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by bonsaibilly 1226 days ago
So your first 6 paragraphs have nothing to do with anything I wrote – you're just arguing with some other post you've made up in your head.

> The appeals to pareidolia are wrong. Synthesis of ideas from past data is natural. But the AI does not choose things. What you’re really complaining about is creation of art from apparent randomness. Not the AI model alone but monkeys on a typewriter getting something compelling from the AI.

No, you've failed to understand what I'm saying entirely (because, again, you've responded to some other post that only exists in your mind).

What I'm talking about is intention and its relationship to meaning, in the philosophical sense (and not... copyright or whatever it is you're rambling on about).

Witness: when ChatGPT famously mis-asserts the number of characters in a word (say, that there are twelve characters in the word "thirteen"), it's not that it's trying and failing to count, because it's confused by letter forms or its attention wanders like a 3 year old or its internal representation of countable sets glitches around the number 8 or something – it never counted anything at all, it's simply the case that twelve is the most statistically likely set of tokens corresponding to that input prompt per its training set. And when it produces a factually correct result (say, "there are 81 words in the first sentence of the declaration of independence"), it produces it for exactly the same reason – not because it has counted the words and formed an internal representation and intends to mean its internal understanding, but simply because 81 is the most statistically likely set of tokens corresponding to that prompt per its training set.

And yet when it produces these correct results, people ooh and aah over how "smart" it is, how much it has "understood", how "good it is at counting; better than my son!", and when it produces incorrect results people deride it as dumb and so forth, and and all of this, all of this, is pareidolia; it is neither smart in the one case nor dumb in the other, it does not learn in the sense the word is normally used, it does no counting. We're anthropomorphizing an algorithm that is doing nothing like what we imagine it to do, because we mistake the statistical order in its expressions for the presence of a meaning intended by those expressions. It's all projection on our end.

1 comments

Your opinion is not the only one that I’m addressing. I clearly understand your point which I address by:

> What you’re really complaining about is creation of art from apparent randomness. Not the AI model alone but monkeys on a typewriter getting something compelling from the AI.

You accuse others of anthrpormorphisizing the tool but you do the same. Art created with Chat GPT is not created by Chat GPT. It is created by a human using a chat GPT. There is no intrinsic limitation on the profundity of art created using chat GPT or other algorithms.

It’s like complaining that paint is stupid. A comment that is largely irrelevant to the artistic merit of paintings.

> Art created with Chat GPT is not created by Chat GPT. It is created by a human using a chat GPT.

Sure, in approximately the same way that the CEO of Sunrise is an animator. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Yours is an utterly incoherent interpretation; when ChatGPT outputs that there are 12 characters in the word 13, I have not "created the meaning" 12. You're just fixated on this "actually I am le real artist for typing prompts" axe you want to grind, but it has fuck all to do with anything I'm saying.

You are cherry picking a dumb example. We don’t shit on paint when someone makes poop. What you should be cherry picking is examples of art that people would consider profound upon seeing it. Otherwise you’ll simply look like a dumbass when you’re implying that only trash will be generated and then beautiful stuff is generated. The fact that current ai has dumb interpretations on things is hardly a fundamental quality of generative algos.

My statement is simply that the algo’s are a tool. And tools can be used to make good art.