this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Ok, take a human being that has never had any other interactions with any other human and has never consumed any content created by humans. Give him finger paint and have him paint something on a blank canvas. I think it wouldn't look any different than a chimpanzee doing finger paint.
In theory, it could. You would just need a way to quantify the "fitness" of a drawing. They do this by comparing to actual content. But you don't need actual content in some circumstances. For example, look at Alphazero - Deepmind's AI from a few years back for playing chess. All the AI knew was the rules of the game. It did not have access to any database of games. No data. The way it learned is it played millions of games against itself.
It trained itself on its own data. And that AI, at the time, beat the leading chess engine that has access to databases and other pre-built algorithms.
With art this gets trickier because art is subjective. You can quantify clearly whether you won or lost a chess game. How do you quantify if something is a good piece of art? If we can somehow quantify this, you could in theory create AI that generates art with no input.
We're in the infancy stages of this technology.
AI can do all of the same. I know it's scary but it's here and it isn't going away. AI designed systems are becoming more and more commonplace. Solar panels, medical devices, computer hardware, aircraft wings, potential drug compounds, etc. Certain things AI can be really good at, and designing things and testing it in a million different simulations is something that AI can do a lot better than humans.
What is art? If I make something that means nothing and you find a meaning in it, is it meaningful? AI is a cold calculated mathematical model that produces meaningless output. But humans love finding patterns in noise.
Trust me, you will eventually see some sort of AI art that makes an impact on you. Math doesn't lie. If statistics can turn art into data and find the hidden patterns that make something impactful, then it can recreate it in a way that is impactful.
The randomness used by current machine learning to train the neural networks, will never be able to do what a human does when they are being creative.
I have no doubt AI art will be able "say" things. But it wont be saying things, that haven't already been said.
And yes, AI can brute force its way to solutions in ways humans cannot beat. But that only works when there is a solution. So AI works with science, engineering, chess.
Art does not have a "solution". Every answer is valid. Humans are able to create good art, because they understand the question. "What is it to be human?" "Why are we here?" "What is adulthood?" "Why do I feel this?" "What is innocence?"
AI does not understand anything. All it is doing is mimicking art already created by humans, and coincidentally sometimes getting it right.
It's not brute force. It seems like brute force because trying something millions of times seems impossible to us. But they identify patterns and then use those patterns to create output. It's learning. It's why we call it "machine learning". The mechanics are different than how humans do it, but fundamentally it's the same.
The only reason you know what a tree looks like is because you've seen a million different trees. Trees in person, trees in movies, trees in cartoons, trees in drawings, etc. Your brain has taken all of these different trees and merged them together in your brain to create an "ideal" of the tree. Sort of like Plato's "world of forms"
AI can recognize a tree through the same process. It views millions of trees and creates an "ideal" tree. It can then compare any image it sees against this ideal and determine the probability that it is or isn't a tree. Combine this with something that randomly pumps out images and you can now compare these generated images with the internal model of a tree and all of a sudden you have an AI that can create novel images of trees.
It's fundamentally the same thing we do. It's creating pictures of trees that didn't exist before. The only difference is it happens in a statistical model and it happens at a larger and faster scale than humans are capable of.
This is why the question of AI models having to pay copyright for content it parses is not obvious at all.
If every answer is valid then you would be sitting here saying that AI art is just as valid as anything else.
A human can understand what a tree is, after seeing one, maybe two. If you show a human a new species, they can effortlessly fit that into their understanding of reality.
An AI machine learning network needs to be shown thousands. Often hundreds of thousands. And the way it "learns" is nothing like what humans do. We do not shuffle our neurons around until we get it right. Given good data, we just get it right.
And even then, you can still make images that aren't trees which will fool an ML model into saying they are. They work nothing like humans. The similarities are superficial, at best. The resulting model can be compared to a brain, but it is orders of magnitude more static.
And no, AI art is not a valid answer. To create a valid answer, you must understand the question.
4 is the correct answer to 2+2. But there is a difference in knowing that, and understanding the math for WHY its correct. AI can create correct answers to the question that is art, but not valid ones. For that, you need the human artist.
Art isn't defined by the creator, but the observer. I can run a line through a piece of paper and call it art as a joke, but perhaps someone sees some form of message in the line and it impacts them. The meaningless becomes meaningful only because it is viewed through a being that can assign meaning to nonsense.
You can make an image that isn't a tree that will fool humans into saying they are. So what?
Please explain to me how these two things are different.
a) human goes through and studies the more than 20,000 works of andy warhol. he is inspired and creates various different artworks in a similar style.
b) AI goes through and parses the same 20,000 works on andy warhol. it uses a statistical algorithm to pump out various different artworks in a similar style.
What is the difference? Because a) isn't copyright infringement. You are allowed to take a style and copy it. Only specific works can be copyrighted.
You are trying to claim the AI and human learning is different - and it IS different because we are biological and machines are statistical models. You can find a million similarities and a million differences. But specifically, in the context of using copyrighted works to make novel content - what is the difference? To me, it looks identical
1- take in data 2- use data to create new things
Why should a) be allowed and b) not be allowed?
Claiming artistic expression is solely in the eye of the beholder discards the very definition of that second word.
Art is communication. Remove the human source, and it becomes a message without a sender.
Yes, you can still get value out of that, but it removes the reasons why art is culturally significant. It's a discussion. Not just a monologue from ourselves to ourselves.