Contramuffin@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think there’s a bit of a misconception about what exactly AI is. Despite what techbros try to make it seem, AI is not thinking in any way. It doesn’t make decisions because it does not exist. It is not an entity. It is an algorithm.
Specifically, it is a statistical algorithm. It is designed to associate an input to an output. When you do it to billions of input-output pairs, you can then use the power of statistics to interpolate and extrapolate, so that you can guess what the output might be, given a new input that you haven’t seen before. In other words, you can perfectly replicate any AI with a big enough sheet of paper and enough time and patience.
That is why AI outputs can’t be considered novel. Inherently, it is just a tool that processes data. As an analogy, you haven’t generated any new data by taking the average of 5 numbers in excel - you have merely processed the existing data
Even if a human learns from AI-generated art, their art is still art, because a human is not a deterministic algorithm.
inriconus@programming.dev 6 days ago
I think you’re mostly right about how AI works, but I think some of the conclusions go a bit further than what the mechanics alone really show.
Yes, AI is an algorithm and it’s statistical. It learns patterns and maps inputs to outputs. I don’t really disagree with that part. Where I start to disagree is the idea that this automatically means the output can’t be novel or meaningful. A human brain is also a physical system processing information according to rules. Saying AI is “just an algorithm” only really works as a dismissal if humans aren’t doing something similar, which I’m not convinced is true.
The Excel average comparison also feels a little off to me. Averaging collapses information. Generative models don’t really do that. They explore and recombine patterns across a large possibility space, which feels a lot closer to how people learn and create than how a spreadsheet works. It’s true you could replicate an AI with enough paper and time, but the same thing applies to any finite physical system, including a human brain. That feels more like computability than about creativity or authorship. Another point I do agree with is how AI is used matters a lot. If someone is mostly prompting and picking outputs, that’s closer to curation than creation. But that isn’t really unique to AI. We’ve had similar debates with photography, sampling, filters, and procedural art. Art has never just been about manual effort anyway, it’s more about intent and judgment.
So I think what we aren’t lining up on is less about what AI is, and (as some others have noted here) is more about where we draw the line for authorship and responsibility in how it’s actually used. I do appreciate your perspective on it, and it’s definitely a very grey philosophical to discuss.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 6 days ago
“explore and recombine” isn’t really the words I would use to describe generative AI. Remember that it is a deterministic algorithm, so it can’t really “explore.” I think it would be more accurate to say that it interpolates patterns from its training data.
As for comparison to humans, you bring up an interesting point, but one that I think is somewhat oversimplified. It is true that human brains are physical systems, but just because it is physical does not mean that it is deterministic. No computer is able to come even close to modeling a mouse brain, let alone a human brain.
And sure, you could make the argument that you could strip out all extraneous neurons from a human brain to make it deterministic. Remove all the unpredictable elements: memory neurons, mirror neurons, emotional neurons. In that case, sure - you’d probably get something similar to AI. But I think the vast majority of people would then agree that this clump of neurons is no longer a human.
A human uses their entire lived experience to weigh a response. A human pulls from their childhood experience of being scared of monsters in order to make horror. An AI does not do this. It creates horror by interpolating between existing horror art to estimate what horror could be. You are not seeing an AI’s fear - you are seeing other people’s fears, reflected and filtered through the algorithm.
More importantly, a human brain is plastic, meaning that it can learn and change. If a human is told that they are wrong, they will correct themselves next time. This is not what happens with an AI. The only way that an AI can “learn” is by adding on to its training data and then retraining the algorithm. It’s not really “learning,” it’s more accurate to say that you’re deleting the old model and creating a new one that holds more training data. If this were applied to humans, it would be as if you grew an entirely new brain every single time you learned something new. Sounds inefficient? That’s because it is. Why do you think AI is using up so much electricity and resources? Prompting and generating an AI doesn’t use up much resources; it’s actually the training and retraining that uses so much resources.
To summarize: AI is a tool. It’s a pretty smart tool, but it’s a tool. It has some properties that are analogous to human brains, but lacks some properties that make it truly similar. It is in techbros’ best interests to hype up the similarities and hide the dissimilarities, because hype drives up the stock prices. That’s not to say that AI is completely useless. Just as you have said in your comment, I think it can be used to help make art, in a similar way that cameras have been used to help make art.
But in the end, when you cede the decision-making to the AI (that is, when you rely on AI for too much of your workflow), my belief is that the product is no longer yours. How can you claim that a generated artpiece is yours if you didn’t choose to paint a little easter egg in the background? If you didn’t decide to use the color purple for this object? If you didn’t accidentally paint the lips slightly skewed? Even supposing that an AI is completely human-like, the art is still not yours, because at that point, you’re basically just commissioning an artist, and you definitely don’t own art that you’ve commissioned.
To be clear, this is my stance on other tools as well, not just AI