this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Not the same thing, dog. Being inspired by other things is different than plagiarism.
And yet so many of the debates around this new formation of media and creativity come down to the grey space between what is inspiration and what is plagiarism.
Even if everyone agreed with your point, and I think broadly they do, it doesn't settle the debate.
The real problem is that ai will never ever be able to make art without using content copied from other artists which is absolutely plagiarism
But an artist cannot be inspired without content from other artists. I don’t agree to the word “copied” here either, because it is not copying when it creates something new.
Yeah, unless they lived in a cave with some pigments, everyone started by being inspired in some way.
But nobody's starts by downloading and pulling elements of all living and dead artists works without reference or license, it is not the same.
Humans learn from other creative works, just like AI. AI can generate original content too if asked.
AI creates output from a stochastic model of its' training data. That's not a creative process.
What does that mean, and isn't that still something people can employ for their creative process?
LLMs analyse their inputs and create a stochastic model (i.e.: a guess of how randomness is distributed in a domain) of which word comes next.
Yes, it can help in a creative process, but so can literal noise. It can't "be creative" in itself.
How that preclude these models from being creative? Randomness within rules can be pretty creative. All life on earth is the result of selection on random mutations. Its output is way more structured and coherent than random noise. That's not a good comparison at all.
Either way, generative tools are a great way for the people using to create with, no model has to be creative on its own.
They lack intentionality, simple as that.
Yup, my original point still stands.
How is intentionality integral to creativity?
Are you serious?
Intentionality is integral to communication. Creative art is a subset of communication.
I was asking about creativity, not art. It's possible for something to be creative and not be art.
I still posit that ceativity requires intentionality.
I don't think all creativity requires intentionality. Some forms of creativity are the accumulation of unintentional outcomes, like when someone sets out to copy a thing, but due to mistakes or other factors outside their control end up with something unique to what they were going for.
The intentionality steps in when it is decided to keep or discard the outcome.
A person sees a piece of art and is inspired. They understand what they see, be it a rose bush to paint or a story beat to work on. This inspiration leads to actual decisions being made with a conscious aim to create art.
An AI, on the other hand, sees a rose bush and adds it to its rose bush catalog, reads a story beat and adds to to its story database. These databases are then shuffled and things are picked out, with no mind involved whatsoever.
A person knows why a rose bush is beautiful, and internalises that thought to create art. They know why a story beat is moving, and can draw out emotional connections. An AI can't do either of these.
The way you describe how these models work is wrong. This video does a good job of explaining how they work.
Yeah, I know it doesn't actually "see" anything, and is just making best guesses based on pre-gathered data. I was just simplifying for the comparison.
A person is also very much adding rose bushes and story beats to their internal databases. You learn to paint by copying other painters, adding their techniques to a database. You learn to write by reading other authors, adding their techniques to a database. Original styles/compositions are ultimately just a rehashing of countless tiny components from other works.
An AI understands what they see, otherwise they wouldn't be able to generate a "rose bush" when you ask for one. It's an understanding based on a vector space of token sequence weights, but unless you can describe the actual mechanism of human thought beyond vague concepts like "inspiration", I don't see any reason to assume that our understanding is not just a much more sophisticated version of the same mechanism.
The difference is that we're a black box, AI less so. We have a better understanding of how AI generates content than how the meat of our brain generates content. Our ignorance, and use of vague romantic words like "inspiration" and "understanding", is absolutely not proof that we're fundamentally different in mechanism.
A person painting a rose bush draws upon far more than just a collection of rose bushes in their memory. There's nothing vague about it, I just didn't feel like getting into much detail, as I thought that statement might jog your memory of a common understanding we all have about art. I suppose that was too much to ask.
For starters, refer to my statement "a person understands why a rose bush is beatiful". I admit that maybe this is vague, but let's unpack.
Beaty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. It is a subjective thing, requiring opinion, and AIs cannot hold opinions. I find rose bushes beautiful due to the inherent contrast between the delicate nature of the rose buds, and the almost monstrous nature of the fronds.
So, if I were to draw a rose bush, I would emphasise these aspects, out of my own free will. I might even draw it in a way that resembles a monster. I might even try to tell a story with the drawing, one about a rose bush growing tired of being pkucked, and taking revenge on the humans who dare to steal its buds.
All this, from the prompt "draw a rose bush".
What would an AI draw?
Just a rose bush.
"Beauty", "opinion", "free will", "try". These are vague, internal concepts. How do you distinguish between a person who really understands beauty, and someone who has enough experience with things they've been told are beautiful to approximate? How do you distinguish between someone with no concept of beauty, and someone who sees beauty in drastically different things than you? How do you distinguish between the deviations from photorealism due to imprecise technique, and deviations due to intentional stylistic impressionism?
What does a human child draw? Just a rosebush, poorly at that. Does that mean humans have no artistic potential? AI is still in relative infancy, the artistic stage of imitation and technique refinement. We are only just beginning to see the first glimmers of multi-modal AI, recursive models that can talk to themselves and pass information between different internal perspectives. Some would argue that internal dialogue is precisely the mechanism that makes human thought so sophisticated. What makes you think that AI won't quickly develop similar sophistication as the models are further developed?
You're presupposing that brains and computers are basically the same thing. They are fundamentally different.
An AI doesn't understand. It has an internal model which produces outputs, based on the training data it received and a prompt. That's a different cathegory than "understanding".
Otherwise, spotify or Youtube recommendation algorithms would also count as understanding the contents of the music/videos they supply.
LLM AI doesn’t learn. It doesn’t conceptualise. It mimics, iterates and loops. AI cannot generate original content with LLM approaches.