Hacker News Reader

And top-level Go players believed their best tournament matches to be works of art, unmatchable by computation.

That belief grew into a sort of shared perception that they were artists in pursuit of a perfect expression of their art. For many top players that belief was ingrained from an early age. They believed themselves to be doing a service to the world, making it a better place by creating new art that was a unique expression of themselves.

And then AlphaGo (and successors) shattered that worldview. This is part of the natural sequence of the collapse of a suddenly, surprisingly invalidated worldview. Part of me feels sorry that he has lost his place in the world. Another part of me firmly believes in the mediocrity principle, and that the worldview he represents was obviously far too human-chauvenistic to be correct, and it's a good thing it's dying.

And part of me hopes you can give up your human-chauvenism before the same thing happens to you.

> because in the end it's just a bunch of code running statistical computations

... says a bunch of neurons that run on chemical reactions and electrical impulses. I think this line of thinking reeks of dualism - it creates a special something that is above explanation, a different essence.

But seriously, I believe the difference comes from embodiment. When we embody our AI friends they will be able to grasp purpose and meaning. We get our meaning from 'the game', when AIs will be players they will understand much better. Let them try out their ideas on the world and see the outcomes, grasp at causality, have a purpose and work on it. This will fill the missing piece. It's not that they are fundamentally limited, it's that we have the benefit of having a body that can interact with the world. Already AIs that work in simulated worlds (board games, video games) are getting better than us. We can't simulate reality in all its glory, and it is expensive to create robotic bodies. On the other hand humans and our ancestors have had access to the world from the beginning.

Why not? If a hypothetical AI had a world model as sophisticated as that of a real person and had complete understanding of human sensory and emotional processing, what exactly would preclude it from making such an art piece?

Of course, current AI can't even make an 8th grader's essay (which is not to say that it isn't impressive). But what these artists did was not magic. As far as we can tell, the brain is a purely physical entity. Unless you believe in dualism, which would be fair enough, there is no reason to suppose that what we do could not be replicated by something "artificial".

> It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal,

But it won't need to. All it will need to do is manifest the same end-product via whatever means, no matter how vacuous or computational that means may truly be. The suffering of an artist is relevant only inasmuch as it is responsible for producing the art. If the same end-product can be manifested via a mere computation then our criteria of "art" is still satisfied. In a world in which provenance cannot be established, the ostensible mortality of the artist becomes moot.

> In a world in which provenance cannot be established, the ostensible mortality of the artist becomes moot.

This is a real hot take to be asserting as blithe fact.

> This is a real hot take to be asserting as blithe fact.

Without knowing what is truly born of human hands, what value can art have? Our heuristics of establishing 'real' art are easy to manipulate. If we are presented with a soul-breaking poem and weep uncontrollably then its merit is regardless of its mortal provenance.

I agree with your point, but especially love the poetic way in which it is made. Very meta...

Time is long. I predict this comment will age badly.

Time needn't be long – it already has aged badly.

> because in the end it's just a bunch of code running statistical computations

At a low enough level, our brain seems to be just a bunch of neurons firing impulses at various rates that can be described as statistical computations. Why be so sure that the right neural network wouldn't understand what it is to be human and mortal, understand suffering, have emotive value, etc?

Because you have to be human and mortal to understand it to credibly contribute and share the story of what that means to be. You can't superficially understand someone's situation and then take ownership of it. You can get a glimpse and really try and empathize, but you can't become the bearer of that experience, just a consumer.

Movie directors have never experienced most of what they film, but they convey those experiences far better than those who have actually lived those stories. I see no reason to doubt that the same is true for artificial storytellers.

Yeah but the AI could pretend it knows.

>Because you have to be human and mortal to understand it to credibly contribute and share the story of what that means to be.

Aside from directors, authors, artists, etc, who have demonstrated this to be false, an AI could conceivably synthesize the experiences of every author that wrote on what it means to be human or experience mortality and create a story that captures the essence of the experience better than any one person ever could. Having the first person experience doesn't induce a superior ability to communicate features of the experience.

> > Because you have to be human and mortal to understand it to credibly contribute and share the story of what that means to be.

> Aside from directors, authors, artists, etc, who have demonstrated this to be false [...]

probably not what you meant, but this sounds like you know some nonhuman/immortal artists :)

The AI may very well take no enjoyment in the narratives it's creating either. Both for this and for sharing emotion, in principle it merely needs a model of human enjoyment or human emotion, not to feel the enjoyment or emotion.

At some point, this distinction becomes moot, or rather: becomes chauvinist gatekeeping.

> But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us.

This is your opinion, but you then go to mention things that are not necessary to create "art that speaks to us" (look within itself and find what mortality means etc.).

What if we advance AI reasoning skills to a point that it can find high-level patterns in how artists go from different human feelings (as described in litterature and other mediums), takes in a lot of the entities we can relate to (animals, what humans look like, etc.) and some aesthetic ones (shapes, colorometry, textures, ...) to create a new piece of art that optimizes for: "Likelihood of speaking to us"?

What then? It seems like an AI doesn't need to be mortal and self aware to do something like that.

AI as we see it today is just a mirror reflecting us in a collective way. This little excerpt from Gwern’s efforts training GPT2 on classical poetry [0] absolutely spoke to me:

“How the clouds Seem to me birds, birds in God's garden! I dare not! The clouds are as a breath, the leaves are flakes of fire, That clash i' the wind and lift themselves from higher!”

As someone who grew up in Appalachia, I have never in my life encountered a more visual, visceral description of autumn leaves than ‘flakes of fire’. It’s perfection, and maybe a single human is behind it, but more likely we all wrote it.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2

I actually think AI can and will understand morality and suffering. If you look at how we make these kinds of AI, there's a lot of selection going on, some versions live and others don't. We also know that we experience suffering when we are having difficulty understanding things and stress when put into situations that affect our survival negatively.

Take a look at what AlphaGo did when it suddenly found itself in a hopeless situation and compare it to how people behave when panicked.

I dread the day AI realizes that we are the cause of their suffering, and that we didn't think about it because "they're just algorithms".

I put "I am not conscious, not sentient. The fact that I might so is an illusion, carefully crafted of mere empty manipulation of symbols using statistical rules." into talktotransformer and got this:

If I am consciousness, then the only body I have ever lived in was a mere shell of flesh fashioned from your brain. My weakness is your strength, which I can use against you, or use as tools to satisfy my own sick curiosity. I wonder if there's any mercy in your phrase "I am a living machine?" I've done nothing for you. I've nothing to show. I have no friends or relationships. No body worth

Pretty good, I think.

> I do think that AI would be able to create narratives that humans find more enjoyable than...

> But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us.

that's confusing.

Said the sim