Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI?
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
Really, NN-based art is just a more abstract kind of sampling - blundering around inside a human-originated space, bumping off the walls, looking for the occasional example that a human will find interesting.
It's still mechanical, it's still mimicry, and it's still repetitive. Even if nice things fall out - and sometimes they do - they're really just distortions of the originals. (That's particularly obvious in the library "paintings.")
They're still waiting for a human to say "I like that", but with no sense of what makes a human say that.
It reminds me of fractal art - pretty, but monotonous and disposable.
How many people can remember their favourite example of fractal art?
I’ve got a list of my 10 favorite I can share.
You should actually play with these tools before you dismiss them. There is a lot more going on than bumping around human space. The curation process between artist and machine is live and well in this genre.
By naive AI art I mean just using it blindly to generate something that imitates X, or generating random art-like output.
There’s another potential angle to AI and art though. Humans could use AI as a tool to make art just as they have with electronic oscillators, photographic film, 3D renderers, etc. People once decried electronic music and photography as “not real art” too, so I assume some will say the same of anything using AI.
Personally I think AI as a rendering tool could be fascinating. The artist would be a little like a DJ cueing up patterns and themes, but you could get way more sophisticated than you can with mixing tracks and could do things other than music.
Humans instead learn based on reinforcement, be it positive or negative. So the human essentially builds a world model of what is "good" and "acceptable", and then works against that.
I suspect that a Reinforcement Learning approach to art generation should be producing art that is much better than current works simply because it doesn't aim to imitate, but instead it aims to maximize rewards, or the fitness of the work without relying on individual measurements against an ideal.
It should be noted that RL research is very costly, perhaps a more feasible approach is to train a model to generate art based on noise, and then train the RL agent to generate good noise.
Is that so? How much human-produced art have you looked at?
Based on his examples,
> The "novels" don't have a plot, the "music" doesn't have a direction, the "poem" mimics the tropes but not the rhetorical intent.
AI lacks an actually understanding about what it is talking about.
Current AI is like a cargo cult I guess, they see the surface patterns but do not have the underlying understanding as to why the patterns are the way they are.
you could claim that a chess AI lacks understanding of chess. And yet, objectively, it performs better than a human.
The current state of the art AI generated works are probably low quality, but one cannot claim that this won't improve. At some point, i would imagine that the AI generated works would be indistinguishable from human created works, even tho the AI "doesn't actually understand" it.
I never said AI will not get better. Just that its current level of understanding of many of the fields it’s trying to tackle is similar to that of a cargo cult’s.
What about the abstract emotional perception of humans that determines if something resonates with them? You can learn that certain chord patterns have certain emotions associated with them. It's another step of difficulty to make an emotionally coherent that makes people feel something. Most art is about individual expression. Not impossible to fake, but in order to do so well you need to understand the context of the world and the salience of certain things to humans. word2vec won't win any awards for its latest single "king - man is a queen"
No you can't, the AI has 100% of the rules of chess, there are no rules the human understands that the AI doesn't understand. Compare that to human written texts, we haven't been able to code all the rules for human written text so the AI doesn't have them. So instead of the AI being able to evaluate what it writes itself, the AI has to try to imitate what humans have written without being able to see if what it wrote is good or not. In chess on the other hand the AI can check itself if it did good moves, since it can play test games and see if the moves leads to victories or not.
If you want to try to code an AI that doesn't understand chess, then write it entirely without encoding any chess rules at all, just train a neural network based on human played games. I'd bet it be hard to even have it do legal moves reliably. That is the level of our current natural language AI.
Art has never had anything like that
[1] : https://twitter.com/Killa_ru/status/1439299650331320327?s=19
I think the next big advance will be when we are able to apply attention/word2vec-style algorithms at other semantic levels.
So could a line of Python.
random.choices(words_in_english, k = 10)
This isn't really testing creativity, but more the size of the list of concepts you can keep in your head at once and then select from.
I can see how that correlates with creativity in humans, but for a machine, it is just leveraging its ability to store and process far more data.
EDIT:
I tested this. Maybe there is some confounding factor in my implementation, but random.choice seems to consistently beat most people too, around 90-95%.
Site used: https://www.datcreativity.com/task?
Repo of code: https://github.com/MattGaiser/CreativeWordChoice/tree/master...
I just grabbed a random list of nouns, narrowed it by the params specified, and fed them in as required. You may need more than 10 as it rejects some, but in that case I just re-ran it and put in the first nouns to come up.
(Unless N is 0, of course.)
https://github.com/MattGaiser/CreativeWordChoice/tree/master...
I just grabbed a random list of nouns, narrowed it by the params specified, and fed them in as required. You may need more than 10 as it rejects some, but in that case I just re-ran it and put in the first nouns to come up.
Random sampling is likely to give you unusual, highly specific words. I don't see how that wouldn't do very good. Sure, you could do better by mapping each word to a concept, then selecting ten random concepts and selecting a word for each concept. But why do that when you get 99% of the way there with just random choice.
To show this experientially, I let python choose 10 random words from the first English word list I found. I got "epilithic, codirects, serologic, capsian, digestibility, yasna, samsara, supergun, hepatoptosis, kyurin". Sure, capsian and kyurin are somewhat related (names of places/people), as are serologic and hepatoptosis (both medical terms), but it's a pretty good spread.
You can imagine having some discrete optimisation maximising the dissimilarity of words, though that’s hard to do, in particular in a discrete space.
On the other hand, probably there are many humans who would pick two local animals or two office-related objects that happen to be in their room, so that cuts both ways.
A really quick and easy way to optimise this would be to just grab a well-trained word embedding space and pick _k_ furthest words by your favourite distance metric.
Being able to choose less "related" words doesn't sound like it has much meaningful basis at all in what we care about when we say "creativity". This metric, as many others like it, was likely chosen and popularized because it is easy to measure
When Robert Frost was the poet laureate of the U.S some news magazine (I think NewsWeek, although it might have been Time) did a creativity test on him, using inkblots iirc, and he scored particularly low.
Frost was irate afterwards and remarked something to the affect that to be creative required that you not see things in the inkblot, that is to say to not try to see things in distractions, that he had spent years training himself not to see things in meaningless shapes.
I think that there is quite a lot of truth in this, also if someone wanted to give me a simple test to come up with a list of 10 words as different as possible from each other I would probably get verbally abusive - at least call them an idiot.
This is the dumbest thing I read all week. My god, how can somebody be so obtuse and so... narrow-minded?
An excellent argument in favour of including some humanities course in tech degrees at least.
What are you seeing that I am not?
It looks to me like the author of the article went to a liberal arts school (Hampshire College) for a BA in cognitive science and philosophy before studying a PhD in neuroscience, and is a published fiction writer (both short-stories and a novel).
I suppose what a tech degree is needs to be defined, but in Canada a computer science degree would involve "breadth electives" that cover humanities and the social sciences. It is at least two of each depending on if one is studying for a BSc or a BA (a BA would require more). Even a degree in computer engineering in Canada would require at least one course in the humanities. I think this applies in the US as well. I believe computer science and computer engineering are the stereotypical tech degrees people picture when the argument is made that tech is lacking in an understanding of the humanities and ethics.
It seems that the author of the article is about as far from a typical tech degree as I've outlined above, but you may be seeing something else that I've missed?
One take is that it’s bollocks- a mechanistic measure for a mechanism to “win” at has nothing to do with human creativity. One would argue that the arts should be taught with stem to help engineers interface with humanity- especially the indefinables.
Another take is to ask what it is the machine isnt quite doing. As i believe its been said before “tell me exactly what the program can’t do and i will make it do exactly that”.
But where does it end? To satisfy the argument we will need to define creativity, humanity, arts, not to mention bicker on the semantics of building the necessary shared ontology!
The synthesist in me thinks the next Shakespeare surely could benefit from n+1 “monkeys and typewriters”
The results then stated that "different" refers to the probability of two words appearing closely to each other in known texts.
With that in mind I retook the test and chose 10 words which are rare or vulgar. Scored 93%.
The art world didn't end when photography came along. But it did change. It won't end when AI-driven creations come along. It may change. The creative process and the resulting works have been changing based on technology for centuries. The printing press changed art. The industrial revolution changed art. 3d printing changed art. CNC machines changed art. People will always find new ways to be creative with new technology. New art forms will arise. Old art forms will still be around, and people will find uses for all of the above.
machine learning lowers the skill barrier to producing art, but in a lot of contexts this barrier never existed in the first place. To have any value art must be meaningful to people, and there are fewer things less meaningful than learning that a painting was churned out mechanically in a painting mill, paint by numbers, or optimization algorithm.
The author appears to have an idealistic and mistaken idea of how semantics work. The author implies that words have absolute meaning, and therefore one's thoughts can be made "directly accessible" through words alone. This is clearly false. Everyone has their own semantics.
Communicating clearly, minimizing ambiguity, is a non-trivial task. It is ridiculous to assert that all authors are somehow more capable of this than any actor, if indeed this is even their goal (beyond entertainment).
I think there is some expert bias at play here.
Internet or not if a band were to play 4 straight hours live like Led Zeppelin used to do back in the days they'd get noticed.
Of course you can't just be at the park sitting on a bench while doing so.
You still have to go through the process of embellishment and make an effort to sell yourself both in terms of structure and looks.
What people on HN and reddit fail to realize is that the internet won't ever find a way to force its way into the golden hour of music marketing:
7pm-3am
Young people go out during that timeframe, they are with their friends and smoking and drinking all sort of funny things.
That's how one's favorite song is minted.
The problem is clubs, they want to play the hits because they sound familiar. They should scout for bands and structure a deal for a % of their future income in exchange for giving the initial opportunity.
Club owners are not ambitious enough to think they could find the next big thing and become their manager, and yet history of early pop music was all about that sort of arrangements.
Beatles in Hamburg is the most famous.
Admittedly I am also fifty years old, and got good enough for people to pay me for drawing stuff about twenty five years ago.
The fact that every social media platform likes to hide posts that take people off their sites to places they could give me money hasn’t been making it easier, but I do okay. My audience of people who are enough like me that “stuff I draw to make me happy” fills a lot of otherwise-unfulfilled desires is slowly growing.
I think for this reason human artists won’t be replaced anytime soon. The human brain is insanely efficient. I have a theory that humans are smart not because of some magic algorithm in the brain, but more because we process so much input we can recognize so many patterns at once.
IIRC we‘ve build a super-computer with as much “processing power” as a human brain (although we also don’t know exactly how neurons work). But it’s not just that. We have to build that computer, run it for decades on all kinds of input, and then we have something as smart and creative as one human. Not necessarily even an artistic one either. Meanwhile there are over 7 billion humans, plenty of whom can make art for cheap. And that’s why we’re far from companies using AI to make their graphics.
I’d love to see AI stories and art, but until we get much more processing power i doubt we’ll get AI making novel creations. These abstract art pieces? Sure. Transferring styles (e.g. Van Gogh, water color, polygonal) between paintings? Sure. In fact I bet most artists will be using AI-augmented tools. But for a long time AI will still involve human work and/or be relegated to different styles.
And yet it still takes decades to develop a human mind. Even just to become competent with a single language takes years and it requires much more than just learning that language. If we could develop an AI system that hypothetically could achieve human intelligence, could we even train it to that level faster than it takes a human mind to mature? Is there some kind of maximum rate at which the process by which "intelligence"- whatever that may mean exactly- can be reliably run?
The main lack is a tie to the real world. If you generated, say, an auto repair manual with GPT-3, it would read well, but would not match the proper procedures for the car.
That might be fixable. The next level would be a system that watches someone doing a task, then generates a how-to guide.
Since time began, it's all in the users appreciation or lack there of.
Art is anything and everything if you boil it down.
But, an artist with talent and a message....
However, I believe there have been enough major advancements to assume that there will be more and that it will keep. Obviously that's speculation, but it seems plausible that we will approach closer and closer to human level as time goes on and there are more breakthroughs.
If, in fact, AI output does lack all meaning, then that should provide a major competitive advantage to humans. After all, isn't the search for meaning one our basest motivations?
Thus not knowing exactly what it is, it's not terribly surprising when we are fooled by our own attempts to produce its facsimile.
This brings to mind Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI-box experiment [1]. Although GPT-3 is mindless, how long will future iterations _remain_ in Microsoft's basement?
Taking two pieces (of whatever medium) produced by a human and an AI and comparing them - if the two are the same, that's fine. However if you knew the human involved had some extraordinary circumstances involved in its creation, many would elevate the human's piece despite being literally the same as the AI's
FWIW, I have a degree in Fine Arts, have had my work in galleries, and my goal is neither money nor meaning, but just for people to give me some validation and say, "Hey, that's cool."
I don't think that's a useful classification or that those are even mutually exclusive. How would you group Michelangelo and his incredibly expensive commissioned works for instance?
So you're saying art is a tool?
Is art not shared not art?
I've spent the last two months making carvings and blockprinting them. Sometimes I try to come up with an idea or concept I want to convey. Other times I sit with a block and start carving without any sort of plan or idea for what will come out, just filling in the blank spaces until something emerges.
Upon completion I can often come up with various interpretation of the abstract results, but a lot of the fun comes from hearing how other people interpret my work. A veritable Rorschach test for the soul.