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Comment by gsk22 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts? Nothing new under the sun and all that.

Either way, I feel like your view is an exhaustingly pessimistic take on AI-generated art. I mean, sure, most of what DALL-E generates is pretty mundane, but other times I have been surprised at how bizarre and unique certain images are.

You seem to imply that because an AI is not human, its art is not imbued with meaning or originality -- but I find that an AI's non-human nature is precisely what _makes_ the art so original and meaningful.

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> Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts?

At the extreme limit, maybe. But within art or even digital art, then new styles are actually not that rare, humans are pretty good at generating them. Maybe they grab inspiration from nature, visual phenomena, etc, so in that sense it's not "new" but it is "new to the medium". In art you new styles all the time. DALL-E will never do that by it's very nature, and so it's easy to see how it's boring.

And that's just the stylistic level, but it's happening at almost all levels. It's almost definitional that it doesn't innovate, only remix.

It's strange framing this as pessimistic, it's not really optimistic nor pessimistic, it just is. It's also not AI, and that's important to realize: it's a statistical model that generates purely based on pre-existing training. It's very nature is without-meaning and without-originality. That doesn't detract from it being cool or interesting or helpful or enjoyable. I find it cool and useful.

But it's not innovative or creative or meaningful by itself.

> It's very nature is without-meaning and without-originality.

That's a pretty bold claim. What are humans but statistical models that generate based on pre-existing training -- and yet, are humans not with-meaning and with-originality?

Of course, human brains are some large order of magnitude more complex than the neural nets that underlie most AIs, but we can already see areas where these "simplistic" AIs outperform humans on specific tasks. So what prevents the arts from being one of those areas? If not now, in some not-too-distant future?

Tempting to leave it here but I’ll give it a go.

One thing humans seem to have that is beyond statistics is creativity. In that stats explain what is, and creativity takes what is and makes a dot outside that other people appreciate. No model has demonstrated even attempting the dot, let alone having a good chance of success. What DALL-E does is draw a dot between a few existing points, but never outside.

Humans incidentally have three more things that make for interestingness: emotions derived from feelings, long term memory, and roughly storytelling (~ an ability to turn long term memory into long form recall with a specific reaction intended to a specific audience). I don’t think ML has any of those, but it likely (eventually) gets the latter two.

Meaningness/interestingness require at least a few of those, and it’s what puts most art in a different category than games or math.

Dall-E is like a new camera. You as a user need to give angle and context and meaning. to the prompt and the output.

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