Saturday 25 February 2023

When AI is as good as crap-Art

I noticed an item by Vox Day - about how a (supposedly) science fiction story magazine had stopped accepting submissions of work because overwhelmed by 'AI' (i.e. pseudo-AI that plagiarizes human creativity) simulations.

Plus I have seen scores of other recent tales and depictions of 'AI' simulations of visual art, music, academic papers... 

Clearly "They" have now added 'AI' to 'Smart' devices and the 'internet of things' as one of their core (hence Litmus Test) strategies. 


Some people have concluded that this implies 'AI' is now as good as real, human Art and will therefore (sooner or later, and rightly) replace The Arts

(Neglecting that this procedure is, even by its own account, merely a recombinatorial form of recyling.) 

I agree! This AI will indeed replace The Arts...  in the modified sense that what is nowadays accepted as professional and high status Art and fiction (and academic 'scholarship') is crap; and pseudo-AI can easily generate vast quantities of crap: on demand


If the masses continue to be happy with the crap that is consumed as current fiction, pop music, TV and movies; if the intellectual classes continue to be happy with crap literature, sculpture, architecture, scholarship and teaching; if those in authority continue to justify policies with crap science, crap ideology, and the statements of crap-artists; and if crap design and crap construction of stuff is praised, subsidized and given awards... 

Well, then so-called AI can indeed replace nearly-all of purposive human activity in a crap world. 


But even if 'AI' cannot match the crappy non-quality of The Western pseudo-civilization in 2023; it can and will still replace nearly-everything - because AI will be forced upon the masses by the Evil-motivated Establishment whenever this is expedient.

And the Western masses have shown, again-and-again for decades, that they will accept and rationalize any amount of crap fed to them; will hardly notice, and near-instantly forget how things used-to-be. 
 

10 comments:

william arthurs said...

Vox Day had another article suggesting that a poor-quality screenplay could have been written by an AI. Once the AI engine has been built, it must be faster and cheaper than doing the work of recombinatorial recycling by hand.

BUT, asking for a friend, how does this work for the creation of the documents that underlie the sinister new mechanisms of technological control that the bleak world of the future is supposed to rely on? I mean, the creative blend of science and craftsmanship in operational system specifications. In my experience, as a former system designer, these always have some formulaic elements but can never simply be rehashed from what has gone before. Is it just me, by the way, or is there more poorly-designed software around than ever before?

Having met kids whose essays (school and undergraduate) have been created by rehashing wikipedia or some other encyclopaedia, and who are then terrified in their 20s at the prospect for the first time in their lives, of having to write up, in an organised manner, some ideas that they themselves have thought through, I wonder what the equivalent would be for the career of a young programmer.

ben said...

But it can do your homework better than you! So it must be generally mentally superior to humanity.

Bruce Charlton said...

@wa and b - There has been a top-down policy of allowing copying, plagiarism, and other forms of cheating in evaluations here in the UK - by changing (almost completely) from strict formal exams to evaluation methods that are impossible to police.

This is synergistic with affirmative action rules causing the abandonment of the aim to recognize/ reward/ appoint promote those who are functionally the best people.

All of which means that systemically-plagiarized AI-crap looks as good, or better than, what is regarded as normal and acceptable performance.

It's part of our inverted world where people are Not Even Trying to do what they are supposed to be doing, and then generating an official-media virtual reality to pretend everything is as it is supposed to be, and to reward those individuals and groups that the system decides 'deserve' it!

Mysterious searcher said...

Maybe an algorithmic intelligence trained on world history will be better than politicians, since it will choose the most optimal solutions without being driven by subjective things, such as desires, ideology, and the like

Bruce Charlton said...

@Ms - Except that evil intent is engineered-into the latest AI.

william arthurs said...

Dr Charlton, I'm told that, if you are on the inside of a university department, every student will want to be your pal, because, after they have plagiarised their coursework from Wikipedia, and used Roget's Thesaurus (or some electronic equivalent) to substitute (supposed) synonyms for key words and phrases, they can ask you to give their paper a trial run through TurnItIn, to check that the plagiarism score is within acceptable bounds, before they upload it into Moodle.

The idea that a tutor would be familiar with your handwriting and your writing style, and say for example "William, your essay this week lacked both its usual sparkle and legibility" -- tell them this and they will assume you are talking about Plato's Academy or some other educational venue from the distant past!

No Longer Reading said...

I'm not sure that AI actually is more efficient. It was pointed out that in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, that the computer consumed vast amounts of electricity. On the other hand, the energy required for Kasparov to play chess is the calories in a sandwich.

Likewise, I have read that this AI technology consumes huge amounts of energy. Not to mention all the human beings supporting it. Is it *really* more efficient? I don't actually think so. It's no more efficent than humans than electric cars (run on batteries that require fossil fuels to make) are more efficient than ordinary cars.

It's just that those who control large resources have chosen to use them for these purposes rather than others. And to some extent, they are so Ahrimanized that they can't even think of anything else.

Bruce Charlton said...

@NLR - I think you are correct that the supposed 'economic' reasons for Ai are false, as usual for the current type of evil. It is therefore interesting to speculate on the deeper spiritual reasons for AI.

Part of this - as Jeremy Naydler has says - is the large project to dehumanize, by entraining Men to think like machines, hence non-spiritually, hence on the side of evil.

Another is to corrupt Men - at present this seems to be with a mixture of the iversional and incoherent woke-propaganda built-into the AI; plus the inhuman quality added by the computer - and then to 'smuggle' it into general discourse, so that it becomes normalized and assimilated (again) into Men's habitual thinking.

Modern Men are already habituated to unnoticed-toleration of gross incoherence in their beliefs and actions; this kind of pseudo-AI will, in bulk, push this even further.

Dexter said...

The quality of human-generated fiction (books and movies) from 1990 to 2023 has been so poor that I'm skeptical that a flood of AI-generated fiction can make things worse. The basic motivation of much of this "art" has been evil - to make some sort of Leftist political point - and on top of that it is poorly executed.

I find myself increasingly only re-reading fiction from before 1990 - and sadly, many of my favorite authors are dead and are no longer producing new work.

Jacob Gittes said...

I tend to think of AI as a misnomer for what it really is: an elaborate trick. Just like the automata of the Enlightenment (Vaucason's Duck or something like that?), this technojunk simulates and parodies human consciousness, but it has no soul. No core reason for being, no capability to love or be loved. It doesn't really impress me, but it disappoints me that people believe it's real. It's almost like everyone is pretending that these algorithms that produce dull yet complex outputs that simulate human thought are interesting. They aren't. But they may well replace lots of jobs that don't require true creativity.