Artificial Art
Last week we opened up a new thread on USV.com to think about and discuss the intersection of creativity (art) and artificial intelligence.
Added a new thread to https://t.co/9FxMEQwEoa: Creative A.I. https://t.co/ZphcTt77vb
A few more to come soon
— Jonathan Libov (@libovness) March 3, 2016
We have seen a lot of interesting companies in this area but have not yet made an investment.
Of course, the entire notion that machines will help us make art or even make it without human intervention gets to the essence of what art and creativity are.
Last summer I posted an art project by Ian Cheng that my daughter was involved in. The cool thing about that art project is that it evolves over time based on rules provided to a machine. The art is initially made by humans but it evolves and changes over time using a machine. That is one of many interesting ideas that artists are exploring at the intersection of creativity and computing.
An existential question that society is grappling with right now is how humans and machines will co-exist in the future. And one of the roles of art, maybe it’s most important role, is to force us to confront issues like this.
So while the idea of using a machine to make a song or an image or a novel or a sculpture without human intervention is at some level disturbing, it is also revealing. We expect that artists will push the envelope of what is possible with technology and we also expect that technologists and entrepreneurs will be willing collaborators in this effort.
Whether this will lead to interesting investment opportunities is anyone’s guess, but we think it might. And so we are going to spend some of our time and energy thinking about it and we’ve created a public space to do that. If you are interested in this area you can follow the thread and contribute to it here.
Comments (Archived):
Is it art if there was no emotion involved in creating it? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so probably yes, to answer my own question.
Emotion is on the part of the person viewing the art. As such it doesn’t matter how it was created. (Think of things in nature that are art as only one example…)
There’s no fast rule it seems. You’re right about nature — I thought about that too after I had posted my comment — but music and acting are two forms of art that have an emotional input at creation. So it can happen but it’s not a requisite for art. It’s what it invokes that counts.
I wonder what Pablo Picasso would have thought of this.
Without doubt, he would have embraced it!
Da Vinci would be at the forefront if he was alive now.
true. i thought about him. i think he would be more open than Picasso 🙂
That is a great example. The technology was much different back then but you are so right.
Would he be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur? A researcher at an ivy league university? An artist? Or maybe a genius can’t be classified using categories meant for normal people.
I suspect he would be unclassifiable.
Da Vinci would be LOL’ing at Descartes. See also my comment in reply to Kirsten’s at top of thread.
!-!-! C-L-A-S-S-I-F-I-E-D D-A-T-A !-!-!A-C-C-E-S-S D-E-N-I-E-D.E-R-R-O-R 4-0-4.C-O-N-T-A-C-T M-I-S-S-I-O-N C-O-N-T-R-O-L.
Open the pod bay doors vasudevram..
🙂
He would employ 50 PC’s with machine learning to churn out 10,000 copies each a second, of work like his.That’s my guess, based on this story, which I’ve heard in many versions:Picasso and pricing your work:http://www.davidairey.com/p…/JK
.I have loved a French Street scene painter for decades, Edouard Cortes.He painted every scene in Paris and was a teacher. It is said that he had his students (including another famous Paris Street scene painter, Blanchard) finish his work.He painted 2,000 such paintings and when I first started collecting them they were very inexpensive. They are now quite expensive.It is said that E Cortes painted 2,000 Paris Street scenes and 8,000 of them are in Texas alone.Even the forgeries are great.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Cool!
Among other painters, I also like Ruisdael’s landscapes.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…http://www.nationalgallery….He also had imitators.There was one painting in particular, which I saw some years ago, a wooded landscape with clouds and sky in the distance. Very picturesque. I really liked it but have not been able to find it since.
Speaking of painters and Paris and so on, that reminds me of the book Lust for Life – about Vincent van Gogh.Some years back a colleague mentioned that he had read the book and “went mad” [1]. I had read it too, just a bit earlier, and agreed. :)[1] As in, not really went mad, but were very struck by it, and thought it was a fantastic story.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Fascinates me as a long term art appreciator and collector with a strong bent toward the hand crafted.Though very open and intrigued.
Am undecided still on whether current AI can create at all let alone art.That being said, this whole category could be a Trojan horse/ PR tool to “thaw” relations between robots and weary humans.Remember how “cultural exchanges” back in the days of the cold war were used as a precursor to trade and then political relations.Perhaps culture/art will serve the same role here.”Look what pretty pictures, lovely songs these robots can make, why wouldn’t you let them drive you around, diagnose your medical problems, marry your daughter”
Yes, part of the idea here is that creativity is the one area that can tolerate mistakes, let alone welcome them. If AI still isn’t reliable yet, perhaps artists, and those in need of creative or artistic work, are the first ones who can consume it: https://www.usv.com/post/56…
I’d like to use machine AI to improve my Latte Art work, like the cortado that I totally botched up this morning.
This made me smile. Then it made me realize that I’d love to have some AI right now that would take some sketches I’ve done and transform them into “professional” looking art… and then generate more art from them. It would really help me get a current passion project off the ground faster!
if AI could diagnose what went wrong, and pinpoint how to improve, that would be great. Golf swings come to mind.
Don’t know if it involved AI (guess not), but an ex-colleague worked in his next company on an Android app that helped analyze and maybe improve your golf swings. I think they had sensors attached to the clubs, that transmitted data to a mobile, or something like that.
Yeah the key is creating a machine that makes the latte for you but then doesn’t drink it for you. That’s when this thing gets weird. And maybe dangerous.
Art latte is a lifetime pursuit for me.In hobbies, I mastered pizza & bread making, champagne sabering, swimming, skiing, even growing tomatoes, but not pouring milk into coffee.
Just drink it with your eyes closed.
right. the taste is great 🙂
You do know Cafe X was selected overall winner at Launch festival?
Interesting. I had no idea.
To me it doesn’t matter if a machine creates it or a human, as long as it delights or provokes or mesmerizes or astonishes. I would think the thing about “machine-created” art would be including the idea that a machine created it in one’s experience of it.For example, watching a machine create something is often relaxing, meditative. I’ve come to find the sounds of certain machines comforting.It’s simply a different experience. At the end of the day, machines and their AI are created by humans, so they are themselves the art.If I had to *choose* between AI-created art and purely hand-craft art, I would of course pick hand crafted. But I don’t feel the slightest bit intimidated or concerned about the emergence of AI-created art. I suspect my favorite artist, if still alive, would think it was great!
To me it doesn’t matter if a machine creates it or a human, as long as it delights or provokes or mesmerizes or astonishes.Exactly. Art serves at the very least two purposes. One is simply enjoyment on the part of the person looking at the art.I can get appreciation from looking at a good well built set of steel shelving or a nicely built piece of furniture. To me that can easily be art even though most people would never consider it art. The other purpose of art is to give enjoyment to the person creating the art. As such it doesn’t even matter whether anyone ever sees or appreciates the art other than the artist. (Of course it is obviously better if that is the case..) I’ve come to find the sounds of certain machines comforting.We are the same there. I love the hum and sounds of many machines especially ones that I can control.
The line btw art and engineering is almost undetectable 🙂
This is a orthogonal comment but I was struck by something I heard recently (which was almost a throwaway comment to another point, but which gave me pause). It was a comment by Matt Ridley.So there is a hypothesis about the inevitability of scientific /technological progress – which is that throughout history different people working completely independently have arrived at the same scientific / technological breakthroughs.And while one person gets credit for a technical or scientific breakthrough today, if they had not discovered it…it was inevitable that a discovery was going to happen because there is published evidence that several other people who were on the exact same path.Example – Alfred Wallace had independently conceived the Theory of Evolution through natural selection in a published paper, but the world remembers Darwin today who got the Origin of Species published first. Or that regardless of whether Edison invented it, the incandescent bulb was absolutely inevitably going to be invented in the 1870s – there were several people independently working on that same solution in that decade. Many such examples. Anyway, I was familiar with the above idea. But what intrigued me was his comment that this is NOT necessarily true in art. Viz. If Einstein had been run over by a tram, somebody else would have gotten to what he was doing. But if Beethoven had not written the 9th symphony, does the 9th symphony ever get written ? We can expect that certainly genres of music would have emerged; but we cannot say that a specific piece of music (or art) would have been created without the artist. Engineering progress builds on everything that has been learned before…that process of building/taking what is already known forward lends an air of inevitability to the next step forward. That isn’t necessarily true in art.
I don’t know about your last paragraph. I give you this example:Would Eric Clapton have been Eric Clapton without JJ Cale???? Now that is not to say there would have been another, but everybody is influenced by somebody.https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Beethoven is said to have been influenced by Mozart, and I expect he had other influences as well. I don’t know of any human being who is not influenced by another.http://www.classicfm.com/co…https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
That’s really great food for thought. It’s so fun to think about these things. I’ve occasionally done that mental exercise of “how close are we to the point where there’s no new music that can be written? Has every combination of musical notes been done?” Ha! One of the things that keeps the answer coming back, “no” is new technology.Not being much of a scientist, myself, I don’t feel qualified to say a lot about science vs art. But I am married to a science person, and it does seem to me that science is about explaining what is observed (and about discovering new things to observe), whereas art is about whatever the hell it wants to be about 😉 Since science is about the observable, Ridley’s comments make perfect sense to me.Engineering is where art and science come together – like, say, the Chrysler building 🙂
Like I said, it was a bit of orthogonal comment…I was going off on a tangent :-).To your point about Science and observing….One of the better descriptions of Discovery / Research – “Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, but thinking what nobody else has thought” (Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Szent-Georgi, Others).In the earlier comment I was thinking about the “Inevitability of Outcome”.Today, as we talk about where AI can take us or where genomics can lead us 10-15 years out, there is a assumption of ‘Inevitability of Outcome’ to such technological progress (regardless of the actors that deliver the said outcome).Whereas with the Creative Process, maybe there isn’t an Inevitability of Outcome.
I think it’s a really interesting thesis. Could AI have ever created “My Dark Twisted Fantasy?” I don’t think so. But maybe we’ll eventually find out…
Love the Chrysler because am into Art Deco.However, Buckminster Fuller would be my example of art+science engineering at its apex.
Disagree. Art has built on what has come before since the first marks made on cave walls. The Romans stole liberally from the Greeks. In the Renaissance, artists again looked back to the classics as a jumping off point. In most studios, artists have always apprenticed to masters to learn their craft, and in art school, much learning is done by copying the styles, motifs and palettes of previous generations. Go to any gallery, and you’ll see students sketching their own interpretations of what’s on the walls.In many masterworks, the artist makes deliberate reference to existing works, up to and including Marcel Duchamps absurdist art taking a postcard of the Mona Lisa, scribbling a mustache and beard on the face, and inscribing L.H.O.O.Q. (intended, when said, to sound like the French expression for “she is hot in the ass”) at the bottom, and then framing and selling the piece as a new work of art. (This is extraordinarily common, as described in this article: http://www.anti-marketer.co…On top of that, every school or trend in art for the past 150 years, and probably a lot longer could only have happened as a reaction to what came immediately before. So, just picking an arbitrary starting point, Impressionism (the first school that most are familiar with after Romanticism) led to the Arts + Crafts movement, led to Russian Symbolism and the Aesthetic movement, led to Post-Impressionism (esp. Cloisonnism), led to Neo-Impressionism (esp. Pointillism), led to Art Nouveau and the modernists, led to Russsian Avant Garde and Fauvism, led to Expressism, led to Cubism, and it continues through dada, the bauhaus, Surrealism (skipping lot of intermediate stages) right up to today. Although the advances from one to the next aren’t obvious, it’s easy to see the progression, and how one builds on the next, and if you trace backwards, it’s hard to see how we get to today without everything that came before. Same in music, architecture, theater, film, writing — anything artistic. The notion that creativity springs from the ether as pure inspiration is as misguided as the belief that 99.9% of patents represent any truly original invention.All that said, I’m perfectly comfortable with machines providing assistance to artists in creating new things, a lot less so with the value of machines creating stuff without human intervention. After all, a computer and software is nothing more than a tool, just like a paint brush or a palette knife or paint. Tools help to makes certain types of creation possible, or at least practical, but to be more than decoration, art needs emotion, message, to provoke, to ask questions, to inspire thought and action, and to be a reflection or distillation of the world around it. Art needs meaningful context.Yes, an infinite number of monkeys at a keyboard will eventually type out Shakespeare’s plays, but how many trillions of pieces of junk do I need to filter to find the pieces that are worth reading?
Hey, it was Picasso who advocated stealing!
All artists steal, and most do so openly. Homage to those whose shoulders you stand on, and acknowledgement that it is necessary is nothing to be ashamed of. Pablo just spoke a truth that artists already knew. Have a look at the article link.
Interesting, discovery versus creation.In my opinion Nature is what it is, we have just been unveiling her secrets one by one, one leading to the discovery of the next, this is not predictable but it is inevitable and I guess it is a sequential process.Tweaking nature is more artistic and creative as the 9th symphony is, it may happen or it may not, as in dog breeding. Does every combination of cross breeding was predetermined to happen? The dog breeds we know and identify, what are they? As human creations, are they Art?Math is amazing, a language to describe and understand Nature, a self contained human creation or Nature itself?+ or maybe too much red wine for a sunday evening.
And also between art and craft. And between craft and science.And computer programming at its best involves elements of all three – art. craft and science, IMO.
” I would of course pick hand crafted,” you would not know.
Interesting point! The thing about hand crafted art is that sometimes the story behind the art is what gives it meaning, not just the art in and of itself.
It is relaxing watching a machine create something. I have a company where we have several different 3D printers. I don’t actually have an office there, but I love sitting next to them, where we have a staging space. People ask me how I can stand sitting there, somehow it makes me happy watching them.
delights or provokes or mesmerizes or astonishesGreat description of art.
Thank you 🙂 Of course, it only scratches the surface…
Also could be used to describe kids (as a parent)
and possibly even parents (as a kid)
Totally agree with you, machines are us in many ways, our tools, our imagination, an expression of our evolution as a species. Whenever I see people walking in the street so attached to their devices, or at the subway, I think – Is this normal? Is it sane? Our relation with machines is decades old but the intimacy of the relationship is something new.I guess the comfort you talk about comes from repetitive sounds, like the effect of a mantra, or is it another thing?. Okidata 320 fan by chance?https://vimeo.com/6868193
Great share :)I think all manner of things go into why any single person feels comforted by any particular sound. Memories. Hangups. Hard wired attraction to pattern and repetition. The reassurance of precision. Personally I have a very strong positive reaction to many many sounds in daily life. I’m lucky that way.
Oops, I’m late to the party. We need to remember it is about 100 yrs ago that the math table attempting to produce random notes for a melody took place. We would then have to determine if you’d try to set those random notes to as close to an ‘accepted’ chord progression or not. As the ability to ‘reason’ begins to come of age for the machine, encouraging it NOT to adhere to norm would be cool. Then we have the next generation of artist.Kinda like Jamie Foxx studying with Ray on something like What’d I Say where it (I may be wrong) looks like Foxx is of an age that his right hand would be more counterpoint than what Charles did. Same great song/performance, but from different generations.As we move closer to achieving things moving down to the Femto level, it’s ok to bring the machine into play, and if it doesn’t behave, make it listen to those horrific fake string sounds from 50 years ago.
Artificial Inteligence – another term without much meaning. When does intellirende become artificial anyway?
Artificial Augmented/Extended IntelligenceArt-Creativity-Intelligence “are these not one entangled unity” ?Intelligence at its core is the art/science of creative, holographically multidimensional, cognitive remixing across all perceptually effective metaphors/perspectives.
“machines are created by humans so they themselves are art” Totally agree. I don’t necessarily think it needs to be autonomous it can be a machine made and controlled by humans: http://www.wearablerobotics…
What if you can’t tell?
Regardless of AI, we are getting very close to a time when machines will be able to reproduce artwork so faithfully that even with the most sophisticated forensic techniques the copy will be indistinguishable from the original. That will fundamentally challenge many precepts of art — the value of originality, for example. If you can’t be certain that a copy is a copy, then what about a copy of the style of Van Gogh that faithfully uses his paint strokes and palette and scenes, and adds a copy of his signature? We will certainly view art as less precious, less unique, less an expression of identity when these things become possible.
Before I talk too much, have you ever read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin? I don’t want to talk before asking that
No, it doesn’t sound familiar, but it’s been 40 years since I studied art, so some things are lost to memory.
https://www.marxists.org/re…That is ok! I posted it.Walter Benjamin talks about this issue in terms of the image of the mona lisa suddenly becoming available because the cost of photography suddenly becomes cheap. He posits that the original loses its “aura” as it becomes more reproducible, or in other words Technology Renders Art Impure. Furthermore, he also posits that the move towards modernism/technology/sciencism/whathaveyou also kills off the religious/cultic value and changes it to exhibition (ability to see, which is a form of market) value. One of the outcomes of this is the development of artist as hero cult, rather than the art as cultic object to the divine.If we posit that AI could kill off the artist as hero cult, because it shows us that our perception of exhibition value is manipulatable, and that furthermore that time and participation is more valuable than the original conception of the exhibition (think auction, museum), what does this mean art is?
He sounds like a mystic, with views firmly planted in the middle ages when art could only be made if sanctioned by the church. I have never believed that art was about religiosity, not even religious art, but about humans interpreting and expressing their feelings about the world. Great art transcends, and certainly can evoke strong emotions when it does (including religious cult-like ones).My own feeling about this is that context matters, and is a way of interpreting the expression, but that art does not live solely in its time and place, nor lose its value or meaning when appreciated in a home or office or even the Metropolitan Museum. Purists like Benjamin exist in every domain, whether it be wine appreciation, furniture making, food, music …. It’s one point of view, but often a stifling one that if taken literally squeezes the fun out for everyone else.Machines (tools) don’t lessen art, or reduce its intrinsic value, so long as the artist is in control of how the machine is applied. Even photocopiers can be used to make art, although copying something usually doesn’t result in artistic expression.However, there is another kind of value — the rarity/scarcity value that derives from originality — the “oneness” and irreproducibility of something by the artist’s hand. Are Van Gogh’s Sunflowers really worth $100M? Only because it is one of a kind and bid up in value by collectors coveting it both as a collectable investment, as well as a certified indicator of their taste and wealth.Machines will allow all of us to have a perfect version of any painting or sculpture that we like, at once making it more valuable as a collective resource (10 million people could own it for $50 each), but almost infinitely less valuable as a unique collectable. This is what I mean by challenging traditional notions of value grounded in uniqueness, scarcity, “authenticity” and control of aesthetics by the elite who say what’s good and what isn’t (or what’s art and what isn’t).Machines will enable our world to become more beautiful at an affordable cost, and will almost certainly change the role of artists in society, just as waves of new technology have changed how musicians make their art and how they make their money and their ability to influence change and how consumers consume it.None of this is bad, it’s just a different world.By the way, I suspect the Duchamp scribbling on a Picasso post card that I used as an example was making reference to this line of thought and directly challenging it, asking “what is art”?
So, I’m not sure it matters. What matters is if it’s passed off as hand crafted, when it isn’t. I mean, it’s a lot like the conundrum around forgeries, no? My mom has a Van Gogh oil hanging in her entry — it’s a *perfect* oil replica made by a computer over 10 years ago. I like looking at it, knowing how it was made. It’s beautiful. And it would seem that computer generated paintings haven’t ruined art 10 years on.If Stephen Hawking pushes the button on a computer to make it create some AI-generated art, it immediately becomes more interesting and probably more valuable.You know what I think AI will never be able to do? Create something as moving as Bowie or Kanye or Janelle Monae, or write “Hamilton” or “The Color Purple.”I think the idea is more like what Jonathan mentions over at USV, which is music that will swell in response to your achievement in a video game. That appeals to me. The possibilities for artists with physical limitations is really cool.
AI is simply mortals evolving. This possibly opens the mindset: https://www.edge.org/conver…
Neat share – thank you 🙂
I think the idea is more like what Jonathan mentions over at USV, which is music that will swell in response to your achievement in a video game. That appeals to me. The possibilities for artists with physical limitations is really cool.So is this a photograph or a painting?http://media.nga.gov/public…(Hint, i suggest googling the image with the word finger painting and seeing the name of the artist)You know what I think AI will never be able to do? Create something as moving as Bowie or Kanye or Janelle Monae, or write “Hamilton” or “The Color Purple.” That is true for the state of AI right now in the sense of originality since all AIs need some sort of training. That said, so did David Bowie. Which means we’re walking into a reification issue of sortsThis sort of reminds me of the issues surrounding photography as an artform that Susan Sontag likes to talk about. We’re walking directly into the problem of what are computers and what is a program and what is an AI ad what exactly is a pass from the turing test exactly. And this is why reifying happens
Be patient with those not possessing your talent with numbers. All artists are influenced others and the successful bend their creativity to match the time period- Religion (Bach), Politics (Shostakovich, remember how he’d do a ‘safe’ piece for Kremlin, then ‘edge’ for creative) and then mass marketing.The true advancements which will truly begin to accelerate the ability of AI will come due to exchange (human><machine) regarding=”” something=”” one=”” or=”” the=”” other=”” created.=””>
That’s already happeningAnd I am not that talented with numbers. One of these days I really should get Shawn^ to stop by and say hi *blush*^My fiance, who is the awesomesauce. And a mathematician. Who taught himself to code and pretty much all of cutting edge ML in two years flat, while also being in the process of cowriting a book! in his area of math. And brewing beer. And working in a startup. And playing horn occasionally. And occasionally making me cookies with lots of chocolate in them. And once saving my life. He’s awesome-sauce! (I’m super proud of him, and super lucky to know him as a person, and slightly over the top about this fact, yes, it’s gross, blech, but really, he is an incredible mathematical mind, I’m nothing in comparison)
Give yourself a little more credit, I’m sure he does 😉
He does. He’s awesome!
Actually, better phrased – what do you think specifically of this piecehttp://salavon.com/work/gol…
Ha! Wow! Of course I would not have been able to tell those from something hand crafted, at least in digital format.Paintings of that type are meant to be looked at, in person, for a long time. If the machine has outputted them as actual paintings and they were installed somewhere as an exhibit, then we’d have a better test.Now, exhibiting 100k+ paintings made by a machine would, in my opinion, itself be a work of art and something worthy of experiencing!
He was a professor of mine. The 2002 version of Golem had them printed out on a large format printer.http://www.salavon.com/work… <- it looked like that Each one looks dead on like it could be a Rothko poster hanging in someone’s dorm room, except the printer continually prints. It ups certain pieces of the creep factor, since the computer is much more viscerally making paintings/posters (and I think it would have done more “painting type paintings” via printer if it hadn’t been a cost issue. The one used to make a copy of a Van gogh is easily $100-200k robot, the one ed in the 2002 is probably a state of the art epson color plotter at best, which at max would cost 10k at the time)Jason works with code as a medium – last I heard with a lot of C# (boooo), but that could have changed, and probably has.A lot of his art looks like the hand/humans has disappeared or ironically makes very obvious human’s impact on computers and pop media. Sp for example, he has live work involving wikipedia pages and which ones are being visited. (http://www.latimes.com/ente… ) It is never the same *shrug*.But seriously, let’s pretend i took one of the posters and hung it up, without showing you the rest – you by your own admission would think it is some sort of rothko poster or litho and wouldn’t take a second glance at me if I lied (before now) and said it was created by a human. In fact I could still say that, because in a way it is made by Jason Salavon, albeit abstracting his presence completely away.Let’s put it this way: If you aren’t expecting the presence of an AI, you might not notice it, so to therefore talk about what creativity is, especially in terms of art, “good” vs “bad” art, an artist,”good” vs “bad” artists, we walk directly into a reification issue that directly are about humans often being heuristic and the failures of how the turing test is formulated.(also, to be really fair, I should admit my bachelors is aligned in this area, involving marxist interpretations of technology and art, and my Fiance is on the cutting edge of AI development in industry in NLP.)
The main difference between a human artist and an AI artist is that during the process of creation the human artist FEELS connected to their piece and is seeking to transmit and convey those feelings to the viewer as well as hoping the viewer will have their own subjective interpretations of the piece.The AI artist has no such consciousness about the feelings they feel and hope to elicit in viewers.@libovness:disqus — Current AI art is the Cartesian version and the last time anyone checked … Réne Descartes wasn’t much of an artist.I’m into the whole intersection of Art + AI, creativity + computing thing (and certainly as it applies to Natural Language and getting the machines to better reflect and proxy our intelligence, and understand us).
To this, I’d add (since @donnawhite:disqus mentioned kids), we humans as artists+creators have hopes, consciousness, souls and waves of feelings that flow between us and our creations in symbiotic and sensory ways that AI artists can’t do, experience, feel or comprehend at profound levels.This, to me, is a necessary and intrinsic part of human creativity that separates us from the machines — for all their utility and “intelligence”.
I would argue that AI’s current shortcomings may become a source of creative tension for the artist, and make it more suitable to be incorporated into art before other professions: https://www.usv.com/post/56…
At Launch Festival, I saw several examples of AI as tools of artists and most were poor (may explain why USV hasn’t found a suitable investment there yet).Meanwhile, I have 2 artist friends who apply AI in completely different ways:(1.) Young Harvill, co-founder of http://www.getmatch.co which is raising Series A and applies machine vision to do product recommendations.* http://www.evergreen.edu/ma…(2.) Ben Bogart who tries to get into how machines perceive and if they can have a consciousness:* https://www.youtube.com/wat…In terms of which sector will / should adopt AI first …AI (in form of Neural Nets and Deep Learning not robotics) has been incorporated in finance for 10+ years.My first job as a maths grad was with Professor Taylor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…, an AI pioneer in hedge funds.It’s also worth reading this NYT article from 2008 to understand how pervasive AI is in finance and how it contributed to the financial crisis:* http://www.nytimes.com/2008…For me, artistic creativity being needed in AI is unequivocal — please see Amit Singhal of Google’s comment and the slide on missing pieces of the puzzle.Now, it would be possible to create a version of http://www.deviantart.com community whereby artists use Google DeepDream AI to generate art that can be sold for $ thousands:* http://fortune.com/2016/03/…* http://googleresearch.blogs…However, I’m applying my artistic brain to the Natural Language problem because that’s the hardest nut no one’s cracked yet and I love a challenge!
Also, in reply to E&T piece about the machine-written musical… “Gale also points out another advantage: “A machine doesn’t have biases about what it likes, or taste, or things it learns at school. It can just look at stories and look at what pattern works within them.”Actually, the machines not having biases and doing pure pattern recog is a DISADVANTAGE — pls see latest view from Deep Learning Summit.Our higher intelligence is codified by our ability to perceive and remember subjective biases, subtleties in nuance, ambiguous context and embodied emotional experiences as we express ourselves in natural language (an art) and that are then elicited with any form of art.Part of the reason the AI hasn’t been able to parse Natural Language for our meanings is precisely because of the absence of probability’s ability to deal with subjective bias. Probability being the basis of pattern recognition.Pattern recog is low-hanging fruit when we really need to reach higher for human+machine intelligence.
Yes I agree with that, which is why I’m interested in humans *partnering* with AI on creative work. Injecting bias and taste and so forth
Re “injecting bias” … you do know my system is the only one in the world designed for “injecting bias” back into every form of data media (text, audiovisuals, emoticons etc.)?It isn’t possible to “inject bias” with any probabilistic system (pattern recog) because Probability as a tool invention wasn’t set up for it.Probability was invented to measure & model stochastic (random) behavior of dice. Dice have 0 subjective biases. Unlike humans they can’t consider (think with care). Ergo, they have no subjective bias about anything and neither does Probability.So, first, I invented a twin tool to Probability.In terms of taste, the last time someone tried to apply AI to taste was Hunch (Chris Dixon co-founded it):* http://www.theatlantic.com/…* http://thenextweb.com/insid…So where did I work as a teen BEFORE and during my maths degree?In the taste labs of world’s second largest aroma chemco, inventing flavors and drinks products that are now in every household. So I have unique knowhow on how to “inject bias and taste” into AI and how to do so by integrating Art+Science.
“It’s the same thing as saying, go out into the physical world and go find these beautiful places to photograph in the world. They exist already. It’s a question of us picking the one we care about to look at.” One could ask in the future will art be framed as a piece of history ? http://edge.org/conversatio…
Many or most medieval paintings, pre printing, were also novels and carried subtle or different interpretations of history and standard church dogma. If and when AI starts doing that, we’re in big trouble.or have a good story!
we know we didn’t create the Universe, and in response to that potentially disturbing truth we responded by creating religion and science to make us feel more comfortable and perhaps even ‘in control’.in a sense we’ve always had a relationship with machines. The Milky Way galaxy is a machine, our solar system is a machine, and the Earth is a machine.i have a vexing relationship with my laptop machine. i would prefer to live without it, but that’s not easy to do. perhaps AI will allow humans to unplug. who knows, this stage of ‘attachment’ to technology might be a passing one. it does seem somewhat crude to me having to spend time with computers and phones. it feels like a form of enslavement. it has to change. i would prefer to be more free. there’s a lot of innovation to work on before it becomes a gossamer experience. i look forward to that possibility at some point in my lifetime. until then i must work on things as they are.
Not so sure religion or science make me feel more in control. Maybe they are a point of access? Both serve to further accentuate the mystery of the universe and my own smallness in it. In a paradoxical sort of way that also makes me feel more powerful.
i’m not so sure either.
“in a sense we’ve always had a relationship with machines. The Milky Way galaxy is a machine, our solar system is a machine, and the Earth is a machine.”In that sense, we are machines too. Very complex, unreliable, wasteful, dangerous and beautiful machines………… made after the image and likeness of the gods, as faithful people can tell.
>made after the image and likeness of the godsI’d agree if you mean “after the image of the ancient Greek gods’, with all that that means.
The long ellipsis is to leave the meaning to the reader’s choice. 🙂
Didn’t know that …………….:)
Can we get some artificial intelligence to lead the nation? Oh, wait, most of the candidates’ intelligence *is* artificial.
Could be AI-assisted “bullshit detection” so that everything candidates say is automatically checked and labelled as such.
That would require more CPU power than is currently available.
There are some quantum computers nowadays though… Ha ha!
I need that for daily life. Maybe it is a good idea for the next version of Google glasses.
For that, need real machine intelligence for at least the written word, and we are a very long way from that.Early on, the machine needs to take in the words, form concepts it understands, and work with, e.g., draw conclusions from, those concepts. That’s what the AI people have yet to make any significant progress on.My view is that we need to look at and make progress on concept representation and manipulation, but I am working on other things now.
I’ve written that program for you: return true;Feel free to use it however you like. It’s open source.
I’ve developed some (manual) heuristics that I use as a bogofilter / bozofilter – but it’s for quickly classifying posts and comments on forums, not for pols – but it might be possible to encode it and adapt it for that use.Unfortunately, I’m not releasing it as open sources as of now.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The whole thing has become much too entertaining.
Bad art
Or good art.
A comic artist talks Trumphttps://www.youtube.com/wat…
Good insight about Trump’s secret card actually.
Some darned good insight — Trump is a master of using persuasive techniques. Good. Or, the guy is a super salesman?But Trump Steaks, Trump Airline? Those were some of his business efforts. These are mentioned to imply that he is a loser? He’s not a loser. Maybe he is worth $3 billion, maybe $10 billion, but either way that’s at least a billion more than nearly anyone else. So, why mention Trump Steaks during a run for POTUS? That’s not a serious comment about him.Trump University? Maybe there is a story there, but for one answer the courts will settle it. For another answer, it would be a lot of work to look into it, and it’s not very relevant to running for POTUS.For details, sure his speeches at his rallies are simple to the point of simplistic, with fourth grade vocabulary. But he does have a Web site with a lot of PDF files of position papers. Those papers provide relatively a lot of detail for a someone running for office.The video clip criticized Trump for being inflexible now but flexible over time. Huh? He was flexible in the last few days: He said that he wants immigrants who get high end educations at Harvard, Princeton, etc. to stay. But, soon, he said he wants employers to hire US citizens first — maybe Jeff Sessions whispered to him on that — and, thus, was flexible.A biggie problem with such pundit interviews is that they don’t give actual, detailed references. So, a viewer really has to look up the details from primary references themselves.There are better explanations for Trump’s popularity. Millions of people are voting for him. Routinely tens of thousands of people stand in long lines in bad weather to get into his rallies. So, the answer must be quite widely known. Maybe ask some of the people who stood in line for over an hour in sub freezing weather?Maybe: (1) Enforce our immigration laws so that illegals don’t lower wage rates and so that we don’t have to provide social safety nets for illegals. (2) We have 90+ million people who could work not working, and our rate of unemployment is about 25%, that is, like in the Great Depression. The only thing keeping us out of a Second Great Depression is massive stimulus from the Fed and the Treasury. Still, the economy is not growing. There is lots of evidence that our foreign trade deals in effect let other countries send us their unemployment, and there are suggestions that some conservative policy types have been using such trade deals as a carrot to manage the world and suggestions that some big companies are getting rich importing too much in products and illegals. Commonly other countries protect their domestic companies and employees. The US needs to do that. The other candidates don’t want to do that. (3) The other Repubs want to repeal ObamaCare but otherwise sound like they are willing to let poor people suffer without important health care. Trump looks better both for people who can pay for health care and for others. And there is more.At his rallies, Trump looks genuinely concerned and determined.Maybe those are some of the reasons.
Who says what’s good and bad art? How do we know that Trump isn’t creating his own real-time dadaist/absurdist theater? A political version of Waiting for Godot?The more I watch, the more it seems like he’s trying to deliberately push buttons to see how far he can go before it splatters in a brilliant flash in our faces, and makes all of us look silly.It takes real intelligence, btw, to create something so absurd. If it was A.I., we’d all see through it right away.
For the record I wasn’t highlighting a particular candidate.It’s not so much the actors as it is the stage that’s been created. That’s on us… as in we the people.
Yes, I agree, but one candidate exemplifies how absurd it has become. We’ve allowed ourselves to be lied to effortlessly, to have our grandchildren’s inheritance spent before they’re born wasted on things none of us needed, to turn our heads rather than stand up to bullying and self-aggrandizing behaviors by politicos. to spend more on our war machine than the next 10 countries combined whilst handcuffing our warriors so that they aren’t allowed to go out and win, to create the world’s “best” healthcare system that no one can afford, to disallow what the elite classes deem politically incorrect. I could go on, but we have the system and the candidates we deserve — we created it, and Trump proves it. He’s Larry, Curly and Moe wrapped into one stooge, poking a gigantic finger in America’s eye. The scary thing is, he’s still preferable to all the other choices — that’s how truly bad it has become.
I appreciate hearing your take on this.I actually think that Trump’s imperfection is part of the draw. You can’t make this stuff up. He’s a mess but he is reflecting something. It’s the plastic politicians that scare me more.I’m looking at the candidates who stand a chance at being elected and have no hope of electing a candidate based on true character. A great moral leader? Ha! And anyway, what would the consensus be on the definition of this?So, I’m thinking about our country the way I think about my business during hard times. The goal is to live to fight another day. (Or is it the other way around, fight to live another day?) With the expectation that eventually things will get better and I can work on loftier goals.So, which candidate will keep us alive to fight another day? At least for four years? Making us “whole” or “great” — these are big promises. Just make us solvent, make us fierce, keep us free. Give us a chance to come to our senses.
This is all true. But the question is how do you live to fight another day, and at what risk? There are no good choices.Is Trump the least bad? It could be, but Germans thought the same about Hitler for many of the same reasons. He initially came to power via a plurality of the disenfranchised, consolidated under a populist position, took away any rights to object to his absolute power, and we know the rest.Did they really know what they were voting for at the outset? Was it another case of the frustration and the least bad option, so why not take a risk? It seems incredible to me to say that the choices are so bad, he’s the best there is. But I truly worry what that means for the next 4 years, no matter who wins.It would be really nice to have a third option: to hire a CFO who did nothing (and I mean nothing) but get finances under control so that we have the ability to choose a real alternative next time.
Points well taken. Thank you.
It’s interesting that we’ve come so far that intelligent people can look at what’s happening politically, and see performance art on a grand scale. To Fred’s original question, is this art that only humans could imagine and appreciate, or could AI create this? It’s actually a good question, because it takes multiple layers of context, interpretation, a sense of humor and pathos, an understanding of what people consider interesting and artful, and the ability to animate it with real people. What’s even more interesting, and makes it like performance art is the ambiguity — it’s impossible to tell if this is real, or artists trying to provoke a reaction. Turing test indeed.
So I have to ask — Do you really think that Trump can be compared to Hitler in terms of potential atrocity?Someone recently making the case for Trump pointed out his kids as part of an argument in his favor.
I have no idea. He hasn’t done anything yet. Neither had Hitler before he got the reins of power.Where I think they are dangerously similar is in the ability to inflame populist sentiment and garner rabid supporters who are willing to turn a blind eye to lots of negatives, through extremely effective use of simplistic oratory, scapegoating, and saying very little of substance. His manner is that of a bully — name calling, ad hominem attacks, comparisons of dick size (literally), and that’s before he comes to power. How will he act when he’s actually in charge of the world’s largest military, and representing this country on a world stage?So, I’m looking at the personal attributes and patterns of behavior, and who thinks they will be helped by Trump gaining power (white supremacists, for example). Is it possible he could actually use all these things to be a positive change agent and fixer? — of course. Is it possible the opposite could happen? Also yes. But I’ve rarely seen anyone act as a boor and a bully before they had power who wasn’t more so after gaining power.We just don’t know.Unfortunately, all that said, I trust Hillary even less. Actually, I trust that she will do a lot of really bad things that she believes are right, or that are in her own interest rather than ours. So, do you give the keys to someone who has no clue how to drive and is guaranteed to put you in the ditch, or to the drunk who could drive off a cliff, but might also get you home safely?
> Neither had Hitler before he got the reins of power.He wrote Mein Kampf.Trump has written a lot of books, including on national policies, but he’s never written anything at all like Mein Kampf.
So how are we to know that anyone, any Joe, is not the world’s next Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, even though there is no hint that Joe is any such thng? How is any person X able to prove that deep underneath they are not like old, evil person Y?So, you want us to go to Joe and demand that he prove he is not Hitler. Then prove he is not Pol Pot. Then not the Boston Bombers?That’s like the Romney statement that he believes that there is some smoking gun in Trump’s taxes. Like the Cruz statement that the media is sitting on bombshells about Trump. Like all the talk, is Trump like Hitler — “He’s done nothing; there’s no evidence; there’s now suspicion; but IS he?”So, why don’t we ask any Joe to show their taxes, the dust under their beds, all their private letters, their laundry, everything about their lives?Nonsense. Just destructive nonsense.Actually maybe we should be very glad that Trump is running. He doesn’t need to do this. He’s thought about doing it back to 2012, maybe 2008, maybe farther. So why does he want to do this? I’m accepting his claim — he wants to help the country.
For Hitler, Germany was on its back economically. The German people were desperate. Hitler got a four year plan, promised to get the economy going again, and did. By then, he was a dictator, but, really the German people were still with him. He got another 4 year plan, and then went wacko, did the worst of his horrible stuff. Somehow the German people were not willing or able to get him out of office except by assassination which failed — bomb not big enough.US civics 101: In the US, we have our Constitution. We were willing to start to impeach Nixon and, finally, pushed Nixon out of office. And we actually did start impeachment proceedings against Clinton about his abuse of women or some such. Why we have not impeached Obama? I suspect there are some solid reasons that will come out in 2017.Nixon tried a night of long knives against the DoJ and his special prosecutor, but the lawyers pushed back. At times, the US DoD is capable of pushing back against a POTUS out of line. And Congress can just impeach — e.g., Nixon and Clinton.We have freedom of the press, and while the press often just scares people to get headlines, puts our liberal propaganda, neglects some stories, e.g., long did about damages to our environment, and at times just neglects to do its job, still we have one heck of a tradition of freedom of the press. So, we can have the NYT do The Pentagon Papers, we can have tell all stories about the Tonkin Gulf scam, we can print the stuff from Snowden, we can dump on the NSA for going too far, and currently we are pushing back against the FBI for their desire to be able to get and all data. We are not outlawing strong encryption, and we are not about to. We have the ACLU, EFF, etc., and no POTUS can stop them. We have a lot of safety valves.Our founding fathers knew well that our government would be made of imperfect men and put in some corrections.With our Constitution, it would be tough for there to be a Hitler here.I made an effort to study WWII and especially Germany in an effort to address just this question, and the above is the answer I got.
We are on our back economically. Perhaps some aren’t feeling it, but the vast majority of Americans have a lower standard of living today than they did in 1990. Everything costs a lot more, but incomes have not even kept pace with inflation, let alone grown. That, plus mismanagement of virtually everything by politicians is why a Trump can exist — the same dynamic the enables the rise of populists everywhere who have crazy ideas.Hitler did not get the economy going again. Interesting fiction you’ve been reading. No doubt, many things were better than the Weimar republic which would have been nearly impossible not to achieve, but that isn’t the same thing as prosperity. He did inflame xenophobia, and start rebuilding Germany’s military, which created a rebound of pride, and certainly did his best to plunder other people’s wealth.The German people were not “with him”. The Nazis never had more than a parliamentary plurality (i.e. the majority voted against him), but von Hindenburg did annoint Hitler as Chancellor (who knows what was threatened behind closed doors), effectively granting him dictatorial power which he used to outlaw other parties and political dissent against him. After gaining this power, it was never relinquished. Violence against his enemies and particularly against the groups he scapegoated for all of Germany’s problems (sound familiar), became the norm, and the rest is history we’re all pretty familiar with.Regarding our constitution, and Congress’s willingness to defend it, that ship sailed a long time ago. Look only at the rising use of Executive Orders to handle things that are the responsibility of the Supreme Court or of Congress, which increasingly has the President acting as a monarch rather than fulfilling his actual constitutional role if you need evidence. We are more than 40 years past the forced exit of Nixon. Today we can barely impeach a President for lying under oath, let alone force him out of office. And, given that we no longer live by the constitution, it seems hard to believe that the same populist support that puts a bad president in office couldn’t be used to keep him there.Never say never. The US is a much weaker country today than at almost any time since its rise to a world power. It’s hard to imagine a lower level of trust in the institutions or the people running them, and that’s the underlying cause of the political craziness we’re seeing now. People are mad as hell, and trying to do something about it. These are perfect conditions for evil to take root — it just takes the right chain of coincidences, and we’ll be well on our way.
What’s do you find wrong with Trump’s character? On, say, illegal immigration, all the other candidates are bought and paid for and, thus, refuse to enforce our immigration laws. Trump is determined to enforce the laws. So, he wins a point on character.Back on Sat, July 11, Trump gave a speech in Phoenix to about 5000 people. Much of the time was spent on the problems of illegal immigration. On Monday, McCain gave an interview in his Senate office saying that Trump “fired up the crazies”. That’s a nasty thing to say to 5000 very concerned US citizens. A story about McCain’s statement appeared in The New Yorker on Thursday. On the next Saturday, Trump was interviewed by Frank Luntz in Iowa, and Trump wanted to push back against the McCain statement. Luntz objected on the grounds that McCain was a “war hero” due to his time as a POW. Trump pushed back against “crazies” anyway, said that maybe McCain was a war hero, that he is commonly considered a war hero because he was a POW, but being a POW is not sufficient to be a war hero. But McCain’s “crazies” was nasty, and Trump was correct.Trump insists that he won’t let people die in the streets due to inability to pay, really, going back to Hill-Burton and more, long standing US policy. That is the moral thing to do. But the “conservative” Republicans don’t like that. That’s a nasty position and against a lot of long standing US policy.A lot of US workers and their families are suffering because the US has been importing too many products, exporting too few products, and importing too many illegals. That’s a morally awful situation, and all the other candidates, including Clinton, are happy with it. Their character has been bought and paid for. Trump is the moral one with character on this issue.Where does Trump fail on morality or character? Where do the other candidates do better? Morality and character? Look at what Cruz did in Iowa, with the e-mail and lying about Carson and stealing his votes. What about the loans to Cruz from GS and Citi for low interest rates and just personal guarantee but not reported as required by law?Look at Kasich’s position in illegal immigration — he is in with the others to refuse to enforce the laws.Look at Rubio, who wants to be Zuck’s and Disney’s water boy for more H1-B visa abuse.Look at Clinton? Do you really believe that she got paid all that money just for her speeches? That money went to her foundation; do you really believe that that is all about charity? Character? Hillary, character? How about her e-mail? What she did to quiet Bill’s victims?Looks to me like on character and morals Trump is the least bad of the bunch = the best of the bunch.
>I actually think that Trump’s imperfection is part of the draw. You can’t make this stuff up. He’s a mess but he is reflecting something. It’s the plastic politicians that scare me more.Wow, inspired comment. I liked the whole thing but the above quoted part particularly struck me, as did the final paragraph.
Hey, thank you!
> waste?In some major cases, yes.> inheritance spent before they’re bornI don’t think so. Or, the Treasury wants to spend money so goes to the Fed and borrows it. Does the Fed or the Treasury have to have our grandchildren pay it back? Not really.So, the Fed in effect printed a lot of money. And what’s wrong with that? Sure, it can cause massive inflation. And now, do we have massive inflation? Nope. So, maybe somehow the US economy needs the extra money. Why? Because with the 2008 crash, a lot of money was destroyed and since then the bank’s multiplier effect has not been creating more money. Why? Slow economy. Low interest rates. Severe banking regulations.For more, IIRC the Fed went to the bond market and bought bonds of private companies. The paid for these bonds with money? Right. The Fed got the money from where? The added it to their balance sheet. They added trillions of dollars to their balance sheet. Net, they printed the money.They acted as a buyer of last resort and, thus kept the economy from sinking farther than it did. Sure, when the economy recovers, they can sell the bonds and pull some green cash out of the economy. If the economy starts to overheat, then they can raise interest rates — that makes a bundle of money fast, that is, pulls the money out of the economy and slows it.
If we had simply borrowed money from ourselves, you could print money to pay it back and hurt the elderly, the unemployed, and anyone else on fixed or low income, and ultimately everyone with a significantly lower standard of living, but that money is owed externally, which means printing money crushes the currency and potentially destroys the global economy for generations (while creating hatred and distrust of Americans, cancelling the USD viability as a global reserve currency). The economic effect of that debt is to depress and negate growth, act as a boat anchor holding down wages, take away any fiscal flexibility to deliberately run deficits (say to pay for war or large scale unemployment). i.e. the slow economy, low rates, and chronic hidden unemployment and underemployment are caused by the debt.Debt is a curse, and it is what has usually caused the decline of every great empire in history. Every penny spent beyond what the Treasury had was harmful, and almost all of it was wasted. Unless you think the logical solution to a maxed out credit card is to ask the bank to double your credit so you can keep spending.
In some extreme cases, yes. But the situation is not nearly that simple. And refusing to print money was one of the worst blunders in the history of civilization. Bottom line — ballpark 50 million people killed.There is no solid, rational support for the idea that always having a balanced Federal budget is the best for anything.If we hadn’t had the Fed and Treasury print money after the crash of 2008, when an enormous fraction of our money supply was suddenly destroyed, we would have gone into the Second Great Depression in the US and essentially all of the more advanced economies of the world also. Bernanke knew this and said that he didn’t want to be the Chair of the Fed that presided over the Second Great Depression. So, he “grew the Fed balance sheet”, did “quantitative easing”, bought bonds, that is, printed money.First cut, to me, selling Treasuries overseas sounds like not so good. And, really, selling Treasuries inside the US can take up capital that would likely be better used in the private economy. So, in the case of a 2008, don’t do that. Instead, do what I said: Have the Fed buy the Treasuries from the US Treasury. If the Federal spending is wasteful, then print the money and pass it out to the citizens.What happened in the Great Depression was the 1929 crash that destroyed much of the financial system and the money supply and gave us massive deflation — total poison for a credit economy since it means that borrowers have to pay back more in real money than they borrowed. They default, and there goes the money supply.We suffered with the Great Depression for 12 years refusing to print money as desperately needed.Then as people started shooting at us, we were willing to print money and pulled out of the Great Depression in 90 days, flat — everyone had multiple job offers, and there were jobs enough for nearly everyone to have two or three. And when the war was over, we just stayed with a good economy, no massive inflation, no return to depression.The key: When people started shooting at us, we were willing to print the needed money.We could have solved the problem of the crash of 1929 in 1929 just by printing money then and avoided the Great Depression, Hitler, and WWII.The crash of 1929 created massive deflation, total poison for a credit economy. But deflation is the easiest thing in the world to solve — just print money.The crash of 2008? Created deflation that is still with us, 8 years later, 2/3rds as long as the Great Depression. Solution — just print money.During the Viet Nam war, LBJ and Nixon printed too much money and gave us significant inflation. The S&Ls went bust. We had the LBOs. Finally Volker ran interest rates to 22% and stopped the inflation. By Reagan, he ran big deficits again and got the economy going again.A balanced Federal budget is usually either too much fiscal stimulus or too little. It is like welding the steering of a car to straight ahead and, then, expecting the car to stay on a straight road. It won’t.Instead, our economy needs control against exogenous, stochastic inputs, and the main means of control are from the Fed and Treasury.The core issue is not the weakness of fiat currency, and the solution is not gold or hard currency. Instead, the issue is a credit economy which does create money and/or destroy money and, thus, has the money supply unstable, going up and down. To forbid those controls is economic and national suicide, e.g., could easily cause WWIII, a global nuke war, 5 billion people killed right away, the rest killed more slowly, and the end of human life on this planet.That’s the situation on a balanced Federal budget and, e.g., why the most dangerous person in the race for POTUS is Kasich and his simplistic, brain-dead religion about balanced budgets.
1) The way most depressions/deflationary spirals end is with war. Are you then advocating for a good old-fashioned war so that everyone gets a job, either fighting or making stuff to fight with? The economy didn’t actually boom until after the war though, and only for the countries whose infrastructures weren’t decimated (e.g. US, Canada). Though people were working, there were severe shortages and rationing of basic supplies. The only ones who profited handsomely were the armaments makers.2) At no time did I say “always run a balanced budget”. However, always running a deficit is clearly wrong, and running up incalculable debt for any reason, short of trying to win a war is definitely wrong. Sometimes capital is required for infrastructure that requires temporary debt. That would be a good time to use funds to pay unemployed people to do productive things that are useful to everyone, There are myriad examples you could come up with of things that are useful infrastructure that represents investments which will yield returns — unfortunately, that is not where the vast majority of money is spent. i.e. most is waste.3) There were many other ways, other than printing money, to escape the crisis of 2008 (which the government and banks created in the first place, though none have been held accountable for it). I would argue that what we did was the worst of all possible outcomes, and saying that we escaped a depression is true only because we didn’t have a deflationary spiral — in every other way, we have felt the pain. It is semantics.4) A balanced budget = fiscal stimulus????? Wow, another new definition. Is that liberal financial newspeak? Stimulus = stimulus. Not spending more than you have is never = stimulus.5) Amazing. All we had to do in the 1930s to avoid Hitler was print money. That’s some kind of magic trick that seems to ignore global geo-politics, the Versailles Treaty effects, and the punitive actions taken by allies against Germany, not to mention the racial prejudices prevalent against jews and gypsies (in particular, but not exclusively). But, it seems like a nice fairy tale to suggest that the US printing money would have saved us from WWII.6) Sounds impressive to say exogenous stochastic inputs. Except banning random inputs means no big innovations or corporate failures — the source of all growth and rejuvenation, not to mention fun, stimulating change that’s interesting and motivating — and it’s a silly ideal to think you could or should try to control all externalities. No massive frauds, no earthquakes, no sunspots, no meteors falling unexpectedly, no hurricanes or tornadoes, no floods or mudslides, no 40 car pileups or train derailments or plane crashes, no surprise decisions from the Supreme Court, no terrorist attacks or wars, no famines or pestilence, no pandemics or mosquito-born viruses causing pregnancy problems. Would be nice if we had any say about any of these things, but it takes quite a massive dose of hubris to think you have any ability to flatten out the financial impact of these things globally, or that controlling positive externalities so they didn’t provide stochastic stimulus would be a good thing. Unless you believe in Soviet-style central planning, as that was such a successful economic model. But then predictable failure is still predictable, so maybe that’s a good thing.Bottom line, deficits you don’t plan to pay for are wrong-headed. A temporary stimulus never is, because it’s just like a junkie on heroine — coming down from the high is always too painful, so you keep trying to prolong it until the crash is forced on you. (Greece, anyone.) Then you have severe pain for millions of real people who didn’t do anything wrong, often leading to exogenous stochastic inputs (civil wars, massive black markets and underground economies, decades of unemployment for huge percentages of the population, terrorism, etc.) The reason to run a deficit should never be to manage economic randomness.
:/ guys…..
Are you then advocating for a good old-fashioned war so that everyone gets a job, either fighting or making stuff to fight with?From what I wrote, clearly, certainly not.I said that due to the 1929 crash, money created by our credit economy was destroyed so needed to be replaced. Had we replaced it in 1929, we could have put people back to work in 90 days. Proof: In 1941-2 we were willing to print the money and did put people back to work in 90 days. The reason in 1941 we were willing to print the money was the war, but there is no fundamental reason we need a war to print money. Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, we could have printed the money in 1929 and avoided the Great Depression.Then there would have been no Great Depression in Germany which was the main reason Hitler was able to recruit the Brown Shirts, get suffering people up on their hind legs, lead a movement, get an appointment from Hindenburg, win elections, keep the support of the German people for so long, etc.Germany suffered from the Versailles Treaty in the 1920s and printed money to get out of it — causing ruinous inflation. Germany didn’t need Hitler just to f’get about the treaty. What put Hitler in power was the Great Depression, not the Treaty.Your other statements are far from anything I wrote.Exogenous stochastic — I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on stochastic optimal control. I know quite well what the heck I’m talking about. There has been a lot in economics about stochastic optimal control, e.g., from P. Samuelson and E. Dynkin. Yellen has indicated her interest in control theory.
I keep saying, after he’s elected, Trump’s going to remove his mask and wig and reveal he’s really Andy Kaufman. The greatest performance art event in the history of humankind.
Certainly feels that way. The problem is, we don’t know who’s behind the mask. Could be Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Darrell Hammond, Andy Kaufman or a socialist democrat. All are conceivable.
Right. So, gotta watch carefully. But, then, there is a biggie: Whatever conclude about Trump, we still need to pick a POTUS. And the candidates are Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, and Clinton. May I have the envelope please? [drum roll …] And the winner is ….Someone less good than we want but hopefully the least bad. Or to borrow from an old movie, we have five admittedly regrettable but nevertheless clearly distinguishable alternatives. We have to pick the least bad!
A political version of Waiting for Godot?More like a political version of The Big Short.
Wall Street already pulled that one and got away with it. I don’t see any shorting, or anyone who wins in the event of a complete collapse of the national stock. Not even the country’s enemies win, if it makes us more dangerous.
Admittedly making the comparison very loosely. House of Cards also comes to mind (the expression, not the dramatic series). Ah…and then there is Waiting for Godot.
especially for an outsider like mehttps://www.youtube.com/wat…
double ouch
Bread and circuses.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
.There are those of us who would welcome a lack of stupidity as a first step toward even a modicum of native intelligence. We can wait a long time on AI if we can get some NI.Much of what ensnares us today is the willingness to enable and tolerate incredibly stupid undertakings while pretending they have any chance of actually working.The road to real gun control does not go through faux tear stained press conferences wherein the actual current laws are misstated. Our leaders should, at the very least, know the laws that they intend to alter.One may have a pen and a cell phone but it would be nice if they also had a brain and some actual knowledge, in addition.Who with a brain, as an example, forestalls American energy independence when we have been enmeshed in ill-advised “oil wars” in the Middle East for 50 years?Who taxes American business at the highest rate in the free world while desperately desiring job creation as a means of leavening the LFPR (labor force participation rate).Who desperately contracts the military in the face of terror, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Russia and China?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
> Who with a brain,Our long standing US Secretary of Energy at Large Jane Fonda.Various people and groups who want to make a living out of scaring people about the environment. Scaring people to get money and power from them is a very old story.After long bloody wars in Europe, we have separation of church and state, but we don’t have separation of charlatans and state or hysterical neurotics and state.It is in the immediate term financial interest of the media to scare people, and they do and are good at it. Whatever level of knowledge there is, there will be a boundary between knowledge and ignorance, between the known and the unknown, and there charlatans can always claim that far too close “there be monsters”.A child can fear monsters under the bed. Jane Fonda fears monsters in nuclear reactors. O and his EPA fear monsters in CO2. We could also fear monsters in astroids or, wait until they get a load of this one, a gamma ray burst — don’t want to be even in the same galaxy with one of those, and since it comes at the speed of light we have no way to get out of the way! How to relax against the threat of a gamma ray burst? We know the arrival rate, less than one each billion years or so. We can use the renewal theorem to argue that they should arrive like a Poisson process, so with our estimate of the arrival rate we can do some nicely precise arithmetic on the probability of getting hit with a gamma ray burst in the next, say, 100 years.A gamma ray burst? A quite big star has, from fusion going all the way, a really big iron core. Finally that core collapses from it’s own gravity to a black hole and then starts to pull in the rest of the star. Since there is some rotation, the rest of the star doesn’t all fall in but starts to orbit. But the pressures in the orbiting material are off the tops of the charts. So, with the high pressure, material squirts out the polls of the rotation. That material is ionized. So, the positives and negatives follow fast, tight curves and radiate, right, in the gamma rays — a lot of gamma rays, enough to put out as gamma ray energy via E = mc^2 a significant fraction of all the mass of the star, right away.Supposedly if one of those popped off anywhere in our galaxy, it could instantly blow all the atmosphere off the earth.Ah, tell Jane Fonda to calm down!
ouch
I would say it is natural but bug-ridden.
Music seems like a good initial fit in that it’s a more structured art form than, say, painting. Computer generated alternative arrangements and remixes could be interesting and possibly helpful for human artists much like a record producer might encourage a song writer to think about their song in new ways.
An existential question that society is grappling with right now is how humans and machines will co-exist in the future.”Co-exist” is an interesting word choice.
Hmm…different species of humans have co-existed in the past. Not today, but did in the past.
Was thinking that same thing. How did I ever learn to co-exist with my microwave oven? 😉
I guess if you follow the thread, at some point a human created the algo that runs the AI-so the art is human.
I like this direction. Here is a piece from about 20 year ago that talked about this area. Guess the time is right now. See the old piece: https://dl.dropboxuserconte…
There’s a chance for art from computing, but the chances are slim to none until there is real AI.The challenge: Art is the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. Well, first-cut, the source of the art needs to understand human experience, emotion and, then, how to communicate, interpret it effectively.For a computer to do that, first cut, would mean that a computer has such understanding and insight into humans, and that is essentially real AI and a very long way from anything now.So, right p^3 — passion, pathos, poignancy. Or longing, loneliness, melancholy. Ecstasy from magnificent victory with long odds against terrible obstacles. Victory against the common fates of life. Insistent determination against obstacles. Dream like beauty, fantasy, soaring over grim daily life. The sound of cracking ice and a cold winter wind. A pastoral scene. The murmurs of a forest.https://www.youtube.com/wat…A lakehttp://www.youtube.com/watc…A ship in heavy seas. A trip down a flowing river. A birthday gift to a loved wife. A remembrance of love lost and love gained. An expression of order and all right and harmonious in life. Fantasy, magic. On and on with “human experience, emotion”.George Lucas said something like, technology alone is boring. Instead need some humanity in there.Or there is little that interests humans than humans. Thus, art.”Computer, sit down and be quiet. When I get the typing done, you can send the bits to the screen, printer, speaker, whatever.”And there is more that computers can do to help people with art.
That’s a highly reified notion of art there.My father lived in the village at one point – in the same building as Frank Stella. They once got into a conversation about why he made art – and the answer was basically to make money.He was not thinking of people like me who happen to react to his paintings as if they are very calming drugs (something about shaped canvases and colors, it isn’t only him, it is a number of people who paint in that period, and I am apparently not the only person I’ve ever met with that reaction *shrug*). My reaction and liking/desiring his works, the zen like calm I feel, has absolute nothing to do with why he was doing what he was doingAn AI could build something, you can read into it and experience things, so does that make it art. That seems to be a better question and gets away from the reification
That’s a highly reified notion of art there.It’s the kind of art I like. I gave a lot of cases with a YouTube example for each of two of them. I could have given similarly good examples for nearly all the cases. Sure, love lost — Fritz Kreisler. Etc. An AI could build something, you can read into it and experience things, so does that make it art. That seems to be a better question and gets away from the reificationI tried to address some such, but maybe okay, but as I wrote,For a computer to do that, first cut, would mean that a computer has such understanding and insight into humans, and that is essentially real AI and a very long way from anything now.That is, a computer is just missing what emotions or experience to communicate.Or, if want to take deliberate human communications out of the picture, then don’t need computers and can use Rorshocks. There the point is that there is nothing there but some people see what they want to see. Well, there actually isn’t anything there, and people don’t see much in it. It’s inferior art.Inferior art is easy. Great art is rare and usually quite difficult. E.g., some art is screaming out to the universe about the dignity and passion of the human spirit. Can get that from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and more, easily, right away, but will have to look for a very long time for any such from a computer, even one programmed to follow, say, Bach’s more common chord progressions, key modulations, and rhyhmic figures.I included two examples of art, each a crown jewel of civilization, the second with a good video of Lake Como and the first with a really good video of forest scenes — I see no hope of getting even 1% of such good art from a computer. Not a chance.Gee, once I tried: It got out a table of random numbers and used it to pick out some notes on a piano. Didn’t work. It didn’t work. It was nothing. It was just noise. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t a communication from a human about human experience and emotion. It wasn’t the combination of soaring joy and deep melancholy of the M. Bruch Scottish Fantasy, it wasn’t the dignity of the human spirit in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the pastoral scene in his Fourth Symphony, …, it wasn’t anything. It wasn’t art at all. It sure as heck wasn’t from the same planet as the two video clips I included.
I like some of the music too. And I like many of the painters you like.The larger issue at play is the following:Lets pretend I got all of the best recordings with multiple types of interpretations of classical and romantic symphonies. And all the sections of each piece for each instrument and interpretations and composers and period are tagged. And we feed this into some sort of AI. And we ask for it to pop out a new symphony. It pops out a symphony with directional and interpretation notes. I call some friends of friends and I get a symphony together of all the people who barely didn’t make the cut to play in the Chicago Symphony, and we record this piece.I play this recording for you, not telling you anything about my AI or tagging system.If you like this new symphony, does that mean the AI is a brilliant composer? the person who wrote the AI is a brilliant composer (even if that person knows nothing about music)?the person who came up with the tagging system for the ai is a brilliant composer? (even if they know nothing about AIs or coding, and can’t write music)is the actual music piece a piece of art? Why?Remember, in this toy example, you like this piece. By like, we mean it triggers the same sort of strong emotions and visualizations in the pastoral scene in Beethoven’s Fourth.That’s why I am saying it is reified. Just because you are attributing capturing human spirit to specific pieces because that is what you feel on listening, doesn’t mean that when that subsection of that coda was being written, the composer was thinking about or feeling what you think and feel about the piece. For all we know sitting here now, he was thinking about what his lunch was going to be at that moment in time. Ideas like “pastoral” can be attributed after the fact, or come up with as a vague idea and ignored through most of the creative process except as an idea to return to when stuck.if we talk about an AI, which doesn’t really think because it doesn’t really feel, that it has no attribution about the music such as “pastoral” ,”naturally” – how is this different than a composer coming up with the “idea” after the piece is completely written (which happens a lot more often than admitted in public)Otherwise we might be reifing art, artists, and/or AIs
My view is that what, with anything current AI, what you describe wouldn’t sound like music of anything and, instead, would just sound like noise. It would be at best an audio Rorshock, even if it was played by one of the world’s best orchestras. It would be frustrating to listen to, much like reading little sentence fragments from all over, because it would never make an appropriate expressive progression. Sure, could program the thing to start and end on the tonic, but that’s still not enough. Maybe could get it to sound like elevator music or some throwaway background music for a grade B movie, at best. It would be like some novel written by 20 people where each wrote a chapter without seeing the other 19 chapters. Even if the first chapter seemed good, it wouldn’t come to an end, and the next three chapters would go anyplace; by chapter five, it would be frustrating because the story wouldn’t build on its past or move forward. If put in a melodic line, then can automate an accompaniment, but are still a long way from music. Take some good writing and put the paragraphs in random order — still have correct spelling and punctuation and complete sentences, but no longer have good writing, and that is about what would have with AI music.You are correct, that most good music has more than one interpretation, but AI music would have only one — frustration!
.Art is not the “thing” it is the emotion that dwells within us when we experience that thing through uniquely human senses.On the occasion of the death of Pat Conroy, it is easy to acknowledge it is not the book, or even the story, it is the emotion that it raises within us which then colors our future thoughts and actions.I remember reading Beach Music in the lobby of the Cloister on a rain day which prevented golf or beaching. Tears literally flowed like a conga line down my face. That’s how good the story and the story teller were.A woman came up to me and asked if I was alright. I thought to myself that I was more right than I had been for a long time as I was alive, my emotions were engaged, my heart was beating at a slightly elevated rate, and I was moved to tears.I remember that afternoon and I can say that I have acted upon the emotions that it drew out of me.There is plenty of art out there. I admit to being a little biased toward Pat Conroy because he was a trade school grad, Citadel, and a flawed human.RIP, Pat Conroy and thank you.For all the rest of us, go create some damn art.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
It’s beautiful to be moved. There’s a Verdi piece which always makes me cry, reminds my of my father’s death.Good art moves us. Who cares who makes it?
This will be a very provocative topic in the years to come as ultimately it is the same question as “what is life?” Are we just carbon based engines with organic computing machines? Does AI fall solely in the sphere of science and technology or is there something important to religion? To truly have AI be indistinguishable from humans, these existential questions will need to be answered. I have my own thoughts, but this is, perhaps, not the venue
People have been trying to figure that out for centuries, from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and the Upanishads. It’s an eternal question.
OK, since this post is about AI, google for AI koans, people.
The issues raised here are powerfully discussed in the classic work:”Meaning and the Moral Sciences” Hilary Putnam.
Perhaps a first step is to use A.I. to understand and distribute existing art. If you haven’t checked out the Google Arts & Culture app it’s amazing.
You’re looking at five paintings in a gallery and are pleased with them all. After leaving, I tell you one of them was not art, because it was rendered by an artificial intelligence.If you can’t identify which painting you saw wasn’t art, the ‘eye of the beholder’ argument becomes more clear.
I’m reminded of how in BladeRunner real animals were worth much more than their indistinguishable robotic counterparts. A prescient thought, in my opinion.
.And, of course, they BBQ up much better, no?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
yyyyup – robots are too crunchy even when done medium-rare
.I have been trying some good marinades but the rust ruins everything.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
One of my professors in DOVA is actually a leader in thishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wi…v2 of what was a printer example of exactly what you are talking abouthttp://salavon.com/work/gol…
It’s worth putting in the copy explaining what the piece is because I think it points at the discussion very closelyReformatting a project originally created in 2002, this map (2014) is a presentation of 100,000 abstract paintings. Rather than being hand-made, however, they are the product of an automaton. This artist-authored software system was designed to relentlessly generate an infinite variety of such paintings. In general, each one appears to be the direct product of human thought and touch and, as such, might be said to pass a Turing Test for mid-20th Century abstract painting.
Also, I personally think this is in no way weird. It does point out about the act of the artist and the act of the handx-postingMy fiance thought it would be funny to build a custom neuro-net of me one day out of the crazy amount of emails I’ve saved over the years* (we haven’t done it, it is time consuming). Now that I think about it, it would be even more fun to write to said neural net of myselfIf i did such a thinga) where is the artb) let’s pretend we classify this as performance art, what are the emails exactly? Records of the art?c) What exactly is the ai – does this depend if the ai is on its own dameon, or if this only works if this is triggered by me. If it is on a dameon, who is the artist in this?d) why is this art*Close to a decades worth of conversations with people in a google email inbox, and way better tuned than what google inbox could give me, because I have an awesome and brillaint fiance
a photograph, the outcome of the synthesis of a machine and a mind.
Terrific comment!
A genuine machine art would talk to us about its – the machine’s – fears, desires, frustrations, convictions, torments and passions. Their representations would embody their own perspectives on the role of technology in art and art in the broader society (of machines).
Why would it need to talk.Again, I say this is reified
Hi Shana, just a figure of speech … paintings talk to us, sculptures address us, music captivates us… Hopefully if machine art does speak to us it will have a nicer tone than Siri.
is it discursive, or are we thinking it is discursive, right, two different issues
It is the art speaking to us. The work of art is a discursive object.
Posting this comment late, because I only saw this last night, and it was only released yesterday anyway (I guess) – Google’s latest Doodle. It’s a very nice example of what may be called artificial art. Explore it while you can, before it makes way on the home page for their next one. But they also have a site where they archive the old doodles, so it may work there later too. Here it is:https://google.comIts about Clara Rockmore, a theremin player of note.Both her name and the instrument name are on Wikipedia. The theremin is some sort of instrument that makes electronic music when you wave your hands near it – literally.I found both the animation and the music rather good. Also, there is a small theremin class of a lesson or three. I passed it :)Very well done doodle.
Internet Art has been around for 20 years. Maybe even longer. A good place to see where it stands: http://www.aec.at/news/
Patterns and randomness algorithmically “tuned”, I suppose.
The machine is the expression 😉
Mind / matter.What is mind? Not matter.What is matter? Never mind.:)
That’s a reified notion of art
And what is it an expression of, really?
That’s a philosophical rabbit hole. I can imagine LE having a field day with this one. Let’s see if he goes for it 🙂
if you read into it, isn’t it?
I get what you are saying here.When does the machine stop being a human creation?And to my point in another comment to which you responded, if it stops being a human creation, then it does become “co-existence.”
Wellll…if a human expresses, is reception required for it to be expression?I have a pet peeve that we mistake expression for communication , but that’s another conversation.
Right.It’s just really hard for me (perhaps just a lack of imagination) to picture a future where machines have some sort of self-perpetuating domain that isn’t managed by humans at all. Maybe it’s already forming and I just don’t see it. Maybe I don’t read enough sci fi 😉
Is anyone else noticing how similar this conversation is to the ones we have about Twitter? 😛 What is art?! What is Twitter?! We may *never* know!
>Wellll…if a human expresses, is reception required for it to be expression?This is getting rather deep – I better pull out my zen reinforcements:If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?/koan
Watched The Matrix too many times.