Notes on a conversation about AI with the visual artist Memo Akten. I drafted this some months before DALL-E 2 went viral, and now see it as the oldest record I have of myself thinking about AI.
- When discussing art and AI, the discussion is not one of replacement but one of augmentation.
- AI-authored content as purposeless creation.
- Theoretically the patterns behind purpose could also be learned and implemented algorithmically. This is a current limitation, not one attached to AI itself.
- What do we exactly mean by purpose here? Is intention a better word?
- Being purpose or intention, are these actually relevant for the content consumer?
- Author → Creation → Consumer
- A different process from author to creation may or may not affect the process from creation to consumer
- Current models exhibit the most creativity in being able to join pre-existing ideas and create an unknown conjunction.
- This is effectively extending the union between what is possible and what is real, and can do so faster than we have
- An argument against this creativity can be the lack of agency of the models
- If by agency we mean free-will, we may not have any more access to it than the model
- We overvalue the rules behind the human mental process in comparison to how simpler algorithms work, adding to the value of its product the weight of foggy notions as conscience or agency. A position to better compare AI and human intelligence is one of radical determinism.
- Believing AI can’t catch up with human intelligence is believing in the paranormal
- You need to attach a supernatural, impossible to simulate force to human intelligence to consider non-biological machines theoretically unable to compete
- AI is, first of all, modern data processing. A super advance AI assistant would be so more because of its access to refined data than because of conversational skills.
- An approximating debate: replicating versus mimicking. AI-made paintings in the style of Rembrandt mimick what Rembrandt produced, but don’t ever approximate a Rembrandt replication mechanism - this would also mean to evolve in the manner Rembrandt would have.
- Bias in AI
- Can at times be a positive or neutral part. We are but biases, and in so bias can act as a humanizing factor.