I come from the position that AI cannot be like human intelligence. I don't believe it can function like a human being, I don't believe it's actually intelligent, just a more complex machine. We can go into whether people are just complex machines and all that, but I don't really want to.
I always thought that human generated art would have some quality that machine generated art could not, and perhaps that's true but there reaches a point where the average person cannot distinguish them. My girlfriend showed me an AI art generator on Discord called midjourney (referenced in the article I believe) and I was blown away. I've seen pictures I'd hang in my wall generated by the thing.
How long before the vast majority of paintings, drawings and the like that people enjoy are generated by machines? What about music? Then, without human input at all? Then even without human curation? It's a neural net model after all, can't it be trained on its successes and keep spitting out wonderful art pieces?
What about movies? Look at the Marvel movies, Star Wars, they're mostly CGI. At what point do we stop needing people to make them? At what point do we stop needing actors?
Video games... It's beginning to look like any form of artistic content can be generated by machines, and be very, very good, and by good I mean pleasant to people who interact with them. Eventually these things will be better than anything a human can make, if our yardstick is how much people like them and how many. And there will be a near endless supply. Imagine every person you know having absolutely unique pieces of absolutely gorgeous art that cost them absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand top notch feature films a week being released for peanuts.
And what sort of information environment are our minds swimming in in a world like this? What effect do all these things have on us? We see how algorithms ranking content available to us causes massive behavioral changes throughout our societies (the most off cited being political polarization), what happens when the content itself is generated by machines?
I come from the position that AI cannot be like human intelligence. I don't believe it can function like a human being, I don't believe it's actually intelligent, just a more complex machine. We can go into whether people are just complex machines and all that, but I don't really want to.
I always thought that human generated art would have some quality that machine generated art could not, and perhaps that's true but there reaches a point where the average person cannot distinguish them. My girlfriend showed me an AI art generator on Discord called midjourney (referenced in the article I believe) and I was blown away. I've seen pictures I'd hang in my wall generated by the thing.
How long before the vast majority of paintings, drawings and the like that people enjoy are generated by machines? What about music? Then, without human input at all? Then even without human curation? It's a neural net model after all, can't it be trained on its successes and keep spitting out wonderful art pieces?
What about movies? Look at the Marvel movies, Star Wars, they're mostly CGI. At what point do we stop needing people to make them? At what point do we stop needing actors?
Video games... It's beginning to look like any form of artistic content can be generated by machines, and be very, very good, and by good I mean pleasant to people who interact with them. Eventually these things will be better than anything a human can make, if our yardstick is how much people like them and how many. And there will be a near endless supply. Imagine every person you know having absolutely unique pieces of absolutely gorgeous art that cost them absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand top notch feature films a week being released for peanuts.
And what sort of information environment are our minds swimming in in a world like this? What effect do all these things have on us? We see how algorithms ranking content available to us causes massive behavioral changes throughout our societies (the most off cited being political polarization), what happens when the content itself is generated by machines?