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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 b

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
        > 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 And I think that's grossly missing the point. The vast majority of people making art are just trying to make something look aesthetically nice within some sort of provided communication framework. And that's perfectly fine. Frankly I think elevating artists to the pedestal of the illuminating the human condition is very damaging to their actual interests
        monadINtop 2y ago
        Is creating things of aesthetic quality not of value with respect to the human condition? Is not some subset of that aesthetic quality derivative of the intuition and intention of a human mind? Sure, if you want to build some tehchnology to make designing packaging for dog food more effecient go ahead, as long as it isn't the previous dog food packaging creators that are being made to absorb the economic cost of the new technology (which they are). But I hope at last some subset of human art strives to do more than that, and I think it's a bad thing that the incentive to increase revenue at the expense of quality has now expanded past being a tool to improve efficiency of laborious tasks and is now instead cutting costs via cutting artistic value.
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.

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
      > 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 And I think that's grossly missing the point. The vast majority of people making art are just trying to make something look aesthetically nice within some sort of provided communication framework. And that's perfectly fine. Frankly I think elevating artists to the pedestal of the illuminating the human condition is very damaging to their actual interests
      - monadINtop 2y ago
        Is creating things of aesthetic quality not of value with respect to the human condition? Is not some subset of that aesthetic quality derivative of the intuition and intention of a human mind? Sure, if you want to build some tehchnology to make designing packaging for dog food more effecient go ahead, as long as it isn't the previous dog food packaging creators that are being made to absorb the economic cost of the new technology (which they are). But I hope at last some subset of human art strives to do more than that, and I think it's a bad thing that the incentive to increase revenue at the expense of quality has now expanded past being a tool to improve efficiency of laborious tasks and is now instead cutting costs via cutting artistic value.

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.