this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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AI won't be creating anything new anytime soon, because it recycles existing art just like hack writers do now. The "best" art tends to require a supporting story, which AI won't have. Comedy changes constantly, and AI won't be any better than people trying random stuff.
You don't question your existence because other people are smarter or better at doing things, right? Is most of humanity not of any value because they aren't the best at everything?
This is one of those half-truths which I think is doing more harm than good for the AI-skeptic crowd. If all we have to offer in our own defense is that we have souls and the machines do not, then what does that mean if the machines ever surpass us? (For the kids snickering in the back: I am using "soul" as a poetic stand-in for the ineffable creative quality which the "AI as collage-maker" argument ascribes to human people -- nothing spiritual).
For now, the future of AI is incredibly uncertain. We have no clear idea just how much gas is left in the moment of this current generative AI breakthrough. Regardless of whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, do not trust anyone who acts like they know for a definitive fact what the technology will or won't be capable of.
What everyone in these online arguments miss. Personhood. What makes art and all human creations meaningful is that it was made by a human. That has an unrepeatable point of view, and is trying to say something about the world. We can relate, empathize, with that human, and in that connection, imagining what they're trying to say—what they were seeing or thinking when they did that thing—lies meaning. AI will never cross that line. We cannot empathize with the machine, there's no consciousness or sentient experience that we know of that we can relate to. The machine has no particular point of view it's trying to express, it has nothing meaningful to say about the world, it has no concept of the world. It's just probability numbers crunching in an electronic calculator. It's not human, it's not a person, and thus their creations have no meaning. Similarly to how we tend to reject corporate impersonal, void artwork, it says nothing, only ads. It has no point of view, just profit. It has no meaning, but consumption. It's banal, even if it's aesthetically pleasing.
It already has.
ChatGPT can write that. Multi-modal models that combine text generation with audio and video are months away.
Those claims have the tendency to not age well.
Humans aren't that much better than me and not doing the things I want to do. AI on the other side will be much better than me, as well as do exactly what I want it to do and will be a click away.
And yeah, I had numerous experience were I would question my existence when playing around with ChatGPT or StableDiffusion. Neither of them is quite good enough yet, but they are very much on a trajectory where you can see that you have zero chance of competing with them in the future, or even getting remotely close.
The fact that we got them in the first place, not from humans doing centuries of research on art and language, but by simply by throwing huge amount of training data at AI algorithm, should be enough to question your existence.
AI writing a fictional background story about how it came up with some piece of art is not the same thing as multiple researchers telling the story of an artist. Neither of your examples are something someone couldn't do, because whoever prompted it could have done the same thing and just had not yet.
You are completely missing the point that great art is generally supported by the context of how it was made and not the end result in a vaccuum.
I understand why you think that, but what you have to remember is that every great piece of art you've ever seen has been derivative of something before it.
For example, I think of the Beatles as musical geniuses. But they are the first to admit that they stole other people's ideas left and right.
Beethoven's 9th symphony is this piece of transcendental music, that was widely considered at the time to be the greatest symphony ever written.
But if you listen to Beethoven's works over time, you see that the seeds of that symphony were planted much much earlier in inferior works.
Genius and creation aren't what we think they are. They are all just incremental steps.
That is overly reductive and conflates copying (like a cover band) and creating something new (being influenced). Heck, even when some bands play new versions of existing songs they are adding their own personal touch and have the possibility of making it mean something new. Like how Hurt by NIN and Johnny Cash are the same song, but how they are performed ends up being about completely different experiences.
Even when bands like Led Zeppelin outright covered existing songs they added something to it that AI can't, and won't be able to do. AI can't have sexually charged energy that a human can have. They can pretend to, like how cover bands can pretend to be like the band they are covering, but AI won't be able to replicate the personal touch that memorable art has.
Even popular stuff with widespread appeal frequently drops off over time because it isn't the type of art that holds up over time. Hell, the Beatles mostly hold up more for when they were popular and how they have managed their legacy than any kind of technical prowess in musicianship. Without their performances, their personas, and the backstory to most of their music it is just well done music that has been superseded musically since that time. None of that will apply to AI, and without the backstory it will just end up being high quality music that won't stand the test of time because we don't have any context for it.
Hell, there were a ton of other composers during Beethoven's time that were putting out great music too, but you know who he is because of details other than his musical prowess.