The fact that feelings of love and closeness could be prompted by a mere chemical was deeply saddening to me. It wrecked my worldview.
"Love is just the result of some chemical? Then it's not even real!" I thought to myself.
Fast-forward ~20 years later, and that's proven to be an obvious— and massive— and useless— oversimplification.
Of course love isn't "just a reaction caused by a chemical." It's a fantastically complex emergent property of our biological system that we still absolutely do not understand.
It's the same with thinking: are parts of it analogous to pattern matching? Sure! Is this the whole story? Not even close.
Now contrarian to the contrarian view: many of us live in bubble echos and go for the popular opinion instead of critical thinking, so maybe that's a bar too high even for humans.
and how do you do that? By pattern-matching on "high-quality source"
LLMs do not have that capability, fundamentally.
Making totally new innovations in art, particularly ones that people end up liking, is a whole different ball game.
Look at something like [Luncheon on the Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27herbe)
This painting was revolutionary. When it was first exhibited in Paris, people were shocked. It was rejected from the Salon (the most prominent art exhibition at the time). Yet, 10 years later, every painting in the Salon resembled it. And you can draw a line from this painting, to Monet, from which you can draw a line to Picasso, from which you can draw a line to Pollock....
Obviously, none of these are totally new innovations, they all came from somewhere. Pattern making.
The only difference between this and these language models is that Manet and artists like him use their rich sensory experience obtained outside of painting to make new paintings. But it's all fundamentally pattern matching in the end. As long as you can obtain the patterns, there's no difference between a human and a machine in this regard.
A urinal and some soup cans are very mundane objects, and yet were the start of some notable art movements and careers.
I was thinking the same: can a (future) model be like Leonardo or Beethoven, and actually innovate?
Assuming that what Beethoven did is not "just" making music similar to pre-existing music.
And yes, I'm aware the bar was raised from "average human" to Beethoven.
It seems to me we're at a similar place now with AI tools. If you provided an AI tool with all music written _prior to_ Bach, would that tool take those inputs and create something new along the lines of what Bach did?
Or if provided input of all music up through the 1920s, would it create bebop? Or if provided music through the 1940s, would it create hard bop? Or if provided music through the 1970s, would it create music like Pat Metheny?
On one hand, being able to create more of the same sort of music that already exists is a very respectable thing, and what today's AI tools can do is utterly amazing. It takes human composers time and effort to be able to learn to write music that is certainly not innovative, but just matching the state of the art. And there's certainly a commercial market for churning out more of the same.
But in terms of asking, how close are these tools to human intelligence?, I think this is one legitimate area to bring up.
It seems to me that making art that people like is a combination of pattern matching, luck, the zeitgeist, and other factors. However it doesn't seem like there's some kind of unknowable gap between "making similar art" and "making innovations in art that people like". I'm of the opinion that all art is in some sense derivative in that the human mind integrates everything it has seen and produces something based on those inputs.
A urinal, and some supermarket soup cans, represent pretty pivotal art movements. It’s not clear what makes those two things more art than others, and even to people at the time it wasn’t super clear.
All art is derivative.
