‘It’s too powerful a technology’

  •  Syrup   ( @Syrup@lemmy.cafe ) 
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    510 months ago

    A bit of a quibble, but I think it’s a stretch to say that current-gen AI is mind-like. I’m of the opinion that, given the way current AI works, there isn’t any “creativity” in how midjourney/etc. generates images. Though you could make a solid argument for a detailed prompt being creative, or for a functional/algorithmic AI being a creative tool of the coder, in neither case would I say that the source of the creativity is the computer.

    Then again, legal definitions would only allow creativity to come from humans, but I think other animal species are currently capable of creativity/art, in the sense of “do they do actions for purposes other than survival or reproduction.”

    • Absolutely. Just yesterday I tried asking stable diffusion to draw me “An elephant and a monkey dance while two cheetahs drink punch. The elephant and monkey look very happy. The cheetahs look bored.”

      It drew me two elephants with monkey hair and two cheetahs. No punch, no dance.

      If what you ask is somewhere in the bank of images it will draw it. But if what you ask is a situation the AI has never encountered before in any image, it will fail to invent it.

      If all artists used AI we would be stuck on a loop of content that is not novel. Years from now we would stop seeing amazing incredible art. There would be no evolution at all in the styles.

      I am glad that there are artists who continue to draw without AI even if it must be hard for them.

    • Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they’re neuron-like. Saying they’re mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that’s a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They’re both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.

      Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as “resources” and “consumers” are privileged.

    • Can you think of a better term? I tried to clarify by saying, “thing that has internalized a ton of content that it can use to generate new content from”, but there’s not a succinct term for that. I would not call an LLM a mind, but I would say minds do this observe patterns->distill information->generate new patterns thing very well. So “mind-like” is all I could come up with.

      legal definitions would only allow creativity to come from humans

      That would be part of the ethical dilemma we will need to solve, which corporations will be on a very predictable side of. Our laws were written assuming that only humans were capable of creativity and consciousness (however linked, or not, the two might be).