[wxs]

I agree with the first half of this comment, but I don't follow you here: "Until there is an element of randomness fueled by context, they aren't creating anything new. That's where genius lies."

I suspect reframing of problems, seeing things in new light, paradigm shifts, new ontologies, whatever you want to call it are not quite so simple as context-dependent randomness! I don't think we understand this process very well right now.

Finally; I think there is an artfulness in copying existing patterns, because the way in which you "abduce"[1] an observation-explaining theory out of the infinite space of possibilities is a creative and aesthetic process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

[tyre]

What I mean by thinking of context is this:

Lil Wayne has a wonderful line in his song 6'7', "real G's move in silence like lasagna". Unbelievable.

Let's extrapolate that pattern:

"Real H's move in silence like phonebooks".

Not really the same ring to it, huh? It's not just pulling out a silent letter to emphasize the silence, but there's the context of Lil Wayne being a rapper and self-proclaimed G (gangster.)

Is our extrapolation "new"? Sure, in that no one has (likely) ever said that. But while it mimics Weezy's style, it doesn't understand it's context. Similarly, if Katy Perry sang the same line as Lil Wayne, the context doesn't make sense (Katy Perry is no gangster...)

EDIT

A better example, specific to art, would be Warhol. He explicitly copied real-world objects as art, to create something new. But the newness wasn't that he made a clear copy, it was that his copies reflected the shift in materialism that came with mass-production. Warhol mass-producing "art" was a social comment that resonated _at that time_.

His art was more than the process, it was the context in which it was made and what that said more broadly about society. That's why it resonated.

[wyldfire]

> Lil Wayne has a wonderful line in his song 6'7', "real G's move in silence like lasagna". Unbelievable.

Sorry, I'm too thick. I mentally thought of a gangster moving laterally, splayed out and wondered how it would be quiet. I had to google this to understand that he meant silence like the letter 'G' in 'lasagna'.

[Udik]

Even harder for me, since I'm Italian and the g in lasagna is not silent at all.

[emmelaich]

I think most English speakers would pronounce the gn as ñ.

[Udik]

That's how it is pronounced also in Italian. Gn is a digraph, pronounced like ñ in Spanish. The g is not silent, as it is part of the digraph.

[Dylan16807]

Wow, this is more complex than I thought. It looks like in Italian, you have a single consonant ɲ. In English, ɲ doesn't exist. We say nj, a two consonant cluster, and most people can't properly distinguish the two sounds.

The end result here is that in English the g causes a sound change after the n, and basically qualifies it as a silent letter. This is a subtly different sound from the Italian version, where it merges with the n and does not qualify as a silent letter.

[hueving]

A neural network generating rap lyrics would be trained to contain 'G' in it's vocabulary.

[kastnerkyle]

Extrapolation in text space is not the same as more abstract movement - even simple things like word2vec can capture a lot of meaning through context. Probably not enough to construct wordplay like this yet, but it is not outside the realm of possibility. At least a few journalists were fooled by a walk through latent space in a more complex model here.

[0] https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/21/the-amazing-power-of-wor...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/googles-a...

[tedmiston]

Rap Genius broke that line down a few years ago if anyone is curious.

http://genius.com/72892

[visarga]

> context dependent randomness

Dependent randomness? or, in other words, deterministic randomness? a paradoxical notion