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AI is to the point where it can create it's own style. We talk about these styles as if it's some kind of sacred thing. What you don't realize is that we're pas

AI is to the point where it can create it's own style. We talk about these styles as if it's some kind of sacred thing. What you don't realize is that we're past this point. There's a latent space of different art within a certain style category, but there's the latent space of different categories itself. AI can already traverse the space between art in a single style category AND it can traverse the gradient space BETWEEN categories. It can even go beyond that. AI has turned everything into a freaking best fit curve. Copywrite is such a mundane question. It's just a fight against the inevitable truth. That human creativity are just points on that curve. Nothing more, nothing less. I view this as a BAD thing. Copywrite is good, it's great. It's a law that implies what humans create has meaning. But we have to face the truth. That the output we produce is in actuality just one part of a high level pattern. That's all we are.

monadINtop 2y ago
lol sometimes I wonder if the reason so many tech bros make so many grandiose statements about how AI has already trancended the bounds of human creativity is because they've never really had actual experience with art and literature and music growing up. They say things like this and then you go and look for an example of these incredible works of artificial art and it is the biggest pile of shit you have ever seen. Just like how they think that these glorified typing assistants function identically to the human brain. I mean maybe they really do replicate the level of creativity and intelligence of the people who believe these things, but maybe the people with decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical. Its kinda like when people talk about research mathematics like its all adding really big numbers together or calculating really tricky integrals.
- spywaregorilla 2y ago
  Your dignified belief in the supremacy of human ingenuity will be cold comfort to the young artists struggling to find employment
  - monadINtop 2y ago
    Yep, you're right. But idk why you phrased that like it's a rebuttal to my criticism. This is another failure of our economic system, for incentivising the owners of art production to churn out literal mindless slop to cut costs, instead of safe guarding artists and creators for the sake of their intrinsic value to society and humanity. Since, of course, they must eternally seek to reproduce capital to the detriment of everything else.
    - spywaregorilla 2y ago
      Well your argument is admonishing tech bros as if they don't get it, but generally they do get it completely in this context. The goal here is not replacing great art. It's replacing art assets. Comes off as naive and distracting to me.
      - monadINtop 2y ago
        The distinction is philosophical. Tech bros consider "art assests" or consumer oriented products as art. In their eyes its capibility as a tool for profit is a downstream effect. My point was that since their entire purpose in life revolves around developing and refining technology for the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can be sold for a profit. When people post 3d versions of the Mona Lisa or a shitty remix of Monet's water lillies with breathless praise, it's because in their eyes the stylistic reproduction or reinterpetation of the literal shapes and colors on a flat screen is all there is to art, not merely because it demonstrates utility in replacing already exploited sectors of creative workers. I don't think we disagree about any of this. I think that I'm just making a tangential point to the article in response to a dumb comment, while you are talking about the subject more directly. Otherwise I fail to see what you think is naive, if only because I've seen so many examples of this rot of understanding around the essence of artistic expression from the mouthpieces of silicone valley and our wider, increasingly corporatized, culture.
        spywaregorilla 2y ago
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Not yet but this is not too far off: One day you're going to encounter something that really moves you. And then you'll realize it was procedurally generated, by an AI. We're only about 1 - 2 years into AI. Think about the pace of progress.
  - astrange 2y ago
    There's a long tradition of random art and if you like that, there's dril GPT and Magic card GPT that produced lots of good absurdity. Of course, there's a human curation pass after it to let it be called art. https://x.com/drilbot_aww/status/1792077476338057292 https://x.com/drilbot_aww/status/1792077476338057292
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      We just started on this. Imagine what the next two decades will bring. This long tradition of stuff you speak of has only been a couple years at most. Draw the trend line. Extrapolate the inevitable consequence.
      - astrange 2y ago
        A lot longer than that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art Could also count elephant paintings and such.
- astrange 2y ago
  If you need intelligent things to act exactly like a human being I think you're going to look bad in the future where we have aliens or uplifted ravens and this looks racist/speciesist. Being trapped in a computer with no environmental interaction is obviously a big difference though. > but maybe the people with decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical. Like other kinds of academics, many of those people are cranks so they're not necessarily right. For instance, some of them are Chomsky. (But it's their job to be wrong most of the time so of course this is expected.)
  - monadINtop 2y ago
    No, you need intelligent things to be intelligent. And it would probably be good to distinguish between "things that appear superficially intelligent" and "things that have genuine capacity for internal experience" while you're at it, since the popular perception on this forum seems to be to just declare that physicalism/materialism is obviously correct and explanatory and we can just brush the hard problem of conciousness under the rug. People are so eager to endow the statistical model that has been designed to produce responses that are statistically feasable in a given context (a very impressive feat of technology to be clear) as having internal experience. Chomsky happens to be more right about LLMs than 90% of the popular discourse will ever be able to understand, which isn't that suprising considering the impact if this "crank's" earlier work.
    - astrange 2y ago
      Chomsky's critique of LLMs was somehow not even correct about his own theories (https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529 https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529). And of course has the usual problem of 1. claiming LLMs are random statistical models (they aren't, the sampler is) 2. claiming instead of generating correct text they only "seemingly" generate correct text and not explaining why this is any less impossible. But people have built explicit grammar knowledge into LLMs (it's in llama.cpp) and nobody seems to need it to make English text. Of course the main reason Chomsky is a crank is that he's completely convinced he's right about politics despite his unbroken record of endorsing every mass murderer in the world as long as they're anti-American.
saintfire 2y ago
Wish we could apply that logic to software. AI is in a magical universe where we all pretend copyright isn't a thing just because we don't like it.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  You missed the point. You view it as a war against human rights. Copywrite. I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning. We're living in a bubble. Where we pretend it all still matters and that AI will always be inferior to everything we do forever and for all eternity. All bubbles will eventually pop.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning. If "human meaning" goes, all else goes with it; Social media, search, education, ambition, creation, innovation... And along with that goes Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, Amazon... There's nothing that exists outside that "bubble" of human meaning, Technology must preserve it, or technology dies. Unless you are confirming what many have already said.. that digital technology has become death cult?
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      Human meaning won't go out the door. It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it from machine generated content. Machine generated content will become more superior and more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning. You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last vestiges of human created things like real painted art or vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-digital books: An exercise in irrationality in attempt to reverse a war already lost. Perhaps that is what will save human meaning in the end. Self delusion. We will deliberately ignore superior and better content and tell ourselves that human works are and always will be the best. That's a little of what's happening in this thread already.
      - 2y ago
croniev 2y ago
Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. One mission of art is to find a different dimension, out of the curves reach, until eventually it becomes more common and the curve can be fitted to it again. AI cannot think outside of the box because it cannot think at all, there is no meaning behind what it does.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  >Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve. It doesn't matter what turns what into what into some point on the curve or finding a different "dimension" If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that curve you've found the algorithm for human creativity. We are close, deadly close, to the end. Especially given the fact that these AI algorithms literally treat the problem as a best fit curve from a mathematical perspective. Like the analogy I made is not even really an analogy, it's the reality of how these algorithms actually work.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    "We're at the tippity top of the mountain, but we're only halfway up".
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      We're at the foot of the mountain. We only just started.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        Surveys of humans strongly demonstrate that they are rather impressed with their mountain climbing accomplishments thus far. The main shortcoming to humanity is only the actions of those other people.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve. That's what they said about mathematical proofs. > If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that curve you've found the algorithm for human creativity. And that's what they said about programs that take finite time to prove whether or not other programs halt. Neither of those turned out to be true though. (In particular, because the curve you're talking about is infinitely large and so you cannot compute on it in finite time.) Also, real world things cannot be reduced to their bit descriptions because they have metadata even if their descriptions are identical: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

monadINtop 2y ago

lol sometimes I wonder if the reason so many tech bros make so many grandiose statements about how AI has already trancended the bounds of human creativity is because they've never really had actual experience with art and literature and music growing up. They say things like this and then you go and look for an example of these incredible works of artificial art and it is the biggest pile of shit you have ever seen. Just like how they think that these glorified typing assistants function identically to the human brain. I mean maybe they really do replicate the level of creativity and intelligence of the people who believe these things, but maybe the people with decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical. Its kinda like when people talk about research mathematics like its all adding really big numbers together or calculating really tricky integrals.

spywaregorilla 2y ago
Your dignified belief in the supremacy of human ingenuity will be cold comfort to the young artists struggling to find employment
- monadINtop 2y ago
  Yep, you're right. But idk why you phrased that like it's a rebuttal to my criticism. This is another failure of our economic system, for incentivising the owners of art production to churn out literal mindless slop to cut costs, instead of safe guarding artists and creators for the sake of their intrinsic value to society and humanity. Since, of course, they must eternally seek to reproduce capital to the detriment of everything else.
  - spywaregorilla 2y ago
    Well your argument is admonishing tech bros as if they don't get it, but generally they do get it completely in this context. The goal here is not replacing great art. It's replacing art assets. Comes off as naive and distracting to me.
    - monadINtop 2y ago
      The distinction is philosophical. Tech bros consider "art assests" or consumer oriented products as art. In their eyes its capibility as a tool for profit is a downstream effect. My point was that since their entire purpose in life revolves around developing and refining technology for the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can be sold for a profit. When people post 3d versions of the Mona Lisa or a shitty remix of Monet's water lillies with breathless praise, it's because in their eyes the stylistic reproduction or reinterpetation of the literal shapes and colors on a flat screen is all there is to art, not merely because it demonstrates utility in replacing already exploited sectors of creative workers. I don't think we disagree about any of this. I think that I'm just making a tangential point to the article in response to a dumb comment, while you are talking about the subject more directly. Otherwise I fail to see what you think is naive, if only because I've seen so many examples of this rot of understanding around the essence of artistic expression from the mouthpieces of silicone valley and our wider, increasingly corporatized, culture.
      - spywaregorilla 2y ago
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Not yet but this is not too far off: One day you're going to encounter something that really moves you. And then you'll realize it was procedurally generated, by an AI. We're only about 1 - 2 years into AI. Think about the pace of progress.
- astrange 2y ago
  There's a long tradition of random art and if you like that, there's dril GPT and Magic card GPT that produced lots of good absurdity. Of course, there's a human curation pass after it to let it be called art. https://x.com/drilbot_aww/status/1792077476338057292 https://x.com/drilbot_aww/status/1792077476338057292
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    We just started on this. Imagine what the next two decades will bring. This long tradition of stuff you speak of has only been a couple years at most. Draw the trend line. Extrapolate the inevitable consequence.
    - astrange 2y ago
      A lot longer than that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art Could also count elephant paintings and such.
astrange 2y ago
If you need intelligent things to act exactly like a human being I think you're going to look bad in the future where we have aliens or uplifted ravens and this looks racist/speciesist. Being trapped in a computer with no environmental interaction is obviously a big difference though. > but maybe the people with decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical. Like other kinds of academics, many of those people are cranks so they're not necessarily right. For instance, some of them are Chomsky. (But it's their job to be wrong most of the time so of course this is expected.)
- monadINtop 2y ago
  No, you need intelligent things to be intelligent. And it would probably be good to distinguish between "things that appear superficially intelligent" and "things that have genuine capacity for internal experience" while you're at it, since the popular perception on this forum seems to be to just declare that physicalism/materialism is obviously correct and explanatory and we can just brush the hard problem of conciousness under the rug. People are so eager to endow the statistical model that has been designed to produce responses that are statistically feasable in a given context (a very impressive feat of technology to be clear) as having internal experience. Chomsky happens to be more right about LLMs than 90% of the popular discourse will ever be able to understand, which isn't that suprising considering the impact if this "crank's" earlier work.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Chomsky's critique of LLMs was somehow not even correct about his own theories (https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529 https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529). And of course has the usual problem of 1. claiming LLMs are random statistical models (they aren't, the sampler is) 2. claiming instead of generating correct text they only "seemingly" generate correct text and not explaining why this is any less impossible. But people have built explicit grammar knowledge into LLMs (it's in llama.cpp) and nobody seems to need it to make English text. Of course the main reason Chomsky is a crank is that he's completely convinced he's right about politics despite his unbroken record of endorsing every mass murderer in the world as long as they're anti-American.

saintfire 2y ago

Wish we could apply that logic to software. AI is in a magical universe where we all pretend copyright isn't a thing just because we don't like it.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
You missed the point. You view it as a war against human rights. Copywrite. I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning. We're living in a bubble. Where we pretend it all still matters and that AI will always be inferior to everything we do forever and for all eternity. All bubbles will eventually pop.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning. If "human meaning" goes, all else goes with it; Social media, search, education, ambition, creation, innovation... And along with that goes Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, Amazon... There's nothing that exists outside that "bubble" of human meaning, Technology must preserve it, or technology dies. Unless you are confirming what many have already said.. that digital technology has become death cult?
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Human meaning won't go out the door. It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it from machine generated content. Machine generated content will become more superior and more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning. You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last vestiges of human created things like real painted art or vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-digital books: An exercise in irrationality in attempt to reverse a war already lost. Perhaps that is what will save human meaning in the end. Self delusion. We will deliberately ignore superior and better content and tell ourselves that human works are and always will be the best. That's a little of what's happening in this thread already.
    - 2y ago

croniev 2y ago

Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. One mission of art is to find a different dimension, out of the curves reach, until eventually it becomes more common and the curve can be fitted to it again. AI cannot think outside of the box because it cannot think at all, there is no meaning behind what it does.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
>Human creativity turns into a point on that curve. All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve. It doesn't matter what turns what into what into some point on the curve or finding a different "dimension" If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that curve you've found the algorithm for human creativity. We are close, deadly close, to the end. Especially given the fact that these AI algorithms literally treat the problem as a best fit curve from a mathematical perspective. Like the analogy I made is not even really an analogy, it's the reality of how these algorithms actually work.
- mistermann 2y ago
  "We're at the tippity top of the mountain, but we're only halfway up".
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    We're at the foot of the mountain. We only just started.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Surveys of humans strongly demonstrate that they are rather impressed with their mountain climbing accomplishments thus far. The main shortcoming to humanity is only the actions of those other people.
- astrange 2y ago
  > All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve. That's what they said about mathematical proofs. > If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that curve you've found the algorithm for human creativity. And that's what they said about programs that take finite time to prove whether or not other programs halt. Neither of those turned out to be true though. (In particular, because the curve you're talking about is infinitely large and so you cannot compute on it in finite time.) Also, real world things cannot be reduced to their bit descriptions because they have metadata even if their descriptions are identical: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23