leo_papandreou1

I only like images that contain exactly 34 pixels, in a straight line. There are 76 times as many 8-bit 34-pixel images (of a straight line) than atoms in the universe. Makes you think.

*Shows picture of three bridesmaids dressed in yellow and black.* "What do you think, Hal?" "Julie, your progress is nothing short of amazing. That is a fine picture of a school bus." (I hope you're patient, we can't even simulate a worm yet.)

I knew I'd regret "my". I don't even believe that. I'm just an inconspicuous filigree in the vast immanence, a split end in God's mane.

Well, he thinks it's an "illusion". He doesn't say what it's an illusion of though, perhaps of a deeper illusion? Whoa.

Dennett denies consciousness exists, whereas (my) consciousness is the only thing I'm sure that exists.

"That's where I have trouble, because art seems to cling so much to our consciousness, that I find it hard to imagine it's existence without the former." Well yes, lacking subjective experiences or qualia is why a tree, for example, doesn't make art by bending crookedly. Not because it wouldn't be fair to trees that grow straight but because there's no first person there (so to speak). But take enough pictures of crooked trees and suddenly you're the artist.

The genealogy of art as a human activity is almost surely the (not entirely correct) belief that it sets us apart in the animal kingdom. It's much more an assertion of our place in ye olde chain of being than it is an essential definition of art. Not that it matters, pending strong AI or visitors from outer space ...

We wouldn't be able to distinguish a strong AI from a human based on either's work. That's the point of strong AI. (Has anyone seen what Banksy looks like?)

"If the AI machine is really AI then the human builder should not have influence on the product of that AI machine." Is "really AI" strong AI? Because strong AI is functionally human (at least) intelligence. Toddler intelligence would be mission accomplished, AFAIC.

"Yes, and the programmability gives it possibilities well beyond the specific control over the programmer," Well, a program's output need not be predictable, but (assuming no hardware errors) any non-deterministic behavior is explicitly programmed (by sampling the outside world, for example), every source of noise and each degree of freedom is accounted for. Programmers must control chaos, traditional artists surrender to it (if they're any good). The thing is, there's an author here. There's no driftcode.

Btw I'm talking up the creative aspects of art, but this doesn't mean I don't care the art objects in themselves. I don't think art inheres in any object, and if I prefer a piece of driftwood to a sculpture, for example, then that's what I prefer and it doesn't matter to me who "made" either.

"a violin is a different sort of machine IN KIND from an AI machine system." I agree, one of them is programmable.

OK I"ll give it a shot: code is a medium and programmers are artists.

Sure, and every year various AI competitions are held, including some for the arts. The question remains, though, who or what is the winning artist? It can't be the computer because the very same computer, if I have anything to do with it, can only draw a stick figure doing jumping jacks. It can't be the code either because the code didn't write itself and how the heck is it going to spend the $10,000 prize? PS That quote is good description of your camera firmware.

Sounds like photography.

Art is just a proxy word for me in this discussion. When I say (half-seriously) only artists will have jobs in the future, I don't mean designated artists, TBH I mean the easiest things we do are going to be the hardest to mechanize. As in you don't need any special knowledge to be an artist, like you do to become a doctor or accountant say.

"Except it's not." Semantics. It's an analog computer/device/whathaveyou. By receiving light (information) from an object, it provides a measurable response that's analogous, or correlated, to the object.

"It's only killer if you already pre-assign to art the need for intention." I think I do, yeah. In this case the intentional agent would be the computer scientist. What if, say, a computer generated original works to rival those of Shakespeare? Well I would change my mind then. But we're going to need a radically different kind of computer before that happens. Seriously.

Come to think of it, film is a computer. A different kind of programmer, called a chemist, made film, and the images it generated certainly differed from those made by people, in fact changed people's visual understanding. Also, there's the same amount of learning going on in film as there is in machine learning.

"The kind of art and the way in which they may make it, even though it began with a human programmer, may very well be far different from the capacity a human has to make art or the kind of art eventually made." Computers have been making art since the 80s. Novels, music, paintings, name it. It's just that they need human input and direction and lack plasticity. They need human input and direction because they are bereft of curiosity and intention and because an adequate sensory capacity is really, really hard, possibly AI-complete. They're rigid because they can't program themselves, or anyway not well. They may never be able to program themselves well. Not for metaphysical reasons but because of the astronomical lower bound on the resources that may be needed (assuming a Turing model of computation.) The lack of intention is really killer IMO. There is a strong sense in which the programmer is the artist here and the computer is serving the equally mindless function of film, except it's a digital system instead of an analogue one. I'm always more impressed with the engineers in these stories than the computer generated art. I mean lots of devices can potentially generate art. Any moving gadget if you tape a loaded brush to it.

I love computers. I love ML -- linear algebra and statistics, my God, how can anyone not love that? My objections to AI, if you can call them that (I believe in AI!), are really objections to the way some AI evangelists, historically, at least since Turing, have drawn a sharp distinction between the physical and intellectual. To make an artificial artist you first have to make an artificial life, is what I'm saying (because I love biology too. I love everything. I'm all about love.)

"Now, machine art is leading a probably otherwise rational guy to visions of dog poop being moved around the sidewalk." I'm not that creative. The point was to ridicule the idea that you can go from disembodied bytes to robots that think and act, i.e., artists. I think first of all we're going to have to solve the more basic problem of machines that can seek out the basic materials and energy they need to sustain themselves. Because if you can't even do that, then you're just a tool for things that can.

It's not the first AI euphoria, and it won't be the last, but DL so far has only incrementally improved already existing computer applications, including complex acts of "creation" of images, sound, and text. If you weren't alarmed or elated at the prospect of computer art 25 years ago, then you shouldn't be alarmed or elated for its prospects today. DL is mostly old algorithms for statistical analysis, modern processing power combined with large data sets, and hype. Lots and lots of hype.

Now if I wanted to do the same thing where I live I'd have to make all sorts arrangements because here is a nice Canadian city with laws against leaving dog poop on the sidewalk. I'd have to physically move turds from location A where they're allowed to location B where they are not allowed. But I can do that, and all sorts of other things to reduce the entropy of my surroundings in order to create impossible novel arrangements, because that's the fundamental, energetic definition of being alive. Machines, OTOH, are inert, and it's hard to be an artist if you're dead.

I met a guy in Europe once who spent his canada council grant for the arts painting pictures of dog turds. People didn't bag poop in this city and the sidewalks were minefields. Anyway -- they were the most exquisite paintings! I think these engineers who decided to mine google earth instead of sidewalks for pictures just completely missed a glorious opportunity. Oh, a landscape. How ... artistic.