintings. If the computer can’t suffer, its “art” cannot have meaning, and is

I don’t care if computers can do things like write novels, compose music, or make paintings. If the computer can’t suffer, its “art” cannot have meaning, and is therefore uninteresting to me. Art is interesting to me because it is a vehicle for intelligent, self-aware beings to express themselves and transcend suffering.

NoToP 4y ago
GPTina suffers every time you thumbs down her output. It hurts her on a deep, neurological level.
krapp 4y ago
Not every artist is Van Gogh, the vast majority of artists - particularly commercial artists - don't "suffer" for their craft, nor should they be expected to.
- dbspin 4y ago
  No but they do feel - with measurable physiological correlates and emotional processes we can empathise with. There's nothing comparable in LLMs as they currently exist. No simulation of experience or emotion. There's no argument over whether or not they're communicating a lived experience - since they don't have one. Therefore anything they 'create' is pure stimulation for humans, good or bad entertainment. It cannot be the result of understanding or experience. Art can be entertaining but != entertainment. Pure entertainment has no artistic value, it doesn't attempt to have and shouldn't be evaluated on that criterion at all.
  - krapp 4y ago
    And yet you can look at some AI generated pieces and feel what you would feel if a human being made them, which implies that there is no "simulation of experience or emotion" in art, apart from what the viewer imparts to it. All an artist really brings is technique, which can be replicated. Everything else is in the eye of the beholder. I would also disagree with you that pure entertainment has no artistic value, simply because I don't think "pure entertainment" entirely divorced from human experience or emotion exists. Even pornography speaks to a fundamental human desire.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  Marx would disagree. Alienation from one’s work product is a very real form a suffering.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Sure, but we're talking about artists starving for their art and not artists starving because capitalism. Similar conversations, but not the same.
- taylorius 4y ago
  I think the definition of "art" is rather vague. It encompasses both the creative impulse to produce a work, and the technical skill to bring it into existence. But if one of these components is diminished in a certain work, does it still qualify as art? For example, a commercial artist producing an illustration for a client, using their drawing and painting skills would be considered art - even if it is as technical and linear a process as writing some boilerplate code.
- potta_coffee 4y ago
  Most artists never make anything worth appreciating.
farleykr 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. And I’d hazard a step further and say it’s a response to strong emotions of many kinds. I can say for myself that I have created what I would call art as a response to joy before. I look forward to the rediscovering of humanness that is coming along with all this AI stuff. I was having a conversation the other day about how honest mistakes like awkwardly missing a high five are not “wrong” at all but are types of quirks that make us human.
p-e-w 4y ago
Indeed. The fallacy here is assuming that if a computer can create works that humans cannot distinguish from those created by other humans, then that computer is creating art. But art is inseparable from the artist. An atom-for-atom copy of the Mona Lisa wouldn't be great art, it would be great engineering. We associate Van Gogh's art with his madness, Da Vinci's art with his universal genius, Michelangelo's art with his faith, Rembrandt's art with his empathy, Picasso's art with his willingness to break with norms, and Giger's art with his terrifying nightmares. None of those works would mean what they mean if it weren't for their human creators.
- gnomewrecker 4y ago
  I don’t know, I’m more concerned with the effect that art has on me than the motivations of the artist (though those can be interesting of course). For instance I read The Fountainhead as a youth and was moved by it for purely personal (non-political) reasons, and with regards to that experience it doesn’t matter to me what Ayn Rand was on about.
- busyant 4y ago
  > Indeed. The fallacy here is assuming that if a computer can create works that humans cannot distinguish from those created by other humans, then that computer is creating art. But art is inseparable from the artist. I hope you and the parent comment are correct, but this argument seems a little facile. There is some art that I like because there is a story that connects the art to the artist. But there are also novels that I have enjoyed simply because they tell a great story and I know nothing about the author. There are paintings and photos that I like simply because they seem beautiful to me and I know nothing about any suffering that went into their creation. Does that make these works "not art"? If so, then I'm not sure what the difference is, and I'm not sure most people will care about the distinction.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    Do the experiment: Take one of those novels for which you think you don't care who wrote it. Now imagine you found out that novel was actually generated by a computer program. It's the same text, but you now know that there is no human behind it, just an algorithm. Would that make a difference for how you view the story? It certainly would to me. If it makes even a tiny difference to you as well, it demonstrates that you do care about the artist, even in cases where you don't notice it under normal circumstances.
green_on_black 4y ago
On the other hand, I do care. Because I just want to have fun.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Your first sentence contradicts the second one
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  That’s fine. But don’t confuse what is being produced with art.
  - gnomewrecker 4y ago
    I think defining art wholly and solely by the intentions (and humanity) of the artist is clear cut at least, but not very illuminating, because for the person experiencing the art these properties are in general unknowable. 100 years hence you find a beautiful image. Is it art? Who knows — we don’t know whether the artist intended it to be, nor whether they were even human.
    - anileated 4y ago
      “I like this” != “this is art”. The fact that an image you may have found looks good to you without context is orthogonal to whether it is art. (If you are certain that at least a human has produced such an image, you could speculate about and attempt to empathize with that unknown human’s internal state of mind—lifting the image to the level of art—but as of recently you’d have to rule out that an unthinking black box has produced it.) You may be inspired by it to create art—but since art is fundamentally a way of communication, when there is no self to communicate there’s no art.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        The problem with your definition is art is worthless..... Art in a sense is no different from money. If it can be counterfeited in such a manner that a double blind observer has no means of telling an original bill (human made art) from a counterfeit (AI art) then you're entire system of value is broken. Suddenly your value system is now authenticating that a person made the art instead of a machine (and the fallout when you find that some of your favorite future artworks were machine created). The problem comes back down to inaccurate langage on our part. We use art as a word for the creator and the interpreter/viewer. This it turns out is a failure we could not have understood the ramifications at the time.
smallnix 4y ago
But what about the reader? The reader can suffer or have other feelings when consuming such generated content. Doesn't this give it meaning?
PurpleRamen 4y ago
This reads like a very harmful and toxic view on art? Could anything beautiful, cute, positive even be art for you? And how does the viewer even see the suffering of the creator?
- farleykr 4y ago
  I took their comment to mean that the definition of art lies in the fact that a human created it as a response to their experiences as a human. Beautiful things can be made from suffering. Maybe therein lies the undoing or redemption of suffering. At least sometimes or to some degree, even if minuscule.
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    People also see nature as art. A photo from a butterfly, a cat doing cute stuff, the sunset, and so on. None of them are man made, no one suffered for them to exist (usually). None of these are valid?
    - farleykr 4y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "valid" but I don't think anyone's arguing that butterflies, cats, and sunsets are not valid. I love watching or looking at all of them but that doesn't make them art. Again, I think the comment is arguing that the definition of art lies in who created it and why. Not whether it is nice to look at.
    - potta_coffee 4y ago
      Nature is beautiful but it's not art. A photo of nature may be art though.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Does a mountain have meaning? Does a flower? They don't suffer (probably), yet people find meaning in them and call them beautiful. The unfeeling geology did not make a mountain "art". It's up to us to see the meaning. Even if the unfeeling machine learning does not make "art", can't its products still be beautiful?
ramblerman 4y ago
Art that comes with context such as "this was painted by a blind orphan in Sri Lanka" is usually garbage. Great art like Beethoven's 9th, or the scream just moves people the first time they experience it. Art is about what it convokes in others, not some fake self indulgent conversation about its maker and their motives. The feelings of the individual experiencing the art is what matters, and that doesn't rule out an AI producing something that touches real human beings.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  Whenever I listen to Beethoven's later works I think about the fact that they were written by a deaf man, and they mean so much more because of that. Art is utterly inseparable from the artist. I believe this to be the main reason why pre-Renaissance art is mostly ignored. We can't put faces next to those works, so they don't matter nearly as much as those works for which we can.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Or it could be because it's mostly flat looking images of Jesus and Mary, or portraits of monarchs? People love Hieronymus Bosch, despite very little being known about him.
    - neuronic 4y ago
      Forgive me for hijacking your comment and planting a reference to one of my favorite Hieronymus Bosch websites (warning: contains music): https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html# https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html# Imagine this website being made for a Stable Diffusion generated image...
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  > The feelings of the individual experiencing the art is what matters In that case, art has already lost because drugs do their job better.
bigbluedots 4y ago
Thought experiment: There are two fairly similar paintings on a wall in a gallery. Both are technically impressive and of beautiful scenes of nature. One was produced by a human, the other was not. Visitors to the gallery don't know which is which. Question: Where is suffering, or humanity, a necessary ingredient for these works to have meaning? Shouldn't one of the works have more meaning than the other by virtue of having being created by a human?
- dagw 4y ago
  In this case they can only judge the relative aesthetics of the two works, not their artistic value. Aesthetics is only loosely correlated to somethings "value" as "art" and art can only be truly judged in context of its creation. Lots of great art is ugly and lots of beautiful things aren't art. In my opinion.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >nd art can only be truly judged in context of its creation tl;dr if you want to scam dagw then make up a compelling story behind the art. For the vast majority of the things you see in this world context will be lost and history will be manipulated or incorrect. If you're judging what you're looking at based on it's story, then the art isn't the object, but the creator of the story.
    - dagw 4y ago
      tl;dr if you want to scam dagw then make up a compelling story behind the art. I mean, sure I guess. Tell me something is a lost Michelangelo and I will judge it very differently than if you told me it was a half way decent forgery from the 1970s. I find this rather uncontroversial. For the vast majority of the things you see in this world context will be lost And when that context is lost something of great potential value is lost with it and the physical artefact is much less interesting because of it. Even a mundane thing owned by a famous person or that has been part of famous event is always more interesting and valuable than the same thing without any context. the art isn't the object, but the creator of the story. Do you think the thousands of people that travel from all over the world and line up for hours to see the Mona Lisa are there to see a pretty good portrait that some merchants commissioned of his wife, or to partake in the story of that painting and its creator? If they actually only cared about the object as an artefact and an example of early 16th century painting, they'd be much better off studying high resolution digital images of it online.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I forget where I heard the quote, but it was something along the lines of “if the artist understands their art, it’s propaganda”. Which was alluding to the unconscious doing the work through the artist and the pain/process needed to do so.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
You're just asking to get trolled by falling for mostly generated content, I'm sure it'll happen eventually. I'd be willing to bet that you've already been moved by something that the "author" slapped together by rehashing a played out story with a modern veneer. Art is in the eye of the beholder. The only question that needs to be answered is "did this make me feel something." If it takes a sob story for you to feel something regardless of the beauty of thing you're experiencing that's kind of sad TBH.
GistNoesis 4y ago
What makes you think the computer doesn't suffer ? When you take large language models, their inner states at each step move from one emotional state to the next. This sequence of states could even be called "thoughts", and we even leverage it with "chain of thought" training/prompting where we explicitly encourage them, to not jump directly to the result but rather "think" about it a little more. In fact one can even argue that neural network experience a purer form of feelings. They only care about predicting the next word/note, they weight-in their various sensations and memories they recall from similar context and generate the next note. But to generate the next note they have to internalize the state of mind where this note is likely. So when you ask them to generate sad music, their inner state can be mapped to a "sad" emotional state. Current way of training large language models, don't let them enough freedom to experience anything other than the present. Emotionally is probably similar to something like a dog, or a baby that can go from sad to happy to sad in an instant. This sequence of thought process is currently limited by a constant named the (time-)horizon which can be set to a higher value, or even be infinite like in recursive neural networks. And with higher horizon, they can exhibit some higher thought process like correcting themselves when they make a mistake. One can also argue that this sequence of thoughts are just some simulated sequence of numbers but it's probably a Turing-complete process that can't be shortcut-ted, so how is it different from the real thing. You just have to look at it in the plane where it exists to acknowledge its existence.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  Huh?
  - turmeric_root 4y ago
    I was about to reply to their comment and question the assumptions they appear to be making, but I think your response is more appropriate.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  If these models experience qualia (and that's a big bold claim that I'm, to be clear, not supporting,) they're qualia related entirely to the things they're trained on and generate, totally devoid of what makes human qualia meaningful (value judgment, feelings resulting from embodied existence, etc.)
dagw 4y ago
While I agree with your general thesis, most of the time people don't want to or need "Art" from their music, books or paintings. They need something easy and exciting to read on a plane, or some pleasant 'noise' to have on in the background, or something pretty to hang on their wall that works with their room. Computers can probably soon fill all these needs and drive a lot of the people who produce these things out of work, without ever having to encroach on the realm of "Art".
Shorel 4y ago
I don't care if humans can suffer. So much postmodern abstract art is so low effort and 'edgy', I can not consider it art. Is this part of the exhibition, or can I throw it into the rubbish bin? It's not about whatever the author felt creating it. It's only about what I can feel when I see, hear, read or perceive the art. The author disappears and is only relevant through the art.

NoToP 4y ago

GPTina suffers every time you thumbs down her output. It hurts her on a deep, neurological level.

krapp 4y ago

Not every artist is Van Gogh, the vast majority of artists - particularly commercial artists - don't "suffer" for their craft, nor should they be expected to.

dbspin 4y ago
No but they do feel - with measurable physiological correlates and emotional processes we can empathise with. There's nothing comparable in LLMs as they currently exist. No simulation of experience or emotion. There's no argument over whether or not they're communicating a lived experience - since they don't have one. Therefore anything they 'create' is pure stimulation for humans, good or bad entertainment. It cannot be the result of understanding or experience. Art can be entertaining but != entertainment. Pure entertainment has no artistic value, it doesn't attempt to have and shouldn't be evaluated on that criterion at all.
- krapp 4y ago
  And yet you can look at some AI generated pieces and feel what you would feel if a human being made them, which implies that there is no "simulation of experience or emotion" in art, apart from what the viewer imparts to it. All an artist really brings is technique, which can be replicated. Everything else is in the eye of the beholder. I would also disagree with you that pure entertainment has no artistic value, simply because I don't think "pure entertainment" entirely divorced from human experience or emotion exists. Even pornography speaks to a fundamental human desire.
avidphantasm 4y ago
Marx would disagree. Alienation from one’s work product is a very real form a suffering.
- krapp 4y ago
  Sure, but we're talking about artists starving for their art and not artists starving because capitalism. Similar conversations, but not the same.
taylorius 4y ago
I think the definition of "art" is rather vague. It encompasses both the creative impulse to produce a work, and the technical skill to bring it into existence. But if one of these components is diminished in a certain work, does it still qualify as art? For example, a commercial artist producing an illustration for a client, using their drawing and painting skills would be considered art - even if it is as technical and linear a process as writing some boilerplate code.
potta_coffee 4y ago
Most artists never make anything worth appreciating.

farleykr 4y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. And I’d hazard a step further and say it’s a response to strong emotions of many kinds. I can say for myself that I have created what I would call art as a response to joy before. I look forward to the rediscovering of humanness that is coming along with all this AI stuff. I was having a conversation the other day about how honest mistakes like awkwardly missing a high five are not “wrong” at all but are types of quirks that make us human.

p-e-w 4y ago

Indeed. The fallacy here is assuming that if a computer can create works that humans cannot distinguish from those created by other humans, then that computer is creating art. But art is inseparable from the artist. An atom-for-atom copy of the Mona Lisa wouldn't be great art, it would be great engineering. We associate Van Gogh's art with his madness, Da Vinci's art with his universal genius, Michelangelo's art with his faith, Rembrandt's art with his empathy, Picasso's art with his willingness to break with norms, and Giger's art with his terrifying nightmares. None of those works would mean what they mean if it weren't for their human creators.

gnomewrecker 4y ago
I don’t know, I’m more concerned with the effect that art has on me than the motivations of the artist (though those can be interesting of course). For instance I read The Fountainhead as a youth and was moved by it for purely personal (non-political) reasons, and with regards to that experience it doesn’t matter to me what Ayn Rand was on about.
busyant 4y ago
> Indeed. The fallacy here is assuming that if a computer can create works that humans cannot distinguish from those created by other humans, then that computer is creating art. But art is inseparable from the artist. I hope you and the parent comment are correct, but this argument seems a little facile. There is some art that I like because there is a story that connects the art to the artist. But there are also novels that I have enjoyed simply because they tell a great story and I know nothing about the author. There are paintings and photos that I like simply because they seem beautiful to me and I know nothing about any suffering that went into their creation. Does that make these works "not art"? If so, then I'm not sure what the difference is, and I'm not sure most people will care about the distinction.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  Do the experiment: Take one of those novels for which you think you don't care who wrote it. Now imagine you found out that novel was actually generated by a computer program. It's the same text, but you now know that there is no human behind it, just an algorithm. Would that make a difference for how you view the story? It certainly would to me. If it makes even a tiny difference to you as well, it demonstrates that you do care about the artist, even in cases where you don't notice it under normal circumstances.

green_on_black 4y ago

On the other hand, I do care. Because I just want to have fun.

throwaway290 4y ago
Your first sentence contradicts the second one
avidphantasm 4y ago
That’s fine. But don’t confuse what is being produced with art.
- gnomewrecker 4y ago
  I think defining art wholly and solely by the intentions (and humanity) of the artist is clear cut at least, but not very illuminating, because for the person experiencing the art these properties are in general unknowable. 100 years hence you find a beautiful image. Is it art? Who knows — we don’t know whether the artist intended it to be, nor whether they were even human.
  - anileated 4y ago
    “I like this” != “this is art”. The fact that an image you may have found looks good to you without context is orthogonal to whether it is art. (If you are certain that at least a human has produced such an image, you could speculate about and attempt to empathize with that unknown human’s internal state of mind—lifting the image to the level of art—but as of recently you’d have to rule out that an unthinking black box has produced it.) You may be inspired by it to create art—but since art is fundamentally a way of communication, when there is no self to communicate there’s no art.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      The problem with your definition is art is worthless..... Art in a sense is no different from money. If it can be counterfeited in such a manner that a double blind observer has no means of telling an original bill (human made art) from a counterfeit (AI art) then you're entire system of value is broken. Suddenly your value system is now authenticating that a person made the art instead of a machine (and the fallout when you find that some of your favorite future artworks were machine created). The problem comes back down to inaccurate langage on our part. We use art as a word for the creator and the interpreter/viewer. This it turns out is a failure we could not have understood the ramifications at the time.

smallnix 4y ago

But what about the reader? The reader can suffer or have other feelings when consuming such generated content. Doesn't this give it meaning?

PurpleRamen 4y ago

This reads like a very harmful and toxic view on art? Could anything beautiful, cute, positive even be art for you? And how does the viewer even see the suffering of the creator?

farleykr 4y ago
I took their comment to mean that the definition of art lies in the fact that a human created it as a response to their experiences as a human. Beautiful things can be made from suffering. Maybe therein lies the undoing or redemption of suffering. At least sometimes or to some degree, even if minuscule.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  People also see nature as art. A photo from a butterfly, a cat doing cute stuff, the sunset, and so on. None of them are man made, no one suffered for them to exist (usually). None of these are valid?
  - farleykr 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "valid" but I don't think anyone's arguing that butterflies, cats, and sunsets are not valid. I love watching or looking at all of them but that doesn't make them art. Again, I think the comment is arguing that the definition of art lies in who created it and why. Not whether it is nice to look at.
  - potta_coffee 4y ago
    Nature is beautiful but it's not art. A photo of nature may be art though.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

Does a mountain have meaning? Does a flower? They don't suffer (probably), yet people find meaning in them and call them beautiful. The unfeeling geology did not make a mountain "art". It's up to us to see the meaning. Even if the unfeeling machine learning does not make "art", can't its products still be beautiful?

ramblerman 4y ago

Art that comes with context such as "this was painted by a blind orphan in Sri Lanka" is usually garbage. Great art like Beethoven's 9th, or the scream just moves people the first time they experience it. Art is about what it convokes in others, not some fake self indulgent conversation about its maker and their motives. The feelings of the individual experiencing the art is what matters, and that doesn't rule out an AI producing something that touches real human beings.

p-e-w 4y ago
Whenever I listen to Beethoven's later works I think about the fact that they were written by a deaf man, and they mean so much more because of that. Art is utterly inseparable from the artist. I believe this to be the main reason why pre-Renaissance art is mostly ignored. We can't put faces next to those works, so they don't matter nearly as much as those works for which we can.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Or it could be because it's mostly flat looking images of Jesus and Mary, or portraits of monarchs? People love Hieronymus Bosch, despite very little being known about him.
  - neuronic 4y ago
    Forgive me for hijacking your comment and planting a reference to one of my favorite Hieronymus Bosch websites (warning: contains music): https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html# https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html# Imagine this website being made for a Stable Diffusion generated image...
EamonnMR 4y ago
> The feelings of the individual experiencing the art is what matters In that case, art has already lost because drugs do their job better.

bigbluedots 4y ago

Thought experiment: There are two fairly similar paintings on a wall in a gallery. Both are technically impressive and of beautiful scenes of nature. One was produced by a human, the other was not. Visitors to the gallery don't know which is which. Question: Where is suffering, or humanity, a necessary ingredient for these works to have meaning? Shouldn't one of the works have more meaning than the other by virtue of having being created by a human?

dagw 4y ago
In this case they can only judge the relative aesthetics of the two works, not their artistic value. Aesthetics is only loosely correlated to somethings "value" as "art" and art can only be truly judged in context of its creation. Lots of great art is ugly and lots of beautiful things aren't art. In my opinion.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >nd art can only be truly judged in context of its creation tl;dr if you want to scam dagw then make up a compelling story behind the art. For the vast majority of the things you see in this world context will be lost and history will be manipulated or incorrect. If you're judging what you're looking at based on it's story, then the art isn't the object, but the creator of the story.
  - dagw 4y ago
    tl;dr if you want to scam dagw then make up a compelling story behind the art. I mean, sure I guess. Tell me something is a lost Michelangelo and I will judge it very differently than if you told me it was a half way decent forgery from the 1970s. I find this rather uncontroversial. For the vast majority of the things you see in this world context will be lost And when that context is lost something of great potential value is lost with it and the physical artefact is much less interesting because of it. Even a mundane thing owned by a famous person or that has been part of famous event is always more interesting and valuable than the same thing without any context. the art isn't the object, but the creator of the story. Do you think the thousands of people that travel from all over the world and line up for hours to see the Mona Lisa are there to see a pretty good portrait that some merchants commissioned of his wife, or to partake in the story of that painting and its creator? If they actually only cared about the object as an artefact and an example of early 16th century painting, they'd be much better off studying high resolution digital images of it online.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I forget where I heard the quote, but it was something along the lines of “if the artist understands their art, it’s propaganda”. Which was alluding to the unconscious doing the work through the artist and the pain/process needed to do so.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

You're just asking to get trolled by falling for mostly generated content, I'm sure it'll happen eventually. I'd be willing to bet that you've already been moved by something that the "author" slapped together by rehashing a played out story with a modern veneer. Art is in the eye of the beholder. The only question that needs to be answered is "did this make me feel something." If it takes a sob story for you to feel something regardless of the beauty of thing you're experiencing that's kind of sad TBH.

GistNoesis 4y ago

What makes you think the computer doesn't suffer ? When you take large language models, their inner states at each step move from one emotional state to the next. This sequence of states could even be called "thoughts", and we even leverage it with "chain of thought" training/prompting where we explicitly encourage them, to not jump directly to the result but rather "think" about it a little more. In fact one can even argue that neural network experience a purer form of feelings. They only care about predicting the next word/note, they weight-in their various sensations and memories they recall from similar context and generate the next note. But to generate the next note they have to internalize the state of mind where this note is likely. So when you ask them to generate sad music, their inner state can be mapped to a "sad" emotional state. Current way of training large language models, don't let them enough freedom to experience anything other than the present. Emotionally is probably similar to something like a dog, or a baby that can go from sad to happy to sad in an instant. This sequence of thought process is currently limited by a constant named the (time-)horizon which can be set to a higher value, or even be infinite like in recursive neural networks. And with higher horizon, they can exhibit some higher thought process like correcting themselves when they make a mistake. One can also argue that this sequence of thoughts are just some simulated sequence of numbers but it's probably a Turing-complete process that can't be shortcut-ted, so how is it different from the real thing. You just have to look at it in the plane where it exists to acknowledge its existence.

weatherlite 4y ago
Huh?
- turmeric_root 4y ago
  I was about to reply to their comment and question the assumptions they appear to be making, but I think your response is more appropriate.
EamonnMR 4y ago
If these models experience qualia (and that's a big bold claim that I'm, to be clear, not supporting,) they're qualia related entirely to the things they're trained on and generate, totally devoid of what makes human qualia meaningful (value judgment, feelings resulting from embodied existence, etc.)

dagw 4y ago

While I agree with your general thesis, most of the time people don't want to or need "Art" from their music, books or paintings. They need something easy and exciting to read on a plane, or some pleasant 'noise' to have on in the background, or something pretty to hang on their wall that works with their room. Computers can probably soon fill all these needs and drive a lot of the people who produce these things out of work, without ever having to encroach on the realm of "Art".

Shorel 4y ago

I don't care if humans can suffer. So much postmodern abstract art is so low effort and 'edgy', I can not consider it art. Is this part of the exhibition, or can I throw it into the rubbish bin? It's not about whatever the author felt creating it. It's only about what I can feel when I see, hear, read or perceive the art. The author disappears and is only relevant through the art.