this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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I don't think it's obvious at all. Both legally speaking - there is no consensus around this issue - and ethically speaking because AIs fundamentally function the same way humans do.
We take in input, some of which is bound to be copyrighted work, and we mesh them all together to create new things. This is essentially how art works. Someone's "style" cannot be copyrighted, only specific works.
The government announced an inquiry recently into the copyright questions surrounding AI. They are going to make recommendations to congress about potential legislation, if any, they think would be a good idea. I believe there's a period of public comment until mid October, if anyone wants to write a comment.
I really hope you're wrong.
And I think there's a difference. Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.
AI art, literally cannot do anything, without human training data. It can't take a previous result, be inspired by it, and make it better. There has to be actual human input, it can't train itself on its own data, the way humans do. It absolutely does not "work the same way".
AI art has NEVER made me feel like it's greater than the sum of its parts. Unlike art made by humans, which makes me feel that way all the time.
If a human does art without input, you still get "something".
With an AI, you don't have that. Without the training data, you have nothing.
Ok, take a human being that has never had any other interactions with any other human and has never consumed any content created by humans. Give him finger paint and have him paint something on a blank canvas. I think it wouldn't look any different than a chimpanzee doing finger paint.
In theory, it could. You would just need a way to quantify the "fitness" of a drawing. They do this by comparing to actual content. But you don't need actual content in some circumstances. For example, look at Alphazero - Deepmind's AI from a few years back for playing chess. All the AI knew was the rules of the game. It did not have access to any database of games. No data. The way it learned is it played millions of games against itself.
It trained itself on its own data. And that AI, at the time, beat the leading chess engine that has access to databases and other pre-built algorithms.
With art this gets trickier because art is subjective. You can quantify clearly whether you won or lost a chess game. How do you quantify if something is a good piece of art? If we can somehow quantify this, you could in theory create AI that generates art with no input.
We're in the infancy stages of this technology.
AI can do all of the same. I know it's scary but it's here and it isn't going away. AI designed systems are becoming more and more commonplace. Solar panels, medical devices, computer hardware, aircraft wings, potential drug compounds, etc. Certain things AI can be really good at, and designing things and testing it in a million different simulations is something that AI can do a lot better than humans.
What is art? If I make something that means nothing and you find a meaning in it, is it meaningful? AI is a cold calculated mathematical model that produces meaningless output. But humans love finding patterns in noise.
Trust me, you will eventually see some sort of AI art that makes an impact on you. Math doesn't lie. If statistics can turn art into data and find the hidden patterns that make something impactful, then it can recreate it in a way that is impactful.
The randomness used by current machine learning to train the neural networks, will never be able to do what a human does when they are being creative.
I have no doubt AI art will be able "say" things. But it wont be saying things, that haven't already been said.
And yes, AI can brute force its way to solutions in ways humans cannot beat. But that only works when there is a solution. So AI works with science, engineering, chess.
Art does not have a "solution". Every answer is valid. Humans are able to create good art, because they understand the question. "What is it to be human?" "Why are we here?" "What is adulthood?" "Why do I feel this?" "What is innocence?"
AI does not understand anything. All it is doing is mimicking art already created by humans, and coincidentally sometimes getting it right.
It's not brute force. It seems like brute force because trying something millions of times seems impossible to us. But they identify patterns and then use those patterns to create output. It's learning. It's why we call it "machine learning". The mechanics are different than how humans do it, but fundamentally it's the same.
The only reason you know what a tree looks like is because you've seen a million different trees. Trees in person, trees in movies, trees in cartoons, trees in drawings, etc. Your brain has taken all of these different trees and merged them together in your brain to create an "ideal" of the tree. Sort of like Plato's "world of forms"
AI can recognize a tree through the same process. It views millions of trees and creates an "ideal" tree. It can then compare any image it sees against this ideal and determine the probability that it is or isn't a tree. Combine this with something that randomly pumps out images and you can now compare these generated images with the internal model of a tree and all of a sudden you have an AI that can create novel images of trees.
It's fundamentally the same thing we do. It's creating pictures of trees that didn't exist before. The only difference is it happens in a statistical model and it happens at a larger and faster scale than humans are capable of.
This is why the question of AI models having to pay copyright for content it parses is not obvious at all.
If every answer is valid then you would be sitting here saying that AI art is just as valid as anything else.
I think it's a mistake to see the software as an independent entity. It's a tool just like the paintbrush or photoshop. So yes, there isn't any AI art without the human but that's true for every single art form.
The best art is a mix of different techniques and skills. Many digital artists are implementing ai into their workflow and there is definitely depth to what they are making.
Why do you think so? AI art can take an image and change it in creative ways, just as humans can.
Only an incredibly small amount of humans ever "trained itself" without relying on previous human data. Anyone who has ever seen any piece of artwork wouldn't qualify.
Art is subjective. I've seen great and interesting AI art, and I've seen boring and uninspired human art.
Really? Do you have an example for someone who is deaf, blind, mute and can't feel touch, who became an artist? Because all of those are inputs all humans have since birth.
I'm talking from a perspective of understanding how machine learning networks work.
They cannot make something new. By nature, they can only mimic.
The randomness they use to combine different pieces of work, is not creativeness. It's brute force. It's doing the math a million times until it looks right.
Humans fundamentally do not work that way. When an engineer sees a design, and thinks "I can improve that" they are doing so because they understand the mechanism.
Modern AIs do not understand anything. They brute force their way to valid output, and in some cases, like with code, science, or an engineering problem, there might be one single best solution, which an AI can find faster than a human.
But art, DOES NOT HAVE a single correct "solution".
AI is supposed to work with human input. AI is a tool for the artist, not a replacement of the artist. The human artist is the one calling the shots, deciding when the final result is good or when it needs improvement.
Absolutely.
Yet a lot of people are sharpening their knives in preparation to cut the artist out of the process.
And the difference in results is clearly different. There are people who replaced artists with Photoshop, there are people who replaced artists with AI, and each new tool with firther empower people to try things on their own. If those results are good enough for them then they probably wouldn't have paid for a good artist anyway.
Explain it to me from a mathematical point of view. How can I know based on the structure of GANs or Transformers that they, by nature, can only mimic? Please explain it mathematically, since you're referring to their nature.
This betrays a lack of understanding on your part. What is the difference between creativeness and brute force? The rate of acceptable navigations in the latent space. Transformers and GANs do not brute force in any capacity. Where do you get the idea that they generate millions of variations until they get it right?
Define understanding for me. AI can, for example, automatically optimise algorithms (it's a fascinating field, finding a more efficient implementation without changing results). This should be impossible if you're correct. Why does it work? Why can they optimise without understanding, and why can't this be used in other areas?
Again, define understanding. They provably build internal models depending on the task you're training. How is that not a form of understanding?
Then it seems great that an AI doesn't always give the same result for the same input, no?
The brute forcing doesn't happen when you generate the art. It happens when you train the model.
You fiddle with the numbers until it produces only results that "look right". That doesn't make it not brute forcing.
Human inspiration and creativity meanwhile is an intuitive process. And we understand why 2+2 is four.
Writing a piece of code that takes two values and sums them, does not mean the code comprehends math.
In the same way, training a model to generate sound or visuals, does not mean it understands the human experience.
As for current models generating different result for the same prompt... no. They don't. They generate variations, but the same prompt won't get you Dalí in one iteration, then Monet in the next.
So it's the same as a human - they also generate art until they get something that "looks right" during training. How is it different when an AI does it?
But you'll have to explain where this brute forcing happens. What are the inputs and outputs of the process? Because the NN doesn't generate all possible outputs until the correct one is found, which is what brute forcing is. Maybe you could argue that GANs are kinda doing this, but it's still a very much directed process, which is entirely different from real brute forcing.
You're using more words without defining them.
But we're not writing code to generate art. We're writing code to train a model to generate art. As I've already mentioned, NNs provably can build an accurate model of whatever you're training - how is this not a form of comprehension?
Please prove you need to understand the human experience to be able to generate meaningful art.
Of course they can, depending on your prompt and temperature.
You are drawing parallels where I don't think there are any, and are asking me to prove things I consider self-evident.
I'm no longer interested in elaborating, and I don't think you'd understand me if I did.
This is what it always comes down to - you have this fuzzy feeling that AI art is not real art, but the deeper you dig, the harder it gets to draw a real distinction. This is because your arguments aren't rooted in actual definitions, so instead of clearly explaining the difference between A and B, you handwave it away due to C, which you also don't explain.
I once held positions similar to yours, but after analysing the topic much much deeper I arrived at my current positions. I can clearly answer all the questions I posed to you. You should consider whether you not being able to means anything regarding your own position.
I am able to answer your questions for myself. I have lost interest in doing so for you.
But can you do so from the ground up, without handwaving towards the next unexplained reason? That's what you've done here so far.
Yes.
I once held a view similar to the one you present now. I would consider my current opinion further advanced, like you do yours.
You ask for elaboration and verbal definitions, I've been concise because I do not wish to spend time on this.
It is clear we cannot proceed further without me doing so. I have decided I won't.
Bummer. You could have been the first to bring actual argument for your position :)
Not today. I have too much else to do.
And it's not like my being concise makes my argument absent.
The issue isn't you being concise, it's throwing around words that don't have a clear definition, and expecting your definition to be broadly shared. You keep referring to understanding, and yet objective evidence towards understanding is only met with "but it's not creative".
Are you suggesting there is valid evidence modern ML models are capable of understanding?
I don't see how that could be true for any definition of the word.
As I've shared 3 times already: Yes, there is valid evidence that modern ML models are capable of understanding. Why do I have to repeat it a fourth time?
Then explain to me how it isn't true given the evidence:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382
I don't see how an emergent nonlinear internal representation of the board state is anything besides "understanding" it.
Cool. But this is still stuff that has a "right" answer. Math. Math in the form of game rules, but still math.
I have seen no evidence that MLs can comprehend the abstract. To know, or more accurately, model, the human experience. It's not even clear, that given a conscious entity, it is possible to communicate about being human to something non-human.
I am amazed, but not surprised, that you can explain a "system" to an LLM. However, doing the same for a concept, or human emotion, is not something I think is possible.
What are you talking about? You wanted evidence that NNs can understand stuff, I showed you evidence.
Yes, and math can represent whatever you want. It can represent language, it can represent physics, it can even represent a human brain. Don't assume we are more than incredibly complicated machines. If you want to argue "it's just math", then show me that anything isn't just math.
See? And that's the handwaving. You're talking about "the human experience" as if that's a thing with an actual definition. Why is "the human experience" relevant to whether NNs can understand things?
And the next handwave - what is a concept? How is "the board in Othello" not a concept?
Modern MLs are nowhere near complex enough to model reality to the extent required for genuine artistic expression.
That you need me to say this using an essay instead of a sentence, is your problem, not mine.
You'd have to bring up actual evidence for this. Easiest would be to start by defining "genuine artistic expression". But I have a feeling you'll just resort to the next handwave...
Thank you for confirming that your position doesn't make any sense.
Rude. Thanks for confirming my choice on minimizing the effort I spend on you, I guess.