Comment by AstixAndBelix
3 years ago
AI won't make artists redundant because it does not experience human sensations. The only thing an AI can do is read the flow of data we make available to it, which is text, audio and video.
An AI will never be able to represent what it means to be subject to police brutality, because it cannot feel being beaten and humiliated by a cop.
An AI will never be able to paint an anti-war poster from the perspective of someone who has felt the ground shake due to shelling of their hometown, because an AI has not lived there for 30 years and does not know the feeling.
The only way AI will make artists redundant would be if it became completely human, which is contradictory since at that point it would be a real artist
In case you don't know, AI art is not an AI pumping out art by itself. A human prompter has to prompt the AI. The prompter can perfectly understand 'police brutality'/'shelled hometown', as they are human, just like the artist.
Artists feel threatened, because they invested 90% of their time in drawing skills, which went from unthinkable to automate, to AI surpassing 90% of artists in 8 months.
> they invested 90% of their time in drawing skills, which went from unthinkable to automate,
Except that the AI doesn't automate drawing, it automates the creation of an image of a drawing.
I have a friend who is an amateur water colour painter. I have no doubt that an AI/ML application can produce pictures that look very much like pictures of his pictures. But at the moment at least it is utterly unable to create the actual artwork.
All of that is true, but as soon as you model subjectivity and embodiment with any kind of credibility it's game over.
The current generation of tools doesn't do that. It's essentially a very sophisticated parrot making speech-like noises it doesn't understand.
But a couple of generations from now, I think it's going to be much less straightforward.
Also, the thing about genius is that it's subjective. In the arts it's more or less synonymous with mastery of a medium with impactful novel insight.
You could argue that AI systems are well on their way to mastering visual media. It's not quite true, but that's because the people training these systems are not artists, and so far they're selecting work that looks a bit Social Media and Game-Ish rather than Art Museum and Contemporary Show-ish.
I don't see any reason in principle why that couldn't be fixed with better training.
So what about impactful novel insight? The point here is there's a kind of cultural and perceptual feedback process which selects certain works out of semi-random cultural noise. There are always a lot of artists making a lot of work, and most of it is not that interesting. Selecting interesting work doesn't require intent, it just needs a feedback loop.
So if you create a situation in which a community rates the art and selects certain works/algorithms/training sets over others, I suspect the impactful and novel insight will happen automatically.
Sentience or subjectivity are not required. In fact you'll get an automated version of what happens already, where different communities with different levels of education and sophistication select different kinds of work for their own reasons, and some are considered "works of genius" for reasons that may be as political and cultural as artistic.
You are discounting fiction then. Lots of art describe or depict things the artist never personally experienced.
It's not that clear-cut. Humans can empathize, to the point where observing someone getting hurt flares similar neural response to the one in the hurt person. Sufficiently vivid imagination in conjunction with a lot of research can give you an experience "close enough" to the real deal to be able to write about it. I've witnessed an author falling into a deep, clinical depression solely due to the subject they decided to tackle. Not every person is capable of such a deep dive into an experience they nominally don't have, but authors and artists tend to be able to do this. In such a setting, "personal experience" is a fluid term, not necessarily synonymous with "he was there at the time personally" or "it happened to him personally".
When you wake up from a nightmare, you're covered in cold sweat, you have trouble breathing normally, your hands are shaking - did you "personally experience" what you've dreamed of? Authors and artists are in a business of dreaming like that while awake, and sharing those dreams with others.
The AI will surely get there at some point, as others noted, once you model embodiment and imagination it's game over. But it's not as close as others seem to think, in my opinion.
You’re being downvoted for contradicting the AI hype machine, but you are completely correct. Humans have been creating art for at least tens of thousands of years, and none of the reasons we create art will ever be fulfilled by AI.
You are reading too many coffee table books.
You are reading too much Twitter
But I don't.
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