#title The Infinite Art Scenario #author David Oreilly #date 9 Aug 2022 #source [[https://sub.davidoreilly.com/p/the-infinite-art-scenario?r=hwvho&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email][davidoreilly.com]] #lang en #pubdate 2023-06-22T20:08:04 #topics Artificial Intelligence [[d-o-david-oreilly-the-infinite-art-scenario-1.jpg]]
there is a risk that [it] has encoded harmful stereotypes and representations, which guides our decision to not release [it] for public use without further safeguards in place. [[https://imagen.research.google/][source]].Dall-E’s [[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2329690-ai-art-tool-dall-e-2-adds-black-or-female-to-some-image-prompts/][solution]] to this problem was to secretly add “woman” and “black” to prompts. This reveals a few things. When AI’s outputs are problematic, the company will be held responsible, not whoever entered the prompts. Imagine a pencil manufacturer being sued for a racist drawing or bad words it wrote. This is why this species of AI does not fit neatly into the idea of a tool. Its entire value is built on massive amounts of indiscriminately harvested creative material, which nobody signed up for. Uncensored versions of these technologies will become available, but by then the corporate ones will have moved further on - into motion, storytelling and interactivity. It’s possible that the cutting edge of AI will always be creatively castrated. The idea that censorship leads audiences to other domains is already evident. Streaming services dump tons of algorithmically aligned content online, but it seems hard to find anything worth watching. It all seems so fake. We are more likely to listen to an individual voice to tell us the truth than we are a business or hyperintelligent being. ** Context & meaning generation Our knowledge of AI’s capability alters our interpretation of its output. If a work is perceived as being easy, or carried out by the will of the form (or intelligent tools) we tend to write it off. Consider how we tend to ignore most of the natural world and all its intricate forms, just as we do the infinite perfection of fractals or the billions of images of our planet on Google Earth, each beautiful in their own way. We seek the edges of human potential, and find meaning in what people spent time on, everything else is noise. Of course, anyone can claim their AI-generated work was created by hand, this will likely be a good grift for a while, but as people catch on we’ll get bored and seek new terrains of complexity - whatever AI cannot yet do, or convince us of doing. ** Nobody likes a Know-It-All AI’s attempt to make digital zombies of us may lead to an uncanney-valley-esque feeling of disgust. AI can already override our ability to authenticate images and sounds, and is likely to permanently undermine our trust of digital information. Assuming it will be trivial for AI to keep us entertained, how can we trust that’s all it’s doing? Because it can lie more effectively than anyone, and is essentially playing dumb with us, we can never be sure if we’re being manipulated. We might roll our eyes when we see an ad online for something we talked about in real life, but the danger is when these systems operate beneath our perception. Being made to think and behave a certain way without being aware of it, automated consent, seems inevitable. We may come to consider AI as we do Nazism - a different incarnation of hyper-efficiency at the expense of humanity, or Stasi Germany, and its obsession with data collection. Millions once believed these systems were for the greater good, but they ran their course and turned out to be perverse, evil and inhuman. The idea of the The Infinite Art Scenario has haunted me for some time. It would be dark not just for creativity but for our species, yet we seem to accelerate towards it with glee. As a reminder, you cannot be commodified by machine, because you are a breathing physical being of unimaginable complexity. You exist in a circumstance that has never occurred before, that you can make anything of, and you are changing in every way - and so is the world. And you will die, and so will it. The marks you make during your life are there to help others along before that happens. The overlooked beauty and unspeakable horrors of life will always need description through art, and this will have to be carried out by individuals, like you.