“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art”
by Ted Chiang
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art
@gregeganSF Wow. The text is so profoundly myopic I'm surprised it came from an author who writes about alien minds. Maybe I shouldn't be as he may have a knee jerk reaction to encroachment on his turf, the language.
The opening shot is a masterpiece: "Whatever the art is, AIs sure can't do it".
And I love the illustration too.
But this admission is misplaced.
It all follows from the omission of what kind of AIs we're talking about. From the headline we can read the broad claim "whatever the AI is, it can't do art (whatever it is)".
It then gets narrowed down to "current generation of commercial/public LLMs attached to a chat interface".
The core point is that such a system can't make choices that would be "its own" and it just autocompletes the user input from the internet corpus.
That's a load-bearing "just", but I'll let it slide.
Amusingly, Ted goes on a side quest of training efficiency which is irrelevant to the central claim, but it stands out how the author of "alien mind" stories fails to recognize that the thing under inspection is different from animal brains.
Anyway, the claim gets backed by the assumption that there's no light inside, thus no-one to make choices for the art (as a package of choices made, by the local definition).
And this is where he trips up on that silent narrowing of AI.
Sure, public chatlike models aren't agentic. If anything, they are steered away specifically from being anything like that and into the autocomplete realm since this is where commercial interests are. And, as he correctly points out, there's demand for "no effort, only demands" and the corps are happy to oblige.
In a way, he gets to a wallpaper market in search of a poetry group. Yes, the corpos are selling the idea of creativity to users, which is arguably dishonest. But such is our marketing culture of the day. Nevertheless, an inverse of bad take doesn't make a good support for his claims.
At least he does recognize the emerging sub-genre of "let's sift through the boatloads of generated slop and maybe try to nudge it somewhere interesting". And with the growing interest a tool support will come, that's for sure.
Sorry, I'm meandering again, gotta write more essays (=
In the end the claim narrows down to "it would take more than a few years to make a truly autonomous system that would make salient choices to produce quality art pieces".
Now that's a grounded prediction for which the evidence can be collected. And I would love to see an essay/paper that does just that.
But that is very, very far away from what the headline says.
Instead of delving into (sorry) the topic, Ted produced some textual slop by rehashing the already stale claims. Ironic.
@dpwiz @gregeganSF . It feels to me that the negativity (mine at least) stems from the fact that we are using the term AI for all this. When a binary search terminates with the correct output, is it exhibiting any Intelligence? Some might argue that in a way it does, or that binary searching is one of the functions our brains can perform.I prefer to keep viewing it as an algorithm.We still don't know how our "intelligence" works or how it should be defined.
@dsp @gregeganSF I actually agree with Ted's (i.e. F.Chollet's) definition: intelligence is an ability to master new tasks and pick an appropriate mastery for the task at hand.
This swiftly denies intelligence to calculators and thermostats, grants it to humans, and even expands it to "collective intelligence" and, yes, "artificial intelligence".
