• Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

    i read pretty much anything that ted chiang decides he wants to publish to the world at large. he’s been particularly critical of AI over the past few years and i have a difficult time arguing with the ground that he’s staked out.

    this article is well worth the time to read. it’s full of solid, nuanced perspective on the topic of art and human engagement with art.

    the following captures a lot of why we’re so smitten with the current state of AI and the unwitting(?) genius associated with sticking a chat interface onto things.

    Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry

    what this does leave out is that there does seem to be considerable utility in AI as a mechanism for assisting learning. i’m in pretty strong agreement with chiang on the topic of art and AI. i’m interested in art specifically because a human expended the effort associated with the creative act and they made a collection of decisions to bring it to fruition. i don’t care about the output of a machine, even when it’s been coaxed to produce something novel by a human.

tags: #ai #tedchiang