Notices by barrenplanet@c.im

@Mrfunkedude Not only will I ignore this, I'll actively run distraction, by asking staff to check if they have something "out the back", or absorbing them in some random conversation.

@JulieB @Mrfunkedude Same rule here. Even if I'm proven wrong by a comment - which does happen! - if the author is snarky, insulting, or overly confrontational in their approach, they'll never know that I accepted their argument. 'Cos they'll go straight onto the blocklist.

Life's too short to tolerate assholes, whether they know what they're talking about or not.

@simon_lucy @pettter @sotolf @whvholst @rysiek There are no realistic cave paintings. Anywhwre in the world.

@pettter @sotolf @whvholst @rysiek Which leaves you with the problem of feral children, raised by other animals, of which there are several historical examples. They theoretically have the same access to the "entire universe", yet they never even learn full human language, let alone the world-knowledge they would need to make the sorts of giant imaginative leaps you seem to think are innate to all humans.

Raw sensory input is meaningless to us. We need first to be *trained* to interpret it - by our parents, by schools, by society. Without that training we're lost in a bewildering phantasmagoria that we'll never understand.

@pettter @sotolf @whvholst @rysiek I'm really not convinced that's true. It may subjectively *seem* that way, but that's not what's happening. Take the phenomenon of hypnogogia/hypnopompia. These are pre- and post- sleep trance states involving sleep paralysis, and an overwhelming sense of 'presence' that probably explains a wide variety of 'supernatural' experiences such as ghost visitations, alien abductions, and demonic apparitions. The interesting thing is that these hallucinations are clearly culturally-specific, with Americans seeing little grey aliens with big googly dark eyes, Britons seeing ghosts and other entities from European folklore, and Africans seeing demons and other entities from African folklore.

How the human brain interpets the experience depends - to put this bluntly - on its *dataset*, or existing archetypes to which its been exposed through stories and images passed down within the culture in which its embedded.

So while I agree that human creativity is more sophisticated, I don't agree that it is as many orders of magnitude different as you seem to be arguing. The vast majority of humans aren't creative enough to imagine anything outside their existing experience. You can see this by looking at prehistoric cave art by what are, biologically, modern humans. Why is it so crudely stylized? Where are Picassos, the Van Goghs? Where are the vividly realistic paintings? These people are the same as us, yet they can only draw stick figures?

*Culture* is your dataset, and culture has to evolve too, before individual humans can even concieve of something as obvious (to us) as painting something with realistic detail.

In short, I think you're romanticizing creativity.

@pettter @sotolf @whvholst @rysiek You did actually explicitly say elsewhere in the thread that MJ doesn't produce anything original. You even scare-quoted the word!

The crux of this discussion, as I understand it - but perhaps I don't? - is whether the AI is stealing human work or generating new art based on the totality of human work to which it has been exposed.

@whvholst @pettter @rysiek Me too. It's just not always practical to have to come up with objective definitions for everything, rather than all agree that, say, 'creativity' is as good a term as any (for purposes of informal discussion) to describe the endlessly novel ways in which Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc. seamlessly fuse together disparate elements to generate original art.

@pettter @whvholst @rysiek I think we all agree on that. I just don't see how statistical pattern-matching is any different from what brains do. Dismissing the demonstrated capabilities of AI on grounds that there's no "consciousness" involved, seems to miss the point that the AI isn't plagiarizing anyone or copying, it's creating new works by, as it were, hallucinating from its dataset. That's not copyright-infringing.

Pretty sure everyone in this thread understands that such language is figurative in the case of current AI.

@pettter @sotolf @whvholst @rysiek That's an entirely novel outfit. If you must, a priori, decide to dismiss that MJ has indeed generated an original image, when it blatantly has done (there are no images of Putin in a pink floral jacket, are there?) then it's difficult to see how this discussion can proceed.

@pettter @whvholst @rysiek This is a decades-old debate, and one that is largely settled, at least among scientists. Our subjective experience arises from all our dispositional complexities, organisational (cognitive) processes, and how our sensory apparatuses function. There's no reason to think that if all of that was replicated by a machine - even a non-biological machine - that the machine wouldn't also have subjective experiences. The proof is that we *are* machines ourselves! There's no magical ingredients, no elan vital, no special property or quality of "subjectivity" that can be measured or quantified.

What you're expressing here is what Daniel Dennett calls the Zombie Hunch. Here is a beautifully written transcript of a 1999 lecture by Dennett explaining why the Zombie Hunch is so ridiculous. Perhaps give it a read?

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/zombic.htm

@sotolf @pettter @whvholst @rysiek The same is true of these AIs! There seems to be this widespread misconception that computers can't do anything novel. But Midjourney does this all the time, it's designed to do so. For example, check this out.

I asked MT to draw me Putin in a pink floral dress. But it 'knows' that Putin always wears a jacket. So it turned fashion designer, and invented a pink, floral jacket that is also a dress.

@pettter @whvholst @rysiek Again, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc. generate *original* images. They don't copy anyone in particular, they have instead developed a 'feel' for what various elements look like when rendered in particular styles, and you can endlessly 'reroll' a particular image to get the AI to give you any number of creative variations and reinterpretations of your prompt. It is, in a sense, creative. The other day I got Midjourney to render me a man whose skin was made of savoy cabbage. The (bizarre!) result was something it's doubtful any human has ever drawn/painted. The image is shared on my TL, somewhere.

In my view the human brain is nothing more than an elaborate machine, so if AI is plagiarizing, then so is every human artist on Earth.

@pettter @whvholst @rysiek But that's the same way humans learn, isn't it? Learning is not the same as stealing! These AI art bots aren't reproducing anyone's work, they're generating *original* images from the machine equivalent of their 'imaginations', and combining elements in novel ways.

It's a concern that the hard work of human artists may be devalued by making it trivially easy for those with no talent, training or artistic background, to get similar results. Sure. Artists struggle enough to make a living without competition from AI. But looking at a piece of art and getting ideas from it, doesn't infringe any copyright laws.