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I don't seen any fundamental difference between AI creating art and humans creating art. Both of these things absorb huge data sets and spit out something simil

by cortic 4y ago

I don't seen any fundamental difference between AI creating art and humans creating art. Both of these things absorb huge data sets and spit out something similar but different to the data sets they absorbed. Both can apply their 'art' within a defined scope by cross-referencing their data sets. Neither can create something that isn't in some way part of their data set.

Jensson 4y ago
Some humans creates novel things. You might not be able to think that way, but other humans can. For example, humans started making computer games, but there were no computer games before, and now we have all these genres and stuff. Humans are capable of doing creative novel works from nothing. So you personally might be an uncreative automaton who just copies what others said or did, but that isn't normal, other humans can think in novel ways.
- krapp 4y ago
  Name one computer game created without any cultural or historical referents then, "from nothing" as it were. If you mention Pong or Spacewar, you've already lost. Table tennis and the Lensman books, respectively. Literally anything humans do is based on prior influences, referents and data. There's no aether out of which the "spark" of inspiration strikes, nor does anything emerge from the pure vaccuum, creativity is just neurons doing what they will with the information they already have. Therefore the only difference between human genius and the mediocre output of AIs is complexity, and the only question worth asking is how far that gap can reasonably be bridged. It's understandable that this is upsetting, because it threatens one of the last bastions of human divinity, and no one really wants to believe human beings in all their splendor, subtlety and complexity are just a pile of ad-hoc stochastic wetware algorithms running on a hemisphere of gelatinous goo, no more divine than a stone on the ground, but eventually as this technology matures we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that creativity can be manufactured, just like anything else, and like anything manufactured, its quality will inevitably surpass anything humans are capable of.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    All of those things were created by humans. An AI isn't an individual, an AI must be compared to the entirety of humanity. The Go AI for example is better than humanity at Go, it is capable of being creative at Go and doesn't just repeat human moves in different combinations. Humans are capable of being creative similarly to how the Go AI is capable of being creative, statistical AI's that just copies doesn't seem to be capable of such creativity.
  - jonathanstrange 4y ago
    What are the "cultural or historical referents" of Tetris, Angry Birds, and Snake?
    - defrost 4y ago
      Pyramid building, The Emu War, and Pentecostal snake handling ... clearly.
    - krapp 4y ago
      Tetris: the author's childhood playing pentominoes[0] Angry Birds: "a sketch of stylized wingless birds[1]", apparently, and games using that basic physics go back ages, and are inspired by cannon warfare[2] Snake: all Snake games are based on Blockade, published by Gremlin industries, where I found this[3] on an interesting site HN might like "[Lane Hauck] While we were designing wall games, I was tinkering in the back room with a video circuit that became our Blockade game board. I kept showing my work to Frank Fogleman and Jerry, pestering them with the “can we get into video now?” question. I made a 32x24 cell frame buffer with graphical characters. I was intrigued by the random walk in Physics…which said a drunk taking steps in random directions around a lamppost would gravitate to the lamppost. I decided to program an arrow to be the drunk, and watched it flit around the screen for about a minute before getting bored. Then I thought, what if the drunk can’t visit the same square twice? I made that adjustment, and watched the arrow move a bit and then get trapped. The step from there to Blockade was a small one. (Hauck 2012)" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception [1] https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game [3] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of-gremlin_25.html http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultima...
- college_physics 4y ago
  Ha ha, love this. Ofcourse what we might call "higher" brain functionality is not uniformly distributed as realized capabilities, being a obscure mix of innate hardwiring and education. But it would be extremely odd if it wasn't quite uniformly available to all fully functioning brains in a qualitative and in-principle manner. Which begs the question: why would individuals intentionally diminish the own status when there is nothing much objective to support it? I guess it is for them to answer this, but what I would volunteer as a possibility is the enormous power of collective mental models / narratives. By adopting the "brain is a computer" narrative you become member (or aspired to become) of a certain social group that, incidentally, has been "winning" in a certain socio-economic context.
- cortic 4y ago
  Humans evolved playing as a teaching (data set input) strategy. We took playing and trees and made games around climbing, we took playing and puzzling things and made puzzle games, we took computers and puzzle games and made video games; We have a very similar algorithm to AI for creating 'new' things, that never really strays from our data sets.
SilverBirch 4y ago
The difference is basically... understanding. Like yeah, sure if you abstract away the concepts AI writing something is similar to Humans writing something, but let's dig into the actual detail: >Both of these things absorb huge data sets Yes, and this point the AI is probably absorbing more total data, but the human understands structure of that data better. A good new book isn't just some new variation of concept, the author has a structured understanding of the relevant work that came before - and it's emotional and cultural impact, and intelligently builds on that. It may be that the AI is doing the computer equivalent of this process. But AI might never write Lord of the Rings because an AI never served in WW1 as a formative experience in it's youth. That's just one more thing that was in Tolkein's "data set". Is great AI fiction only capable of being appreciated by other AI who have the same shared experience?
- missingdays 4y ago
  > never served in WW1 as a formative experience Never served in a WW yet
rob74 4y ago
The difference is that when an enthusiastic but not particularly talented 12-year-old kid who has read all Sherlock Holmes stories writes a new one, that's not as newsworthy as when ChatGPT does it, although it's basically the same level of "artistry".
esailija 4y ago
Firstly, if you stop all human input into AI and have AI only output based on other AI output you will never generate anything new in a trillion years, it just regresses into variations of the original human input before it was stopped. It will never evolve as humans do as it is just a statistical trick at the end of the day. Secodly, humans take only a few examples while AI needs trillions. AI built on a few examples would not have enough data.
- cortic 4y ago
  If course it will, probably faster than humans, we (both human and AI) don't create new ideas, we take existing ideas and smash them together internally to create something we think is novel.. The size of the data sets is not so different, humans take millions of examples within millions of examples over decades from birth to produce anything of substance.
- optimalsolver 4y ago
  Alpha-Zero trained on its own generated data. It turned out that disregarding human data allowed it to become unbeatable in its domain (Go).
- danenania 4y ago
  I would point out that this exact process (AI training against AI) produced novel and counter-intuitive insights in chess, go, poker, and other games that would have been labelled creative and brilliant if a human had come up with them and used them to win.
college_physics 4y ago
> Neither can create something that isn't in some way part of their data set. Thank you for providing a clear example of what I term "selling humanity short" None of human art exists outside the extremely complex cultural evolution history where bits and pieces of perceived reality are internalized by individuals (using entirely novel and evolving mental models and representations that we hardly understand) and is then communicated, gets transplanted and recognized as similar experiences in the brains of other humans, in an ever evolving chain of brain to brain interactions via (much more mundane) physical channels. To make all this extraordinary stuff fit the current AI narrative people opt to wield a dehumanizing sledgehammer to eliminate anything but the in / out information processing concept (ignoring the garbage-in / garbage-out problem). But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for AI to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and decide to write a poem about it.
- nickpp 4y ago
  > using entirely novel and evolving mental models and representations that we hardly understand What if they're just statistics plus some randomizer?
  - freejazz 4y ago
    What if you've never had a creative thought in your life?
    - nickpp 4y ago
      Very possible. How would you recognize a creative thought if you had one?
- cortic 4y ago
  >None of human art exists outside the extremely complex [perceive data]>[internalize]>[algorithm]>[output]> That's just a description of what the AI is doing with a tacked on group interaction that AI will do when more AI art is available. >dehumanizing sledgehammer In other words people tend to be objective, i disagree but i don't see the problem. If our only difference is because we can anthropomorphize humans better than AIs then there is no objective difference. But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for Humans to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and be guided to write a poem about it.
marstall 4y ago
a key difference between bad art and good art is that good art contains something conceptually new, and chatgpt struggles to come up with new things.
- cortic 4y ago
  So do humans.
lm28469 4y ago
Do you see a difference between ants and humans ? We're just groups of tubes, you put food in one end and it shits it on the other end, in between these events we mostly run around and do meaningless things, from time to time we find more food to put in our tubes.
- cortic 4y ago
  I don't see any difference between ants and humans within the context of eating. Even preparing food is similar. And i don't see any difference in human and AI within the context of creating art. If you are trying to conflate those things, you need to do a better job.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    I think that speaks more to your "sight" ability than it does the difference between human creativity and an algorithm
    - cortic 4y ago
      I am perceptive, thanks.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        You are making my point for me!
        cortic 4y ago
        Well, someone has to.
        freejazz 4y ago
        Blind man says he can't see something... and we are supposed to think it's not there? You don't realize this isn't an obvious parallel to your argument? So much for perception
freejazz 4y ago
"Both of these things absorb huge data sets and spit out something similar but different to the data sets they absorbed" This is just fitting the data to your assumption. It's like saying humans just get in the car and use their eyes to drive. While it might be objectively true to an extent, it is so misleading in what it falls to account for, which is actually relevant, that it's basically a useless statement.

by cortic 4y ago

Jensson 4y ago

Some humans creates novel things. You might not be able to think that way, but other humans can. For example, humans started making computer games, but there were no computer games before, and now we have all these genres and stuff. Humans are capable of doing creative novel works from nothing. So you personally might be an uncreative automaton who just copies what others said or did, but that isn't normal, other humans can think in novel ways.

krapp 4y ago
Name one computer game created without any cultural or historical referents then, "from nothing" as it were. If you mention Pong or Spacewar, you've already lost. Table tennis and the Lensman books, respectively. Literally anything humans do is based on prior influences, referents and data. There's no aether out of which the "spark" of inspiration strikes, nor does anything emerge from the pure vaccuum, creativity is just neurons doing what they will with the information they already have. Therefore the only difference between human genius and the mediocre output of AIs is complexity, and the only question worth asking is how far that gap can reasonably be bridged. It's understandable that this is upsetting, because it threatens one of the last bastions of human divinity, and no one really wants to believe human beings in all their splendor, subtlety and complexity are just a pile of ad-hoc stochastic wetware algorithms running on a hemisphere of gelatinous goo, no more divine than a stone on the ground, but eventually as this technology matures we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that creativity can be manufactured, just like anything else, and like anything manufactured, its quality will inevitably surpass anything humans are capable of.
- Jensson 4y ago
  All of those things were created by humans. An AI isn't an individual, an AI must be compared to the entirety of humanity. The Go AI for example is better than humanity at Go, it is capable of being creative at Go and doesn't just repeat human moves in different combinations. Humans are capable of being creative similarly to how the Go AI is capable of being creative, statistical AI's that just copies doesn't seem to be capable of such creativity.
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  What are the "cultural or historical referents" of Tetris, Angry Birds, and Snake?
  - defrost 4y ago
    Pyramid building, The Emu War, and Pentecostal snake handling ... clearly.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Tetris: the author's childhood playing pentominoes[0] Angry Birds: "a sketch of stylized wingless birds[1]", apparently, and games using that basic physics go back ages, and are inspired by cannon warfare[2] Snake: all Snake games are based on Blockade, published by Gremlin industries, where I found this[3] on an interesting site HN might like "[Lane Hauck] While we were designing wall games, I was tinkering in the back room with a video circuit that became our Blockade game board. I kept showing my work to Frank Fogleman and Jerry, pestering them with the “can we get into video now?” question. I made a 32x24 cell frame buffer with graphical characters. I was intrigued by the random walk in Physics…which said a drunk taking steps in random directions around a lamppost would gravitate to the lamppost. I decided to program an arrow to be the drunk, and watched it flit around the screen for about a minute before getting bored. Then I thought, what if the drunk can’t visit the same square twice? I made that adjustment, and watched the arrow move a bit and then get trapped. The step from there to Blockade was a small one. (Hauck 2012)" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Conception [1] https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game [3] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of-gremlin_25.html http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultima...
college_physics 4y ago
Ha ha, love this. Ofcourse what we might call "higher" brain functionality is not uniformly distributed as realized capabilities, being a obscure mix of innate hardwiring and education. But it would be extremely odd if it wasn't quite uniformly available to all fully functioning brains in a qualitative and in-principle manner. Which begs the question: why would individuals intentionally diminish the own status when there is nothing much objective to support it? I guess it is for them to answer this, but what I would volunteer as a possibility is the enormous power of collective mental models / narratives. By adopting the "brain is a computer" narrative you become member (or aspired to become) of a certain social group that, incidentally, has been "winning" in a certain socio-economic context.
cortic 4y ago
Humans evolved playing as a teaching (data set input) strategy. We took playing and trees and made games around climbing, we took playing and puzzling things and made puzzle games, we took computers and puzzle games and made video games; We have a very similar algorithm to AI for creating 'new' things, that never really strays from our data sets.

SilverBirch 4y ago

The difference is basically... understanding. Like yeah, sure if you abstract away the concepts AI writing something is similar to Humans writing something, but let's dig into the actual detail: >Both of these things absorb huge data sets Yes, and this point the AI is probably absorbing more total data, but the human understands structure of that data better. A good new book isn't just some new variation of concept, the author has a structured understanding of the relevant work that came before - and it's emotional and cultural impact, and intelligently builds on that. It may be that the AI is doing the computer equivalent of this process. But AI might never write Lord of the Rings because an AI never served in WW1 as a formative experience in it's youth. That's just one more thing that was in Tolkein's "data set". Is great AI fiction only capable of being appreciated by other AI who have the same shared experience?

missingdays 4y ago
> never served in WW1 as a formative experience Never served in a WW yet

rob74 4y ago

The difference is that when an enthusiastic but not particularly talented 12-year-old kid who has read all Sherlock Holmes stories writes a new one, that's not as newsworthy as when ChatGPT does it, although it's basically the same level of "artistry".

esailija 4y ago

Firstly, if you stop all human input into AI and have AI only output based on other AI output you will never generate anything new in a trillion years, it just regresses into variations of the original human input before it was stopped. It will never evolve as humans do as it is just a statistical trick at the end of the day. Secodly, humans take only a few examples while AI needs trillions. AI built on a few examples would not have enough data.

cortic 4y ago
If course it will, probably faster than humans, we (both human and AI) don't create new ideas, we take existing ideas and smash them together internally to create something we think is novel.. The size of the data sets is not so different, humans take millions of examples within millions of examples over decades from birth to produce anything of substance.
optimalsolver 4y ago
Alpha-Zero trained on its own generated data. It turned out that disregarding human data allowed it to become unbeatable in its domain (Go).
danenania 4y ago
I would point out that this exact process (AI training against AI) produced novel and counter-intuitive insights in chess, go, poker, and other games that would have been labelled creative and brilliant if a human had come up with them and used them to win.

college_physics 4y ago

> Neither can create something that isn't in some way part of their data set. Thank you for providing a clear example of what I term "selling humanity short" None of human art exists outside the extremely complex cultural evolution history where bits and pieces of perceived reality are internalized by individuals (using entirely novel and evolving mental models and representations that we hardly understand) and is then communicated, gets transplanted and recognized as similar experiences in the brains of other humans, in an ever evolving chain of brain to brain interactions via (much more mundane) physical channels. To make all this extraordinary stuff fit the current AI narrative people opt to wield a dehumanizing sledgehammer to eliminate anything but the in / out information processing concept (ignoring the garbage-in / garbage-out problem). But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for AI to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and decide to write a poem about it.

nickpp 4y ago
> using entirely novel and evolving mental models and representations that we hardly understand What if they're just statistics plus some randomizer?
- freejazz 4y ago
  What if you've never had a creative thought in your life?
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Very possible. How would you recognize a creative thought if you had one?
cortic 4y ago
>None of human art exists outside the extremely complex [perceive data]>[internalize]>[algorithm]>[output]> That's just a description of what the AI is doing with a tacked on group interaction that AI will do when more AI art is available. >dehumanizing sledgehammer In other words people tend to be objective, i disagree but i don't see the problem. If our only difference is because we can anthropomorphize humans better than AIs then there is no objective difference. But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for Humans to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and be guided to write a poem about it.

marstall 4y ago

a key difference between bad art and good art is that good art contains something conceptually new, and chatgpt struggles to come up with new things.

cortic 4y ago
So do humans.

lm28469 4y ago

Do you see a difference between ants and humans ? We're just groups of tubes, you put food in one end and it shits it on the other end, in between these events we mostly run around and do meaningless things, from time to time we find more food to put in our tubes.

cortic 4y ago
I don't see any difference between ants and humans within the context of eating. Even preparing food is similar. And i don't see any difference in human and AI within the context of creating art. If you are trying to conflate those things, you need to do a better job.
- freejazz 4y ago
  I think that speaks more to your "sight" ability than it does the difference between human creativity and an algorithm
  - cortic 4y ago
    I am perceptive, thanks.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      You are making my point for me!
      - cortic 4y ago
        Well, someone has to.
        freejazz 4y ago
        Blind man says he can't see something... and we are supposed to think it's not there? You don't realize this isn't an obvious parallel to your argument? So much for perception

freejazz 4y ago

"Both of these things absorb huge data sets and spit out something similar but different to the data sets they absorbed" This is just fitting the data to your assumption. It's like saying humans just get in the car and use their eyes to drive. While it might be objectively true to an extent, it is so misleading in what it falls to account for, which is actually relevant, that it's basically a useless statement.