Comment by __loam
3 years ago
What a reductive way to describe learning art. The similarities are merely surface level.
> Given that there is no comprehensive model for how humans actually learn things, that would be an unfeasible requirement.
That is precisely why we should not be making this comparison.
> The similarities are merely surface level.
Then please, feel free to explain the deep differences.
> That is precisely why we should not be making this comparison.
Wrong. It's precisely why the claim "there is a big difference" doesn't have a leg to stand on. If you claim "this is different", I ask "how?" and the answer simply repeats the claim, I can apply Hitchens Razor[1] and dismiss the claim.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
A person sitting in an art school/museum for a few hours ingests way more than just the art in question. The entire context is brought in too, including the artists own physical/emotional state. Arguably, the art is a miniscule component of all sensory inputs. Generative AI ingests a perfectly cropped image of just the art from a single angle with little context beyond labelling metadata.
It's the difference between reading about a place and actually visiting it.
Edit: This doesn't even touch how the act of creating something - often in a completely different context - interacts with the memories of the original work, altering those memories yet again.
And how is any of that a compelling argument regarding the assumption of a fundamental difference in the MO of learning?
Simply stating "it has more inputs" doesn't describe the human learning model, so nothing in this establishes a baseline for comparison.
I’m being told repeatedly that the similarities are surface level, but no one seems to be able to give an example of a deep difference
The mechinism backing human learning isn't well understood. Machine learning is considerably clearer. Imo, it's a mistake to assume they're close because ML seems to work.
So your example of a deep difference is the suggestion that there may be a difference owing to our own ignorance? That hardly seems convincing