And the tide keeps going out. Even this criticism is only worthy of a C-.
I have to question just what proportion of art today the author believes is derivative vs innovative, and if all derivative art were replaced by AI-generated art, would we really have lost anything? Additionally, in which ways, are human-created arts extrapolative? Surely it's not along all dimensions, so by which ones, to what degree? And finally, if extrapolative saliency is quantifiable, couldn't we just have models which extrapolate in the same way and produce innovative/creative works?
It's here that we run out of runway on the author's argument. It feels like an ontologically-based argument couched in behavioral terms. My opinion, and I've stood by this consistently, is that much of the discourse around AI critics(and AI deserves to be critiqued), is that ontological arguments are laundered through behaviorism either through lack of philosophical background, or unclarity of thought, and the result are muddy arguments, black and white thinking, and a host of other unhygienic epistomologies.
I would add that in part the virtue signaling society has also created the right environment for AI art's rapid adoption. Much of it driven by social media where the game is all about increasing engagement at all costs. Social media influencers and everyone else seeking a following have found it as an easy tool to increase engagement and their income. Social media has increased the number of people who are happy pretending to live an existence they do not in reality.
AI might put artists out of business. It will not, however, replace them. It will not—cannot—make good art, great art: true art.
I disagree with this viewpoint, with the nuance that AI art will indeed become better than real artists as measured narrowly through the lens of visual impact. This is because it is the narrow criteria on what is currently improving the models. It is not art as meaning, but how impactful art is within the one second viewing that someone gives feedback to the machine if it was good or bad.
FYI, I've elaborated further on AI on the topic of creativity with some uncommon viewpoints. See the section "AI owns creativity" for the relevant portion - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.
Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.
My guess is we'll end up with a 2nd "author" neural net to do highly "creative" work. The second net represents the POV of the author, its "life experience" and political leanings. It will choose lower probability options very mindfully, with deep meaning relative to the author.
January 2023 (after I had played around with GPTs and image creators for just a month), I had two family members ask me if I needed to be committed to a facility... how their tunes have changed, understanding this easily-explored creative technology.
Glad to report that my brain and worldview have helped many others (and myself) see Truth of the New World of Brain/Creativity.
Interesting take on the creativity that humans seem to display.
The harder it is to copy the innovative process in a given domain, and the greater the number and magnitude of fundamental rules that gatekeep the definition of “success” in successful innovation, the harder it is to innovate in that domain.
AI is moving up the creativity ladder from low copying difficulty and low definition-of-success creative innovation to progressively more difficult and high definition-of-success creativity. There’s no reason to believe it will stop.
When you say AI can’t be creative, because of its predictive and copycat nature, you’re saying the same of humans. It just becomes a semantic argument with little substance. At some point, when AI makes a mind-bending discovery on its own, before making a mind-bending discovery every day, no one will be arguing over AI’s capacity to innovate anymore.
Footnote: The copycat nature of innovation is why it is so sequential. When copying is all you’re doing, it’s hard to leapfrog. All the prerequisites for an innovation must be achieved first, before they themselves are iterated on to push the innovative frontier. When a prerequisite is leapfrogged, it isn’t a true prerequisite, and clever use of ur-prerequisites proves to be enough to assemble the innovation. Clever copy and pasting is copying nonetheless. Even cleverness may be copied :) National, institutional, and familial cultures often systematize different types of cleverness, depending on their objective function. When they face an external shock, they often attempt to copy and internalize some cultural firmware from their opponents/other third parties, or modify their own firmware in the same way that they always do, just with a greater degree of urgency - another copy and pasted trope, with a cartoonishly concrete outline that Pixar can show you in a movie created using its systematized creative process.
Our most impressive and fundamental innovations are coming out of literal systems - university systems and corporate R&D systems, with rules, processes, and quotas. Even the diversity of Turkish cuisine is the result of systematized culinary innovation in the Ottoman imperial kitchen. Now pass me a plate of copy pasta because that’s the only kind of pasta that exists.
Here’s a scary thought: For millions of years, humans did nothing other than hunt, cook, sleep, draw stick figures, and communicate about hunting, cooking, and drawing stick figures.
Those were humans with the same brains as us (if we met them we’d think they’re quite stupid - which is a testament to how much of our intelligence is embedded in learned processes).
Is GPT-4 really that far off from their level of intelligence and creativity? This is not a rhetorical question, and your answer has direct implications for your own intelligence, because, again, you have the same hardware.
Raising a caveman to be smart is an easier problem to solve than raising a monkey to be smart.
AI will cheaply deliver us the "art" mankind actually salivates for: superficial, stimulating hits of sensation. They may not mean anything or reveal truth, but they keep the attention-manipulation gravy train humming.
What a time to be a alive!
