Writer here, absolutely not having this experience. Generative AI tools are bad at writing, but people generally have a pretty low bar for what they think is good enough.
These things are great if you care about tech demos and not quality of output. If you actually need the end result to be good though, you’re gonna be waiting a while.
That remains to be seen. We have yet to see one of these things actually get good at anything, so we don’t know how hard that last part is to do. I don’t think we can assume there will be continuous linear progress. Maybe it’ll take one year, maybe it’ll take 10, maybe it’ll just never reach that point.
Yeah a real problem here is how you get an AI which doesn’t understand what it is doing to create something complete and still coherent. These clips are cool and all, and so are the tiny essays put out by LLMs, but what you see is literally all you are getting; there are no thoughts, ideas or abstract concepts underlying any of it. There is no meaning or narrative to be found which connects one scene or paragraph to another. It’s a puzzle laid out by an idiot following generic instructions.
That which created the woman walking down that street doesn’t know what either of those things are, and so it can simply not use those concepts to create a coherent narrative. That job still falls onto the human instructing the AI, and nothing suggests that we are anywhere close to replacing that human glue.
Current AI can not conceptualise – much less realise – ideas, and so they can not be creative or create art by any sensible definition. That isn’t to say that what is produced using AI can’t be posed as, mistaken for, or used to make art. I’d like to see more of that last part and less of the former two, personally.
Current AI can not conceptualise – much less realise – ideas, and so they can not be creative or create art by any sensible definition.
I kinda 100% agree with you on the art part since it can’t understand what it’s doing… On the other hand, I could swear that if you look at some generated AI imagines it’s kind of mocking us. It’s a reflection of our society in a weird mirror. Like a completely mad or autistic artist that is creating interesting imagery but has no clue what it means. Of course that exists only in my perception.
But it the sense of “inventive” or “imaginative” or “fertile” I find AI images absolutely creative. As such it’s telling us something about the nature of creative process, about the “limits” of human creativity - which is in itself art.
When you sit there thinking up or refining prompts you’re basically outsourcing the imaginative visualizing part of your brain. An “AI artist” might not be able draw well or even have the imagination, but he might have a purpose or meaning that he’s trying to visualize with the help of AI. So AI generation is at least some portion of the artistic or creative process but not all of it.
Imagine we could have a brain computer interface that lets us perceive virtual reality like with some extra pair of eyes. It could scan our thoughts and allows us to “write text” with our brain, and then immediately feeds back a visual AI generated stream that we “see”. You’d be a kind of creative superman. Seeing / imagining things in their head is of course what many people do their whole life but not in that quantity or breadth. You’d hear a joke and you would not just imagine it, you’d see it visualized in many different ways. Or you’d hear a tragedy and…
Writer here, absolutely not having this experience. Generative AI tools are bad at writing, but people generally have a pretty low bar for what they think is good enough.
These things are great if you care about tech demos and not quality of output. If you actually need the end result to be good though, you’re gonna be waiting a while.
I agree with everything you said, but it seems in the context of AI development “a while” is like, a few years.
That remains to be seen. We have yet to see one of these things actually get good at anything, so we don’t know how hard that last part is to do. I don’t think we can assume there will be continuous linear progress. Maybe it’ll take one year, maybe it’ll take 10, maybe it’ll just never reach that point.
Yeah a real problem here is how you get an AI which doesn’t understand what it is doing to create something complete and still coherent. These clips are cool and all, and so are the tiny essays put out by LLMs, but what you see is literally all you are getting; there are no thoughts, ideas or abstract concepts underlying any of it. There is no meaning or narrative to be found which connects one scene or paragraph to another. It’s a puzzle laid out by an idiot following generic instructions.
That which created the woman walking down that street doesn’t know what either of those things are, and so it can simply not use those concepts to create a coherent narrative. That job still falls onto the human instructing the AI, and nothing suggests that we are anywhere close to replacing that human glue.
Current AI can not conceptualise – much less realise – ideas, and so they can not be creative or create art by any sensible definition. That isn’t to say that what is produced using AI can’t be posed as, mistaken for, or used to make art. I’d like to see more of that last part and less of the former two, personally.
I kinda 100% agree with you on the art part since it can’t understand what it’s doing… On the other hand, I could swear that if you look at some generated AI imagines it’s kind of mocking us. It’s a reflection of our society in a weird mirror. Like a completely mad or autistic artist that is creating interesting imagery but has no clue what it means. Of course that exists only in my perception.
But it the sense of “inventive” or “imaginative” or “fertile” I find AI images absolutely creative. As such it’s telling us something about the nature of creative process, about the “limits” of human creativity - which is in itself art.
When you sit there thinking up or refining prompts you’re basically outsourcing the imaginative visualizing part of your brain. An “AI artist” might not be able draw well or even have the imagination, but he might have a purpose or meaning that he’s trying to visualize with the help of AI. So AI generation is at least some portion of the artistic or creative process but not all of it.
Imagine we could have a brain computer interface that lets us perceive virtual reality like with some extra pair of eyes. It could scan our thoughts and allows us to “write text” with our brain, and then immediately feeds back a visual AI generated stream that we “see”. You’d be a kind of creative superman. Seeing / imagining things in their head is of course what many people do their whole life but not in that quantity or breadth. You’d hear a joke and you would not just imagine it, you’d see it visualized in many different ways. Or you’d hear a tragedy and…