[HN Gopher] Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI?
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Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI?
Author : PinealGland
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-09-19 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikhoel.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikhoel.substack.com)
| o_m wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch
| bongoman37 wrote:
| I am not sure what's 'Big Tech' but yea, artists are getting
| replaced. It is now easy for small companies to use deepfake to
| create interesting marketing ads. A company I know used their own
| employee to create some ads and then used deepfake to replace her
| face with Mona Lisa's. They are considering it for replacing
| faces with those of different ethnicities for different
| countries. There are models that will create a realistic voice
| just given a script. And of course models like GPT-3 can create a
| reasonable script. Nothing Oscar winning or close but enough for
| a lot of companies to drastically reduce their marketing related
| budgets.
| stemlord wrote:
| Seems like you're talking about designers, not artists.
| Designers make products whose endgoal is money, artists make
| artworks whose endgoal is meaning. The intrinsic value of an
| artwork comes from human > human communication. AI is a tool.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| What does it mean for meaning to be the endgoal of art?
|
| I've spent the last two months making carvings and
| blockprinting them. Sometimes I try to come up with an idea
| or concept I want to convey. Other times I sit with a block
| and start carving without any sort of plan or idea for what
| will come out, just filling in the blank spaces until
| something emerges.
|
| Upon completion I can often come up with various
| interpretation of the abstract results, but a lot of the fun
| comes from hearing how other people interpret my work. A
| veritable Rorschach test for the soul.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| > The intrinsic value of an artwork comes from human > human
| communication
|
| So you're saying art is a tool?
|
| Is art not shared not art?
| codingdave wrote:
| That is certainly one definition of art. There are others.
| The answer to "What is art?" changes depending on time and
| culture.
|
| FWIW, I have a degree in Fine Arts, have had my work in
| galleries, and my goal is neither money nor meaning, but just
| for people to give me some validation and say, "Hey, that's
| cool."
| [deleted]
| cwmoore wrote:
| Sounds like a healthier, although very expensive, dopamine
| dependency.
| throwthere wrote:
| > Designers make products whose endgoal is money, artists
| make artworks whose endgoal is meaning.
|
| I don't think that's a useful classification or that those
| are even mutually exclusive. How would you group Michelangelo
| and his incredibly expensive commissioned works for instance?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > For example, recently psychologists discovered a simple way to
| test for creativity. The simple test is to come up with a list of
| 10 words as different as possible from each other. The simple
| test is to come up with a list of 10 words as different as
| possible from each other. After posting my word combinations and
| their scores people were replying with theirs, and then of course
| eventually GPT-3's results were posted. According to the test,
| GPT-3 is far more creative than the average person, scoring in
| the 85-95th percentile. If you like, take that test and see if
| you can beat the machine.
|
| So could a line of Python.
|
| random.choices(words_in_english, k = 10)
|
| This isn't really testing creativity, but more the size of the
| list of concepts you can keep in your head at once and then
| select from.
|
| I can see how that correlates with creativity in humans, but for
| a machine, it is just leveraging its ability to store and process
| far more data.
|
| EDIT:
|
| I tested this. Maybe there is some confounding factor in my
| implementation, but random.choice seems to consistently beat most
| people too, around 90-95%.
|
| Site used: https://www.datcreativity.com/task?
|
| Repo of code:
| https://github.com/MattGaiser/CreativeWordChoice/tree/master...
|
| I just grabbed a random list of nouns, narrowed it by the params
| specified, and fed them in as required. You may need more than 10
| as it rejects some, but in that case I just re-ran it and put in
| the first nouns to come up.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Arguably that line of Python wouldn't do very good - you'd want
| choices that _maximize_ the difference as opposed to be merely
| something random, this is harder than it appears; and the
| distribution of words is also uneven enough (both in relative
| frequency of word usage, and also in lexeme "density" w.r.t
| how many terms there are for some domains and how few for
| others) that pure random sampling would be not a good option.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Word frequencies follow a power law, so nearly all words are
| used very infrequently. So a randomly chosen word is likely
| to be very uncommon. Also there are many more specific
| concepts than general ones (because each general concept
| encompasses many specific ones). So a randomly chosen word is
| more likely to be specific than general.
|
| Random sampling is likely to give you unusual, highly
| specific words. I don't see how that wouldn't do very good.
| Sure, you could do better by mapping each word to a concept,
| then selecting ten random concepts and selecting a word for
| each concept. But why do that when you get 99% of the way
| there with just random choice.
|
| To show this experientially, I let python choose 10 random
| words from the first English word list I found. I got
| "epilithic, codirects, serologic, capsian, digestibility,
| yasna, samsara, supergun, hepatoptosis, kyurin". Sure,
| capsian and kyurin are somewhat related (names of
| places/people), as are serologic and hepatoptosis (both
| medical terms), but it's a pretty good spread.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The example you got was the exact thing I had in mind -
| there are "terminology-heavy" fields with lots of terms,
| and a random draw is quite likely to draw two items from a
| single field which IMHO should count as quite related. The
| automated scoring method they're using seems to say that
| all obscure words are unrelated to each other, though, but
| I'd use that as a criticism for that evaluation algorithm
| not as praise for the evaluated method.
|
| On the other hand, probably there are many humans who would
| pick two local animals or two office-related objects that
| happen to be in their room, so that cuts both ways.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Not poster but I think the point is you could do _better_ ,
| not that this doesn't work.
|
| You can imagine having some discrete optimisation
| maximising the dissimilarity of words, though that's hard
| to do, in particular in a discrete space.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It does pretty well on this
| (https://www.datcreativity.com/task?), at least with the
| below code. Consistently getting 80-90%.
|
| https://github.com/MattGaiser/CreativeWordChoice/tree/master.
| ..
|
| I just grabbed a random list of nouns, narrowed it by the
| params specified, and fed them in as required. You may need
| more than 10 as it rejects some, but in that case I just re-
| ran it and put in the first nouns to come up.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > For example, recently psychologists discovered a simple way
| to test for creativity. The simple test is to come up with a
| list of 10 words as different as possible from each other.
|
| When Robert Frost was the poet laureate of the U.S some news
| magazine (I think NewsWeek, although it might have been Time)
| did a creativity test on him, using inkblots iirc, and he
| scored particularly low.
|
| Frost was irate afterwards and remarked something to the affect
| that to be creative required that you not see things in the
| inkblot, that is to say to not try to see things in
| distractions, that he had spent years training himself not to
| see things in meaningless shapes.
|
| I think that there is quite a lot of truth in this, also if
| someone wanted to give me a simple test to come up with a list
| of 10 words as different as possible from each other I would
| probably get verbally abusive - at least call them an idiot.
| pddpro wrote:
| Memory is much more correlated with creativity than one would
| think.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| Also the test I took[0] scores this very poorly, by determining
| how often those words are in the same section of a text as each
| other, meaning choosing uncommon words (crenellations,
| gravedigger) will show much more creativity than common words
| (castle, grave) that are similar conceptually.
|
| [0]: https://www.datcreativity.com/task?
| advael wrote:
| I got a dual-major in psychology in undergrad, and while it's
| not been an exceptionally useful degree, it did bequeath me
| with an enormous dose of skepticism toward psychometrics like
| this. The replication crisis solidified that skepticism
|
| Being able to choose less "related" words doesn't sound like it
| has much meaningful basis at all in what we care about when we
| say "creativity". This metric, as many others like it, was
| likely chosen and popularized because it is easy to measure
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I can see it being strongly correlated, as that human has
| more items to draw from for figuring out solutions, but I
| don't see how it can be used to test computer creativity.
| Python's random surely isn't creative.
| advael wrote:
| That's the problem with metrics though. You can make
| anything sound plausible. Once a model has been presented
| to you, you can come up with an endless stream of just-so
| stories for why it measures what you were told it measures.
| Nonetheless, some metrics simply aren't that useful, and
| get adopted anyway because they produce a bunch of data.
| Psychometrics like this have an awful track record for
| standing up to more meaningful tests like "Can we drive any
| outcome we care about with this"
| inglor_cz wrote:
| My naive take is that if you can keep 2N concepts in your head
| at once, the number of possible connections among them is much
| more than twice as big than with N concepts, so you have a much
| wider graph to analyze and possibly fish out interesting ideas
| from.
|
| (Unless N is 0, of course.)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I agree, but that is a two stage process. Sure the machine
| can beat us on concepts, but can it make meaningful
| connections?
| quimplo wrote:
| > recently psychologists discovered a simple way to test for
| creativity
|
| Jesus. That "discovery" is
| https://www.datcreativity.com/faq#simple
|
| It's not a "discovery", it's not an objective way to test for
| creativity, and throwing GPT-3 at a test designed to surface
| relative differences among humans is like saying a pair of dice
| are better than humans at supplying random numbers.
|
| Actually, what is the methodology for applying a language
| prediction model to a "come up with 10 'unrelated' words"
| prompt? _Especially_ when the "test" relies on a very specific
| and game-able definition of "unrelated" that needs to be hidden
| from test-takers to provide even a semblance of "valid"
| results?
|
| The amount of BS being juggled among those who should
| presumably know better is astounding and depressing.
| Animats wrote:
| The lesson is that art is much less profound than previously
| thought. GPT-3 is basically autocomplete with a really big
| training set.
|
| The main lack is a tie to the real world. If you generated, say,
| an auto repair manual with GPT-3, it would read well, but would
| not match the proper procedures for the car.
|
| That might be fixable. The next level would be a system that
| watches someone doing a task, then generates a how-to guide.
| ngold wrote:
| As opposed to the artist that dropped buckets of paint from a
| bridge onto a canvas and called it abstract art.
|
| Since time began, it's all in the users appreciation or lack
| there of.
|
| Art is anything and everything if you boil it down.
|
| But, an artist with talent and a message....
| risedotmoe wrote:
| Artists will never be replaced, although looking at the trends of
| modern graphic design, I doubt a computer can do any worse.
| snek_case wrote:
| I'd make the argument that while artists haven't yet been
| replaced by technology, it's clear that technology has made it
| much harder to be an artist. Because of the internet, and the
| fact that we're so globally connected now, art is just a lot
| more competitive. Nowadays, there's just so much music
| available online for free, even just on YouTube and soundcloud,
| it's a lot more difficult to be a musician. You're not just
| competing against something that's been given away for free,
| you're competing against very skilled artists, skilled enough
| that even 10,000 hours of practice might not bring you to their
| level. I think the same is partly through for graphical
| artists.
| GDC7 wrote:
| I don't think it's entirely true.
|
| Internet or not if a band were to play 4 straight hours live
| like Led Zeppelin used to do back in the days they'd get
| noticed.
|
| Of course you can't just be at the park sitting on a bench
| while doing so.
|
| You still have to go through the process of embellishment and
| make an effort to sell yourself both in terms of structure
| and looks.
|
| What people on HN and reddit fail to realize is that the
| internet won't ever find a way to force its way into the
| golden hour of music marketing:
|
| 7pm-3am
|
| Young people go out during that timeframe, they are with
| their friends and smoking and drinking all sort of funny
| things.
|
| That's how one's favorite song is minted.
|
| The problem is clubs, they want to play the hits because they
| sound familiar. They should scout for bands and structure a
| deal for a % of their future income in exchange for giving
| the initial opportunity.
|
| Club owners are not ambitious enough to think they could find
| the next big thing and become their manager, and yet history
| of early pop music was all about that sort of arrangements.
|
| Beatles in Hamburg is the most famous.
| risedotmoe wrote:
| Technology has also made it easier to be an artist, tools
| often automate what took artists countless hours to perfect.
| This exacerbates the issue making "art" a technical skill and
| not a creative endeavor. The problem is that no matter how
| technical it gets, treating art as something that can be
| artificially constructed leaves things very blatantly
| soulless. In the modern era everyone can be an artist but
| only the exceptional will thrive, and art being an endeavor
| you can thrive on instead of struggle is what's unique about
| the times we live in.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I do pretty good drawing stuff that makes me happy to draw
| and giving it away for free, with a Patreon tip jar. There
| are better artists than me who are also doing this, there are
| worse artists than me doing this, and there are artists who
| work a lot harder than my lazy self doing this. Or artists
| who work a lot harder than my lazy self grinding out immense
| amounts of work in the animation/effects/game asset mines,
| and getting a salary.
|
| Admittedly I am also fifty years old, and got good enough for
| people to pay me for drawing stuff about twenty five years
| ago.
|
| The fact that every social media platform likes to hide posts
| that take people off their sites to places they could give me
| money hasn't been making it easier, but I do okay. My
| audience of people who are enough like me that "stuff I draw
| to make me happy" fills a lot of otherwise-unfulfilled
| desires is slowly growing.
| mbgerring wrote:
| To me, it's a lot more fun to look at the work that human artists
| are doing with AI than to get worried about them being
| "replaced." https://pitchfork.com/news/holly-herndons-ai-
| deepfake-twin-h...
| codingdave wrote:
| Sure, and photography for the most part really did replace
| painting, or at least its societal purpose... family portraits
| are done with photos, as is most other visual documentation.
|
| The art world didn't end when photography came along. But it did
| change. It won't end when AI-driven creations come along. It may
| change. The creative process and the resulting works have been
| changing based on technology for centuries. The printing press
| changed art. The industrial revolution changed art. 3d printing
| changed art. CNC machines changed art. People will always find
| new ways to be creative with new technology. New art forms will
| arise. Old art forms will still be around, and people will find
| uses for all of the above.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Art will never be replaced by AI because art isn't about just
| literally the manifestation itself, it's also about the
| intersection between the cultural boundaries and the individual
| as well.
|
| Taking two pieces (of whatever medium) produced by a human and an
| AI and comparing them - if the two are the same, that's fine.
| However if you knew the human involved had some extraordinary
| circumstances involved in its creation, many would elevate the
| human's piece despite being literally the same as the AI's
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| This blog post is so long, but it's important to note that it's
| hobbyists producing these results, using either open source
| models released by OpenAI or calling their API. Big tech didn't
| set out to replace artists, but it may be a side effect of the
| useful models they produce.
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| All of these examples fail on structure. The "novels" don't have
| a plot, the "music" doesn't have a direction, the "poem" mimics
| the tropes but not the rhetorical intent.
|
| Really, NN-based art is just a more abstract kind of sampling -
| blundering around inside a human-originated space, bumping off
| the walls, looking for the occasional example that a human will
| find interesting.
|
| It's still mechanical, it's still mimicry, and it's still
| repetitive. Even if nice things fall out - and sometimes they do
| - they're really just distortions of the originals. (That's
| particularly obvious in the library "paintings.")
|
| They're still waiting for a human to say "I like that", but with
| no sense of _what makes a human say that._
|
| It reminds me of fractal art - pretty, but monotonous and
| disposable.
|
| How many people can remember their favourite example of fractal
| art?
| cirgue wrote:
| I also feel like a huge piece of art being fun and interesting
| is the human to human communication aspect of it. Dali, without
| knowing he's Dali and what he and the rest of his generation
| saw, talked about, wrote about, and valued is just a bunch of
| goofy nonsense, albeit technically well executed.
| nbardy wrote:
| > How many people can remember their favourite example of
| fractal art
|
| I've got a list of my 10 favorite I can share.
|
| You should actually play with these tools before you dismiss
| them. There is a lot more going on than bumping around human
| space. The curation process between artist and machine is live
| and well in this genre.
| snmx999 wrote:
| The majority of human-produced art is also mechanical, mimicry
| and repetitive. What is the "magic" of humans that AI lacks?
| api wrote:
| This is exactly what naive AI art will reveal: that most
| human art is cliche ridden and derivative.
|
| By naive AI art I mean just using it blindly to generate
| something that imitates X, or generating random art-like
| output.
|
| There's another potential angle to AI and art though. Humans
| could use AI as a tool to make art just as they have with
| electronic oscillators, photographic film, 3D renderers, etc.
| People once decried electronic music and photography as "not
| real art" too, so I assume some will say the same of anything
| using AI.
|
| Personally I think AI as a rendering tool could be
| fascinating. The artist would be a little like a DJ cueing up
| patterns and themes, but you could get way more sophisticated
| than you can with mixing tracks and could do things other
| than music.
| Jack000 wrote:
| there is a form of art called "found object art", which is pretty
| much exactly what it sounds like. Once upon a time, I asked my
| art instructor what the difference is between this art and a
| random object on my desk, couldn't anybody just pick up an object
| and call it art? The answer she gave was that the art is not in
| the object but in the context - of people observing the object as
| art, discussing its symbolism and merits.
|
| machine learning lowers the skill barrier to producing art, but
| in a lot of contexts this barrier never existed in the first
| place. To have any value art must be meaningful to people, and
| there are fewer things _less_ meaningful than learning that a
| painting was churned out mechanically in a painting mill, paint
| by numbers, or optimization algorithm.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > What seems to make AIs more intelligent is simply their scale.
| More neurons, more connections (referred to as "parameters" in
| the community) means better, and techniques that don't work at
| one scale may jump to human-level at a larger one.
|
| I think for this reason human artists _won't_ be replaced anytime
| soon. The human brain is insanely efficient. I have a theory that
| humans are smart not because of some magic algorithm in the
| brain, but more because we process so much input we can recognize
| so many patterns at once.
|
| IIRC we've build a super-computer with as much "processing power"
| as a human brain (although we also don't know exactly how neurons
| work). But it's not just that. We have to build that computer,
| run it for decades on all kinds of input, and then we have
| something as smart and creative as one human. Not necessarily
| even an artistic one either. Meanwhile there are over 7 billion
| humans, plenty of whom can make art for cheap. And that's why
| we're far from companies using AI to make their graphics.
|
| I'd love to see AI stories and art, but until we get much more
| processing power i doubt we'll get AI making novel creations.
| These abstract art pieces? Sure. Transferring styles (e.g. Van
| Gogh, water color, polygonal) between paintings? Sure. In fact I
| bet most artists will be using AI-augmented tools. But for a long
| time AI will still involve human work and/or be relegated to
| different styles.
| 6177c40f wrote:
| I've been thinking something along these lines recently too. A
| single neuron seems like an absurdly complex device. I doubt
| they are really similar at all to "artificial neurons" except
| in some vague abstract sense. So the brain is essentially a
| network of billions of powerful, hyper-efficient computers (not
| to mention all the other nerves in the body), whose function,
| communication protocols, and network topology have been
| developed for millions of years in such a way that has lead to
| human intelligence.
|
| And yet it still takes decades to develop a human mind. Even
| just to become competent with a single language takes years and
| it requires much more than just learning that language. If we
| could develop an AI system that hypothetically could achieve
| human intelligence, could we even train it to that level faster
| than it takes a human mind to mature? Is there some kind of
| maximum rate at which the process by which "intelligence"-
| whatever that may mean exactly- can be reliably run?
| nverno wrote:
| > the linguistic and creative output of AIs, which lack all
| consciousness and intentionality, and therefore whose statements
| and products lack all meaning.
|
| If, in fact, AI output does lack all meaning, then that should
| provide a major competitive advantage to humans. After all, isn't
| the search for meaning one our basest motivations?
| polynomial wrote:
| Right, and because we are so completely caught up in the search
| for the meaningful, we don't have a complete idea of what it
| is. There isn't a scientific test for whether something is
| meaningful. (Only how much information something conveys;
| Shannon literally discarded meaning to formalize information
| measure.)
|
| Thus not knowing exactly what it is, it's not terribly
| surprising when we are fooled by our own attempts to produce
| its facsimile.
| racl101 wrote:
| No AI though, can ever be funnier than Norm Macdonald.
| pphysch wrote:
| > We cannot know what a character on TV is actually thinking--
| that's the very purpose of acting, to allow us as much access
| into a character's thoughts as their expressiveness allows.
| Novels, on the other hand, are an intrinsic medium, wherein
| consciousness is directly accessible. The writer can lay bare the
| contents of a skull to a reader.
|
| The author appears to have an idealistic and mistaken idea of how
| semantics work. The author implies that words have absolute
| meaning, and therefore one's thoughts can be made "directly
| accessible" through words alone. This is clearly false. Everyone
| has their own semantics.
|
| Communicating clearly, minimizing ambiguity, is a non-trivial
| task. It is ridiculous to assert that all authors are somehow
| more capable of this than any actor, if indeed this is even their
| goal (beyond entertainment).
| swayvil wrote:
| The necromancy! Facebook already does this. Terminator dons the
| skin of a fresh corpse and tries to sell you a phone plan.
| ilaksh wrote:
| To me the fact that the SOTA AI-generated art resembles a lot of
| human-generated art is mainly because there is a ton of low-
| quality art out there.
|
| However, I believe there have been enough major advancements to
| assume that there will be more and that it will keep. Obviously
| that's speculation, but it seems plausible that we will approach
| closer and closer to human level as time goes on and there are
| more breakthroughs.
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