I imagine this visually as the difference between walking through a museum of fine art vs. an aisle of wall art in HomeGoods.
It’s ALL ‘art’, but the source of HomeGoods art just churns out bucketloads of “something similar to whatever is blandly trending this season” and moves on without a soul invested in it. As follows, we also have no investment and donate it to Goodwill when something new catches our eye.
Nick Cave has some relevant words on that here.
Specifically about music, but his point is universal.
I read his
It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning.
and challenge him to an uphill battle with a rock.
In other words, the existentialists called and are asking if he really must involve a Higher Being or a Higher Purpose in his creative struggle, or if he maybe could spare us the the metaphorical dance of the grebe and just take a swim with the loonies, enjoying the fish and the strange properties of water.
The swan’s songs so many high-profile artist are singing seem all a bit to self-centred for my liking. The bloody statistics at work within the models aren’t the end of creativity. The ability to record sound wasn’t the end of live performances, and I think this is not to far off as an analogy.
Of course it wasn’t, and photography wasn’t the ending of painted portraiture; but you are mistaken in comparing recording with this faking of creativity.
This is irrelevant to the crux of the conversation here, but since their name has come up several times, I Googled Farhad Manjoo because I was not familiar with them. And if you haven’t already guessed from what I’ve written so far, they use they/them pronouns. Again, off topic, but I just wanted people to be aware.
Thank you! Since I have been actively avoiding their work for a long time I had no idea.
I think I disagree.
These models are looking at recorded stuff and remix it in sort of algorithmic collage.
I’m under the impression that this family of models is another form of creativity instead of a fake of creativity.
Yesterday’s job ads for ‘data scientists’ now seem to be be re-written as ‘prompt engineers’. And that’s not even taking into account the amount of creativity involved in creating the models.
Disclaimer: I’m not sure my argument would survive my own scrutiny. I am half asleep already. But I will try to dream a bit about electrical sheep and reconsider tomorrow.
No, especially not in the early days when the quality of sound recordings on shellac were not great. But it DID in fact give new figures greater control over the production of music in a way that was highly destructive to many artists ability to make a living, especially if they were from marginalized communities (who just happened to make some of the most popular music in modern, global history - but were less likely to financially benefit from that popularity). The reality is that sound records have generally speaking more greatly benefited corporations rather than artists. I’m not sure why we should dismiss that reality or ignore how culture industries are seeking to use new technologies to further entrench their positions vis-a-vis artists?
Art is not just a commodity, whatever corporations might want us to think. Capitalism did not invent culture, it merely found ways to turn it into a commodity (just ask Walter Benjamin). That’s not just a one-way process, in the commodification of culture also came along with a weird kind of democratization of culture, even as that was not evenly realized. But the fact that some of the earliest signs of human society involves some kind of artistic self-expression meant to convey a message (even if we can’t interpret that message) shows that Cave is not just blowing smoke when he talks about using art to express himself in a way that understandable by an audience, that he striving is given meaning by his art (for him and for us), shows us just how dehumanizing it is to just treat art as a commodity that we can safely toss away as disposable. That’s part of the problem of this intersection of art and technology. It’s not just bad, but we can’t ignore the very real damage new techologies can do to existing orders.
One of the reasons we study history is understand change over time, why it happens, and how we can more thoughtfully shape that change. Discussions like this are meant to connect the past to the present, and maybe help us to think more thoughtfully about how technology changes human society, and whether those changes are all good or if there are issues and ptifalls we should avoid… I’m not sure why that is worth dismissive derision, since Cave is clearly attempt to wrestle with these issues in a productive way. Perhaps you don’t agree with his conclusions, but how is just ignoring the issues or pretending like they will not be negative impacts help anything?
Awesome! Thanks for letting us know! Will take note going forward…
The problem with getting people like Margaret Atwood to opine on this is that, guess what, she’s going to use it as fuel for her imagination, and that might be good for content, but it also means “AI” ends up getting yet more undeserved credit for how interesting, capable and important it is (or ever will be).
You might say, well, if AI is just hype, then there’s nothing to worry about except for some wasted ink. But the problem is, it’s the threat that is being used to discipline labor, not the eventual reality or lack thereof. Every article fretting that AI might replace background actors means another hour studios get to spend negotiating over this, instead of more immediately real labor demands.
Like, SAG is worried studios will pay someone $100 to scan them and use their likeness in perpetuity. Which, yes, they will try to do. But then, filming someone is scanning their likeness to use it in perpetuity. This is not about new realities, it’s Capital trying to redefine reality to undo the historical progress of labor.
Without a culture of violent, angry rejection of corporate bullshit, we’re doomed to live in their psychic prison. This is why I suport the death penalty for advertising.
Last Friday I was at a forum with Ms. Atwood on creativity and she was unimpressed with what this software can do (come on folks, this is not artificial intelligence, or anything close to it!). She was irritated that much of her work was being used without her permission. She mentioned that however well trained an algorithm gets, it will still lack the essential human ability to bring forth new art from just ourselves. She mentioned this article, but did not divulge its contents.
I’ve poked at the popular flavors of AI, kicked the tires and taken it for a spin. I think Douglas Adams nailed it a few years back:
“After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur’s mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with.
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
I still don’t understand why the various “AI” tech companies were allowed to copy loads of text and art without permission. A lot of it must have been copyright, such as Margaret Attwood’s and Stephen King’s novels.
IIRC non-profit AI research organisations scraped content to provide training data for non-commercial experimental AI. Then the same training data mysteriously came into the hands of commercial AI developers.
/s
I quite like this Patrick Willems video on AI and moviemaking. It goes over why AI is only as good as the people using it, which is why a lot of these “X movie, but made by Y auteur director” AI-driven projects aren’t very interesting. Artists aren’t making them; dilletantes with too much time on their hands are. And he makes a good case that the jobs that AI is actually most suited to replace are those of the higher-ups currently trying to use AI to replace some or all of the pesky humans they don’t like paying.
I really like the adage:
“What is artificial intelligence?” - “A poor choice of words in the 1950s.”
The fundamental problem isn’t AI: it’s the IP law we’ve used to shackle creators to publishers. They’ve been doing much the same for decades, and now AI just creates another multiplier on a situation we’ve failed to properly address.
Functionally, we’ve decided that art belongs to the exploiter, not the creator.
They used it for training purposes. That makes it educational and therefore fair use. /s
That said, I do wonder about how this would play out in court. OpenAI, for example, claims they got their data by scraping publicly available sources, which means sources designed to be read. When that includes copyright-infringing material, are they responsible for someone else having made and published an illegal copy? I don’t know, but if so, every other company using a web scraper should take notice. And the resulting LLM doesn’t actually contain a copy of the material it is trained on, except in something kinda like the same sense in which a human retains a copy of what we read.
Educational “fair use” doesn’t exist. Schools have to subscribe to an organisation like the Performing Rights Society to be able legally to make photocopies of excerpts of textbooks for use in tests and so on. It’s certainly impossible to copy textbooks in toto for free, because it’s “Educational”. So I agree with your ideas around a possible court case.
google search and news can only display snippets for a reason, and look at the way dmca works on youtube, or what copyright means for google books. each of those things has been litigated and they are all different things.
neural nets being taught to recreate author’s styles by unpermitted use of copyrighted material is another different thing, but one that hasn’t been litigated.
i think the authors and artists have a valid complaint about how their works are being used. their labor is making someone else money. a lot of money. doesn’t pass the filter of basic fairness. so something hopefully will change
