it feels like there's a new deep learning paper each week, ever so slightly bringing me closer to an existential nervous breakdown.
Yet there really is something disturbing about seeing a computer resurrect so much of the mind of an artist who's been dead for nearly a century. I know the GPU doesn't understand what it's doing, but did Monet?
When I paint I don't really understand. There may be occasional moments of clarity, I like to think that I make deliberate choices based on the emotions and thoughts within me that I'd like to reflect to the people experiencing my art, but... Honestly am I so different from a neural network?
I am a neural network. Much of what goes into creating a piece of art is based on intuition, on experience and practice, pathways eroded into my mind from years of thoughts traversing the same landscape. The art I create is unique to me, not in that it cannot be reproduced but in that every action I take is a reflection and an echo of all the moments remembered and forgotten that create me.
How much of Monet's mind is in a GPU in Berkeley?
That said, I am amazed by the results even so.
I also want to note here, that I don't see any reason why machine intelligence could not produce meaningful works of art but it will require a new way of looking at it.
Very little, arguably none. Imitation is far removed from creation. If you see an art student reproduce Monet's paintings or redo an existing image in Monet's style, would you ask "how much of Monet's mind is in the art student?"
Sadly, I didn't work through the books like I had planned at all. Lacked the discipline to come home and work through them at the time. I really regret it now as things are blowing up and, as you said, it seems like every week there is something new and interesting