The Notion of A.I. Creating Images Wholecloth
So, I forgot to write an entry yesterday, but no one cares anyway.
I already described my intention to write these as long form twitter entries, so that’s what I’ll continue to do.
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Everyone has their own super special, unique opinions about AI these days. Some people are talking about how scary it is even though they themselves contribute to it (Elon Musk) and others have a more lighthearted approach. One thing I see a lot of, especially on platforms like TikTok, is people delighting in the whimsical weirdness of AI creations, where you feed an AI program certain parameters and see what the AI creates. People will then describe them partly facetiously as being monstrous, or nightmare fuel, or what-have-you.
My problem with this is not the AI creations; I think what’s going on is really cool, notwithstanding the murder of jobs. There is no harm in asking AI to create the newest Nirvana hit, or asking it to create a photo of Jesus working at the steel mill, or a salt shaker going through a midlife crisis, or whatever. The problem I have with people’s reactions is that they are reacting as if the AI is some independent digital intelligence, separate from its human programmers. If you feed parameters to an AI and it creates something delightful, or delightfully perverse, it’s because humans created that AI. The AI is not a magical independent entity that somehow takes a TI-84 and jacks its intelligence up to the level that it can somehow understand commands and produce interesting artistic or musical works, it’s a special computer program that is made with that in mind. If it comes up with something that we find amusing, even if the programmers have no idea what it is that people will request, it’s because it was created in that context.
Again, I’m not opposed to this, and I’m not opposed to technology (as much as it completely derailed my own dreams), I just get personally irritated with people’s reactions as if AI is an independent entity, that created something strange in spite of itself, as opposed to being programmed in that context. Maybe in the future we’ll have a better idea of which AIs are more organic with their approach to AI creations, as opposed to being more directed.
And I know there’s a more technical way to describe all of this, but I think you all know what I’m describing. AI is cool, but it’s not like feeding numbers into the universe — it’s a human-made algorithm — just a very complicated one. Enjoy the ride into oblivion.
