I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. We've found that each new generation of AI tool (basic GANs to StyleGan1/2/3 to CLIP+VQGAN to CLIP Diffusion ++++++) has dramatically improved the power we have to make cooler, better quality AI artwork (shameless plug - you can see some of our AI artwork at https://www.artaygo.com). But it's also increased the need for humans to be involved on our side to create good content because it's become less about copying the style of existing works, and more about the creative process that yields high quality new content.
With something like Stylegan for example, one would need to source all kinds of content and would be limited to producing art that looked the same. Now with the advent of language guided models, it really opens the doors to a human having to think of creative prompting to generate unique and original content. I think good artists will have some element of competitive advantage in that they will have a curated private set of prompts and techniques that only they know, which will result in a unique style. It won't all be "Unreal Engine / Artstation / James Gurney" for long.
Also don't forget that these models seem ridiculous in size and complexity, but it wasn't long ago that we thought 64kb was "all the RAM you need". Future generations of models will be enormously powerful but likely more accessible as computing power advances, driving a lot of new potential for digital artists. I'd also expect ease of use improves, where instead of hacking your own code, it may be a much more user-friendly tool. In the mean time though, I can see the concern of artists needing to learn a skill that is much, much different than the typical artist training regimen.
I think you're underestimating the artisanal aspect of art. People like hand-knitted sweaters and impromptu sketches, live music and personal essays.
Sure, a bunch of graphic designers may lose their jobs (and self-esteem), and the Billboard 100 may be a bunch of pop-derivative GPT-x compositions, but there'll still be room for the humans.
The semantic apocalypse is disturbing as far as some of these creations seem...uncannily good. But I think the value of art has always been in it's artisanal nature, or distinctly original. The in-between stuff is just bland. To me, at least. And that's all the neural nets seem capable of...for now.
A great read! Very thought provoking. I also love the pieces of art and writing you have included.
To those who say "AI will never be as great as Picasso" I would say "most artists aren't Picasso". AI will replace those who aren't soon enough. Also, the meaning of "artist" could change from being someone who creates art to someone who uses AI to generate art and the "art" part becomes the inspiration and the tweaking of parameters and selecting the best piece out of the multiple pieces created by the AI.
The main issue, as you have pointed out, isn't so much the progress of the technology, but its ownership by mega corporations. I am hopeful that this will be addressed before too long.
I would argue one point though: I am pretty sure the idea of consciousness being only a biological phenomena will be challenged soon enough.
Great pre-breakfast read! Perhaps it is as you say, “a bad counterpoint given the honest need for regulation to preserve human health, human [etc]…” but even bad counterpoint IS a counterpoint, and like a much needed poke for a drowsy drunk, it doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s a stick or a gun, it’s just time to get his ass up.
Stop the problem at the inputs, which are the corporations building things like "Jessica" that are only offering an empty shell of the human experience.
Is it fair to say that your article both fascinated and terrified me? As a writer by trade, I am not keen on where this trend is going. I tried Sudowrite once on an article of mine and was freaked out enough that I haven't been back.
Most people want to believe a truck driver is easier to replace than a writer, but it's not true. The general population has no idea how far AI has come in the last three years. The reality of AI isn't consistent with human ideas about education. We aren't used to automation replacing "creativity." We expect factory workers to be put out of work, not screenwriters and novelists.
I loaded a 60k-word draft into GPT-3, and afterward it happily churned out content that sounded like me. It wasn't consistent with my plot, but my voice was there. The AI was close to capturing whatever is unique about my writing. All that was missing was story and plot.
AI is going to replace most content writing very soon. People talk about writing as if it's a human activity which cannot be replaced by a machine, but that's nonsense. It's just words. If people like the words that's all that matters. The writing process may be important for a human author, but the output is what matters for the reader. If people don't accept AI writers, we'll have human performers who pretend to write it. We already have performers who pretend to write the music they sing.
Popular entertainment might as well be written by AI now. It may actually be improved by computers.
Consciousness is key. The "Kubla Khan" example is a mimic. I think a student could mimic as well. There are real flops in a couple lines, as well. I remember the line Pierre Boulez said when digital recordings came along. "There's no air." however, I do see the usefulness of AI as a critical analysis tool. I read that poem a few times and wanted to run get my Coleridge, which is what we'd like any student to do, eh?
the answer to AI is in a sci fi book way of the pilgrim by gordon dickson - AI is a like a powerful race of alients conquering the earth with weapons humans cant defeat. in the story dickson posits a subconcious human identity called the pilgrim that would die instead of being cattle.
its a nice fantasy but i recently read viktor frankls account of concentration camps and isabel wilkerson's caste make this uprising hard to believe. but gandhi went and made his own tax free salt and there was the original tea party - maybe there are pilgrims after all.
The future is (just about) here, and it's a dystopia. Hell, it's becoming a dystopia even *without* the goddam "semantic apocalypse"! Either that, or we're just becoming old people, complaining about how all the youngin's should be reading books rather than watching TV...or watching some wholesome, good old-fashioned TV like we did back in the good old days instead of staring at little screens every waking moment.
If you continue with this excellent blogging much longer, I might just have to quit procrastinating and read your damn novel!
There are some deep problems that have been uncovered by people working on AI alignment, which is the goal of having any AI that attains agency be constructed so that its actions align with human well-being. I think that the research potentially could even contribute to aligning our own actions with our well-being. But currently the money is being poured into the AI gain-of-function races. Alignment research is still speculative and theoretical and tends to depend on lone geniuses affiliated with nonprofits, communicating over blogs and wikis. What we need is for alignment to sort out risks and prevention so that we know what and how to regulate ASAP. Just railing against the soulless corporate entitles won’t even slow ‘em down. We need instead to empower the thinkers.
A minor point, but one that I would love to hear more from you about because I believe it's important to understanding where your thoughts fit within the larger field of creativity. You wrote that "All that matters for creative endeavors is output, not process." I'm curious where you got this idea from, since there is a long history behind process driven artwork.
I'm sort of skeptical of general AI and conscious AI in the short term, but I have no doubts that narrow AI will make huge progress and break all narrow Turing tests. Alpha programs will do more and more things much better than us and GPT-x programs will write much better than us.
One limitation of GPT-3 is that it learns from writing samples. This is equivalent to learning only from books, so I think those human writers who write about what they have learned from life, with word pictures inspired by real lived life, will continue to have an edge for the foreseeable future.
But then they will train GPT-x with an Alpha-like strategy and GPT-x will learn from "life" among very many versions of itself...
I guess time will tell. I'm not to worried.
I look very much forward to reading your next book, can't wait until 2023. I have many questions about IIT, can I ask some questions here?
Erik, my sense is that the current crop of AI systems are "deep fake" tools for copying legitimate creativity, but they are not originating the spark they are copying. you note that these systems only generate a few good pieces but then many poor ones, but the systems cannot pick, they need a human's eye to do that.
So for the near term these will make very powerful tools for augmenting human creativity. Indeed it will open creativity to many more people, in the way that music DJs are creative, but they are building from the creativity of others.
I think the faking that these systems do, will debase the value of such fakes... they will be too easy and too plentiful to be assigned great value.
BUT, I see no reason why these trillion parameter systems can not be altered in a way that does give them a theory of mind, and an actual perspective on the art being created. Depending, that perspective might be so different from ours that their artistic taste will be dramatically different. But your larger fears would be realized by such a system.... and we are on course for building it. I think the present ML is already strong enough, and our compute is already big enough. We are not yet building systems that try specifically to aim for a theory of mind... but we will.
I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. We've found that each new generation of AI tool (basic GANs to StyleGan1/2/3 to CLIP+VQGAN to CLIP Diffusion ++++++) has dramatically improved the power we have to make cooler, better quality AI artwork (shameless plug - you can see some of our AI artwork at https://www.artaygo.com). But it's also increased the need for humans to be involved on our side to create good content because it's become less about copying the style of existing works, and more about the creative process that yields high quality new content.
With something like Stylegan for example, one would need to source all kinds of content and would be limited to producing art that looked the same. Now with the advent of language guided models, it really opens the doors to a human having to think of creative prompting to generate unique and original content. I think good artists will have some element of competitive advantage in that they will have a curated private set of prompts and techniques that only they know, which will result in a unique style. It won't all be "Unreal Engine / Artstation / James Gurney" for long.
Also don't forget that these models seem ridiculous in size and complexity, but it wasn't long ago that we thought 64kb was "all the RAM you need". Future generations of models will be enormously powerful but likely more accessible as computing power advances, driving a lot of new potential for digital artists. I'd also expect ease of use improves, where instead of hacking your own code, it may be a much more user-friendly tool. In the mean time though, I can see the concern of artists needing to learn a skill that is much, much different than the typical artist training regimen.
I think you're underestimating the artisanal aspect of art. People like hand-knitted sweaters and impromptu sketches, live music and personal essays.
Sure, a bunch of graphic designers may lose their jobs (and self-esteem), and the Billboard 100 may be a bunch of pop-derivative GPT-x compositions, but there'll still be room for the humans.
The semantic apocalypse is disturbing as far as some of these creations seem...uncannily good. But I think the value of art has always been in it's artisanal nature, or distinctly original. The in-between stuff is just bland. To me, at least. And that's all the neural nets seem capable of...for now.
Incredible piece. Thank you, if ‘thank you’ is quite the phrase I want for a series of observations that will probably haunt my dream tonight!
A great read! Very thought provoking. I also love the pieces of art and writing you have included.
To those who say "AI will never be as great as Picasso" I would say "most artists aren't Picasso". AI will replace those who aren't soon enough. Also, the meaning of "artist" could change from being someone who creates art to someone who uses AI to generate art and the "art" part becomes the inspiration and the tweaking of parameters and selecting the best piece out of the multiple pieces created by the AI.
The main issue, as you have pointed out, isn't so much the progress of the technology, but its ownership by mega corporations. I am hopeful that this will be addressed before too long.
I would argue one point though: I am pretty sure the idea of consciousness being only a biological phenomena will be challenged soon enough.
Great pre-breakfast read! Perhaps it is as you say, “a bad counterpoint given the honest need for regulation to preserve human health, human [etc]…” but even bad counterpoint IS a counterpoint, and like a much needed poke for a drowsy drunk, it doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s a stick or a gun, it’s just time to get his ass up.
Stop the problem at the inputs, which are the corporations building things like "Jessica" that are only offering an empty shell of the human experience.
Is it fair to say that your article both fascinated and terrified me? As a writer by trade, I am not keen on where this trend is going. I tried Sudowrite once on an article of mine and was freaked out enough that I haven't been back.
Hey! Glad someone else noticed this happening.
Most people want to believe a truck driver is easier to replace than a writer, but it's not true. The general population has no idea how far AI has come in the last three years. The reality of AI isn't consistent with human ideas about education. We aren't used to automation replacing "creativity." We expect factory workers to be put out of work, not screenwriters and novelists.
I loaded a 60k-word draft into GPT-3, and afterward it happily churned out content that sounded like me. It wasn't consistent with my plot, but my voice was there. The AI was close to capturing whatever is unique about my writing. All that was missing was story and plot.
AI is going to replace most content writing very soon. People talk about writing as if it's a human activity which cannot be replaced by a machine, but that's nonsense. It's just words. If people like the words that's all that matters. The writing process may be important for a human author, but the output is what matters for the reader. If people don't accept AI writers, we'll have human performers who pretend to write it. We already have performers who pretend to write the music they sing.
Popular entertainment might as well be written by AI now. It may actually be improved by computers.
Consciousness is key. The "Kubla Khan" example is a mimic. I think a student could mimic as well. There are real flops in a couple lines, as well. I remember the line Pierre Boulez said when digital recordings came along. "There's no air." however, I do see the usefulness of AI as a critical analysis tool. I read that poem a few times and wanted to run get my Coleridge, which is what we'd like any student to do, eh?
the answer to AI is in a sci fi book way of the pilgrim by gordon dickson - AI is a like a powerful race of alients conquering the earth with weapons humans cant defeat. in the story dickson posits a subconcious human identity called the pilgrim that would die instead of being cattle.
its a nice fantasy but i recently read viktor frankls account of concentration camps and isabel wilkerson's caste make this uprising hard to believe. but gandhi went and made his own tax free salt and there was the original tea party - maybe there are pilgrims after all.
Whoa, chills! 😱. This is some masterful blogging!
The future is (just about) here, and it's a dystopia. Hell, it's becoming a dystopia even *without* the goddam "semantic apocalypse"! Either that, or we're just becoming old people, complaining about how all the youngin's should be reading books rather than watching TV...or watching some wholesome, good old-fashioned TV like we did back in the good old days instead of staring at little screens every waking moment.
If you continue with this excellent blogging much longer, I might just have to quit procrastinating and read your damn novel!
There are some deep problems that have been uncovered by people working on AI alignment, which is the goal of having any AI that attains agency be constructed so that its actions align with human well-being. I think that the research potentially could even contribute to aligning our own actions with our well-being. But currently the money is being poured into the AI gain-of-function races. Alignment research is still speculative and theoretical and tends to depend on lone geniuses affiliated with nonprofits, communicating over blogs and wikis. What we need is for alignment to sort out risks and prevention so that we know what and how to regulate ASAP. Just railing against the soulless corporate entitles won’t even slow ‘em down. We need instead to empower the thinkers.
A minor point, but one that I would love to hear more from you about because I believe it's important to understanding where your thoughts fit within the larger field of creativity. You wrote that "All that matters for creative endeavors is output, not process." I'm curious where you got this idea from, since there is a long history behind process driven artwork.
I'm sort of skeptical of general AI and conscious AI in the short term, but I have no doubts that narrow AI will make huge progress and break all narrow Turing tests. Alpha programs will do more and more things much better than us and GPT-x programs will write much better than us.
One limitation of GPT-3 is that it learns from writing samples. This is equivalent to learning only from books, so I think those human writers who write about what they have learned from life, with word pictures inspired by real lived life, will continue to have an edge for the foreseeable future.
But then they will train GPT-x with an Alpha-like strategy and GPT-x will learn from "life" among very many versions of itself...
I guess time will tell. I'm not to worried.
I look very much forward to reading your next book, can't wait until 2023. I have many questions about IIT, can I ask some questions here?
Erik, my sense is that the current crop of AI systems are "deep fake" tools for copying legitimate creativity, but they are not originating the spark they are copying. you note that these systems only generate a few good pieces but then many poor ones, but the systems cannot pick, they need a human's eye to do that.
So for the near term these will make very powerful tools for augmenting human creativity. Indeed it will open creativity to many more people, in the way that music DJs are creative, but they are building from the creativity of others.
I think the faking that these systems do, will debase the value of such fakes... they will be too easy and too plentiful to be assigned great value.
BUT, I see no reason why these trillion parameter systems can not be altered in a way that does give them a theory of mind, and an actual perspective on the art being created. Depending, that perspective might be so different from ours that their artistic taste will be dramatically different. But your larger fears would be realized by such a system.... and we are on course for building it. I think the present ML is already strong enough, and our compute is already big enough. We are not yet building systems that try specifically to aim for a theory of mind... but we will.
and THEN your fears will have quite justified.
Honestly this is pretty bone chilling my friend. Thanks for this lecture.