Slashdot Mirror
A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can't Be an Artist (technologyreview.com)
Sean Dorrance Kelly, a philosophy professor at Harvard, writes for MIT Technology Review: Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to. This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.
[...] My argument is not that the creator's responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine's composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple. Claims like Kurzweil's that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms -- a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.
[...] My argument is not that the creator's responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine's composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple. Claims like Kurzweil's that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms -- a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.
Put works by both humans and AI in a museum, see if anyone can pick out which is which.
Turns out not only can an AI be an artists, but many humans claiming to be artists are not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sounds like a disciple of John Searle. I once walked him into the wrong parking lot while continuing debate from a talk he had given. Or maybe he was just apt to go in the wrong direction...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright.
ok, but what about the monkey that repeatedly cranks out great plays? when does it stop being an accident?
We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.
who's to say that we all aren't just performing arbitrary acts of algorithmic formalism, based on our past experiences and chemical reactions in our brains? this fundamentally boils down to free will and thinking we have some magical divine spark inside us, instead of us just being unimaginably complex meat computers. the jury's still out on that one.
So if we apply an artistic Turing test and it would be impossible to tell whether something came from a human mind, a random event or a computer's action.
So on that basis, computers - like nature - are capable of producing art.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you. You are just a machine; an imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny: [with genuine interest] Can you?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Why people with philosophy degrees are unemployable.
Except this guy teaches at Harvard and, according to his faculty page, has:
Which is more education than I, and probably you, have.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
AI can absolutely create decorative items that may be pleasing to the eye, like many an unskilled artisan who has learned to replicate a decorative form (or Romero Britto, FTM) , but it is not art. Art is a response from the artist, often provocative, that channels their consciousness into their creation.
-a.e.mossberg
Someone is wrong on the Internet.
I suspect that Prof. Kelly is not familiar with his colleague Prof. Livingstone and her work studying the neuroscientific basis for art. It would not be so surprising, given their disparate departments and that Prof. Livingstone is across the river in Boston, somewhat removed from main campus.
The crux of artistic creation is, as I hope philosophers will slowly understand, that each new wave of modality of expression, each new genre, tickles a specific pathway in the brain. Given time, both to study the art and to study the neuroscience of visual perception, the greatness of many of the great works of art can be reduced to a simple explanation. That does not reduce their impact on us, nor should it. But it does reveal the fundamental requirement of human perception to denote a particular work as great.
The Mona Lisa is perhaps Prof. Livingstone's best result: the reason we find the image of a partially smiling woman compelling is that there are two images in conflict: one at low spatial frequencies (larger features) that is smiling, and one at high spatial frequencies (smaller features) that is not. Somehow, Da Vinci was able to exploit these two separate perceptual channels. Because we sense that the figure is smiling, we find it appealing, but we cannot see the smile, so we find it enigmatic and compelling.
Another telling result: much of impressionism is compelling because the colors are what are known as equiluminant: in black-and-white, they would appear to be uniformly gray, this the luminance channel in our visual system is silent, and in conflict with the color channel.
The very fact that we find black-and-white photographs compelling is even understood by showing that the color channel has been suppressed, something that does not normally happen.
Art, at least visual art, is all about masterful manipulation of different perceptual channels that have direct physiological embodiments in our brains.
And, and AI can most certainly be trained to do that. The results eventually will be undoubtedly just as compelling (given good models on which to train the AI) as that done by human hand.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Most of human creativity is just a rehash of prior stuff. Go read the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and you will see how our humor really hasn't changed over the past 1000 years and I suspect it's much like the 1000 years before that too.
Sometimes just mixing things around in a different order can give that same stuff new life and still be entertaining. Just think how much great content we wouldn't have if we didn't do this.
So feel free to proclaim all modern works of art as crap but that's always how it has been. There was never a golden age where crap didn't exist. Instead the crap just faded away while only the cream of the crop is what we remember now.
The "my brain is magic argument" isn't new. Nothing but a human can ever do/be X because the human brain is unquantifiably special.
The argument could be correct. It's basically the same as the one used by the church for a couple thousand years, when they talk about souls.