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by Lockyy 1480 days ago
Is this fundamentally different from training a human exclusively on the same and expecting them to advance the field of art by a hundred years? These sorts of progressions in humanity are slow and steady with occasional exceptions that produce leaps.
2 comments

They may be slow, especially by machine standards, but they do occur. Their pace isn't really relevant to my point.

And humans are trained on the same; unlike AI, we don't have any external supply of art to rely on : ) At any given time, all we have is what we've already created so far

I would actually say that humans have an enormous extra set of data that we, as people, are "trained" on. We walk around in our daily lives, seeing things constantly, and that influences our perception of art. Art is always a product of the broader context it was made in (social, environmental, etc). Something that gets accepted or praised today might very well not have been 200 years ago.

One of the things that is interesting with these new big models is it is dramatically broadening the context in use. The models are learning both the textual representation of a concept, as well as the artistic/visual representation and the relationship between the two domains.

That's true, but this is exactly the unsurpassable limitation of AI's creativity.

It can generate art out of art. It can do it exquisitely well. But it lacks experiential/social inspiration. This component only comes from recycling here.

(Without the atmosphere of industrializing 19th century Central Europe - we have no Kafka. You can't simply generate Kafkauesqueness out of pre-existing literature.)

And that's why I refuse to believe AI can be creative in a meaningful sense of the word.

Obviously it's not AI's "fault", so to speak, but that's kind of beyond the point :)

PS. I can imagine - now we're going far into the realm of s-f - truly sentient AIs producing art that's genuinely creative. Art actually stemming from a self-conscious AI's psychological experience. But then it would probably be utterly incomprehensible for us : ) "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him", as the philosopher remarked.

That’s a good point. Though AI should be millions(?) of times faster and get to those leaps quicker…but can it?

Would be very cool to see that experiement.