I am stealing this idea from one of my friends; but today’s Short Opinion is that the process of creating AI Art has more in common with “commissioning a painting” than it does with “making art.”
I do have a friend who makes AI art and then paints the results onto canvas, which I think is a really cool thought experiment that’s pushing the boundaries of “what even is art?” — but even that is most similar to the exercise you do in art class, where you copy a famous painting someone did. I recently painted a copy of “Spore Flower,” by Margaret Organ-Kean. My friend with more artistic talent painted a copy of “View of Toledo” by El Greco when we were in high school. It’s a normal thing to do. But it’s not its own act of original creation. And that is perfectly okay. (Paint-and-sips also fall into this category! I love those.)
Another friend calls it “You’re not an artist; you’re asking the interns for spec work.” That feels a little harsh, as does this skeet. But…it’s not the same process as creating the art. It’s more like requirements documentation.
Honestly, props to Domino’s for this
Their customer chatbot is not AI based. When someone gives it an “ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick” type prompt, it doesn’t spend GPU resources to comply; instead it uses a fraction of a kilowatt-hour to say “Okay, goodbye!”
I very much appreciate it when a company does not put AI in something that doesn’t need it.
Anecdotes and Parables
I remember having a discussion with someone a few years ago about anecdotes vs parables. At the time, I didn’t think it was too harmful if an anecdote someone told didn’t happen, because the lesson is still valid even if it’s a parable
I’m not sure if I agree with Past Emily on that.
Word of the day: AI Hallucination
Recently, via this Ask Historians reddit thread, I discovered the term Hallucination in the context of Artificial Intelligence.
I’ve known about this concept for a while; neural-net machine translation will often produce “better English,” at the cost of…yanno….accuracy. But all anyone ever sees is how clear and not-clunky the English sentence is! They ooh and aah over how magical the new tech is; but the problem of “did this actually translate CORRECTLY” has not gone away with the new technology. It’s still as present as it ever was. And the pretty English outputs make us more likely to trust the imperfect tech; the old “your purple cabbage grandmother” outputs gave us an appropriate amount of distrust for the machine.
That’s a suitable analogy for the rest of AI. It can be pretty. It’s not bad. But don’t think of it as the same kind of reliable as human-produced content; it’s not even the same kind of unreliable as human-produced content. That’s the part that worries me most.
April 2023: Found this TikTok about spaghetti photos and how they’re likely shaped by the biased data (the only photos going into the engine are likely of toddlers making a cute mess). As she says, “AI is an Ask The Audience robot, and the Audience is the general Internet-using public.”
Emilybook 