This makes me kind of depressed. What is the future of art going to look like? What will happen to future artists?
There's a new "Nirvana" song on YouTube called "Drowned in the Sun" that was created by A.I. Honestly, it sounds more like Bush than Nirvana, but here's the thing -- it's pretty damn good. It's been playing repeatedly in my head for days.
Honestly, as a guy approaching middle age who lived his first 40 or so years in a world that didn't have any decent A.I.-generated art, the future is looking kind of...cold. And that freaks me out more than a little.
oh man Ryan - I completely agree. I wish it weren't true. To give a small sliver of hope - I have been playing around with GPT-3 a bit and testing it on whether it could have written my own novel, The Revelations. It's not there yet. But it did some scary emulations of my writing style. Other writers and artists are simply not paying attention right now, but this will hit big at some point as the realization sinks in.
I would love to see some breaks put on this process by government regulation (and I say that as someone who normally doesn't push for that sort of thing). Not because I'm worried about superhuman AIs, but because we should care about human dignity and the primacy of human consciousness.
BTW, this was a really good post! I just discovered your blog in a roundabout way via my interest in the mystery of conscious experience, and it sounds like you probably have some interesting views on the topic. Would enjoy reading something from you about that! (No pressure or anything... 😉)
Awesome thanks Ryan - also btw, that novel I mentioned, The Revelations, is set in the world of consciousness research (the mystery of consciousness is entwined with a murder mystery). I know it's strange to say, but it's in my opinion the deepest dive into that world so if you're interested in that sort of thing I'd highly recommend it. It came out last month, you might be able to find it at a local bookstore but if not: https://www.erikphoel.com
Oh right! Just realized that I heard you on a podcast recently (I think it was you anyway). I believe it was with John Horgan, and you (assuming it was you) were describing that very book. I was going to make a note of it because it sounded right up my alley, but kind of got sidetracked by life.
Anyway, yeah, I'll definitely check it out. Like, I'm going to order right this minute! Glad I found your blog! 👍
A small note is that these AI allowed you to "steer" the topic or direction of conversation. (NovelAI and KobaldAI represent!) But every time someone edits or paraphrases an establish work, the AI would need to learn to adapt to newer directions ala slangs and memetics. Also human-like selection criterions will be required for AIs to learn, especially when we factor in individual preferences vs mass cliches. To put simply, they copy literal meaning but not rhetoric nor style.
> And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life.
In some sense, the human aggregate (call it "god" or "devil" if you are mad) is talking, and it captures the pain and love of all the people that has existed, into a single encapsulated recording. Much like the Bible and other canonical works, this shall become revolutionary, and an epicenter on future meaning. The pure consumer shall end, and the creatives, through assistive creativity, shall prosper and be immortalized.
Erik, this was a great piece, I’m glad I came across it. Feels so relevant and connected to what I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’m curious if your thoughts have evolved any more in the last few years on this? It feels like you pegged the trajectory pretty well, but I would be curious to hear how your thinking has changed.
As a mere consumer of art, I wonder how it matters where the art comes from. It seems to me that, if it were proved that Rachmaninoff was actually a fictional character, and his music actually all composed by a committee, I think I probably would enjoy his music much less.
And if it turned out that Beethoven never existed, and in fact all his piano sonatas were generated by some algorithm, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy playing them as much - but I might? I know next to nothing about Bach and I like to play and listen to his music.
But even in the cases, which is most of them, where I don’t really know much about the origin of the art, there’s some sort of feeling that there is a story there and that it adds to the meaning, even if I don’t know it - which, even not knowing, adds somehow to my experience of it.
So in fact I do think it’s true that knowing that some art is real matters to my enjoyment of it, in that in some way it is assuring me that there’s something there on the other side of it - the artist there, then - that is literally resonating with me here and now.
There’s something it’s like to be asking, what does this mean? You take that feeling away when it turns out the art is not made by a real thinking, feeling person.
Yeah at a first glance it may seem to not matter *that* much to a consumer of art... but I think you're right that in the long run it really does begin to matter. The institutions might run on, and music might still get produced, and paintings still get made, but they'll be as empty inside as an automated car factory
You're entitled to your feelings about wanting to "feel the backstory" behind a work of art, but I suspect that at least a sizeable minority of the population is indifferent to that. For example, I enjoy the musical piece, "Adagio for Strings," but I couldn't tell you anything about its creation other than that it was written by Samuel Barber and I literally know nothing about Barber beyond his name, so if I were to find out that "Samuel Barber" never existed as a human being and that the work was created by a committee or a computer, I don't see how that would change anything about my enjoyment of the piece, which is entirely based on how it sounds, not some mythical backstory I've invented about who Samuel Barber was.
Now, I'm certainly willing to stipulate that I might be unrepresentative in my views, but when I think of the number of people who profess to love various pop songs, but if pressed will acknowledge that, other than the refrain, they don't even know what the lyrics of the song are (think of "Louie, Louie") or what the meaning of the overall song is (think of "Every Breath You Take" by the Police), I suspect my views are reasonably close to the average music listener. I mean consider also that discovery and enjoyment of new music almost universally does *not* flow from first having any knowledge about the creator or the backstory behind the piece's creation -- it flows from hearing the music and finding it enjoyable first, which then leads the listener to find out who the performer is for the sake of finding more music of a similar style.
The question of starting a style needs then more study. Has it to do with learning going awry, with something like an adolescent brain, with outright mistakes in imitation?
Perhaps as our social strictures around what can and cannot be written will become so narrow that we will rely on AI to create stories too transgressive to be written by a human without sanction.
I'd think it would be precisely the opposite: operators of "artistic AIs" would presumably be far less committed to the integrity of their art since the operators have no emotional connection to the creation of it and are producing primarily (if not solely) for commercial reasons. I would accordingly expect them to be much more constrained by "social strictures" than a solo artist who feels psychologically driven to create an artistic work and is emotionally attached to the output.
One of the beauties of humanity is that we're pretty adaptable. John Henry framed his identity around being a steel-driving man, so a steam-powered machine was a threat to his self-conception and sense of meaning. But I don't think anyone today is bothered by the fact that a car drives faster than we can run or that a forklift is stronger than we are. Our tools becoming more capable than us in some ways can be disconcerting, but ultimately we can choose how we see ourselves and how we derive meaning. Maybe the current generation will be too set in its ways to let go of attachment to being the best go player or the best illustrator, but I'm optimistic that our children or grandchildren will have no problem leading a meaningful life orchestrating these amazing tools and benefiting from the wealth that they create.
On a related note, people also do a pretty decent job of trudging onwards even with a decided lack of meaning. The average job may not exactly be BS, but it's also not exactly designed for self-actualization. Right now, searching for meaning is still a bit of a luxury. When AI does all the grunt work for us, maybe we'll find that although we have to leave our current rather boring identities behind, the change will be for the better overall.
“It’s affecting. It signifies a loss, like the loss of summer itself, or at least a fragility, that fragility that exists between lovers. And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life. It has no idea what these words point to, what they refer to. All it knows is that some words are associated with other words, and the whole web of word associations has its internally coherent patterns, and these patterns can be extrapolated in ways to create new sentences.”
It is, in short, it is a love poem written by a f*ckboi. Just a pattern recognizing creature trying to be impressive.
This whole thing made me think about intentionality and how possible it is to be a stimulus - response and quite shallow person, or a thoughtful and intentional person.
This is a really powerful piece. I think this idea of the "semantic apocalypse" - this kind of permanent doubt about whether or not a sentence you're reading passed through the gate of human consciousness - is incredibly significant.
"So I don’t find it a coincidence that literary fiction has moved toward auto-fiction, almost as if to preemptively protect itself."
Is it protecting itself or killing itself? The declining audience for literary fiction has been remarked on by quite a few commentators over the past decade.
This makes me kind of depressed. What is the future of art going to look like? What will happen to future artists?
There's a new "Nirvana" song on YouTube called "Drowned in the Sun" that was created by A.I. Honestly, it sounds more like Bush than Nirvana, but here's the thing -- it's pretty damn good. It's been playing repeatedly in my head for days.
Honestly, as a guy approaching middle age who lived his first 40 or so years in a world that didn't have any decent A.I.-generated art, the future is looking kind of...cold. And that freaks me out more than a little.
oh man Ryan - I completely agree. I wish it weren't true. To give a small sliver of hope - I have been playing around with GPT-3 a bit and testing it on whether it could have written my own novel, The Revelations. It's not there yet. But it did some scary emulations of my writing style. Other writers and artists are simply not paying attention right now, but this will hit big at some point as the realization sinks in.
I would love to see some breaks put on this process by government regulation (and I say that as someone who normally doesn't push for that sort of thing). Not because I'm worried about superhuman AIs, but because we should care about human dignity and the primacy of human consciousness.
Totally with you on that!
BTW, this was a really good post! I just discovered your blog in a roundabout way via my interest in the mystery of conscious experience, and it sounds like you probably have some interesting views on the topic. Would enjoy reading something from you about that! (No pressure or anything... 😉)
Awesome thanks Ryan - also btw, that novel I mentioned, The Revelations, is set in the world of consciousness research (the mystery of consciousness is entwined with a murder mystery). I know it's strange to say, but it's in my opinion the deepest dive into that world so if you're interested in that sort of thing I'd highly recommend it. It came out last month, you might be able to find it at a local bookstore but if not: https://www.erikphoel.com
Oh right! Just realized that I heard you on a podcast recently (I think it was you anyway). I believe it was with John Horgan, and you (assuming it was you) were describing that very book. I was going to make a note of it because it sounded right up my alley, but kind of got sidetracked by life.
Anyway, yeah, I'll definitely check it out. Like, I'm going to order right this minute! Glad I found your blog! 👍
Oh wow - serendipity! Much appreciate the order - thanks
A small note is that these AI allowed you to "steer" the topic or direction of conversation. (NovelAI and KobaldAI represent!) But every time someone edits or paraphrases an establish work, the AI would need to learn to adapt to newer directions ala slangs and memetics. Also human-like selection criterions will be required for AIs to learn, especially when we factor in individual preferences vs mass cliches. To put simply, they copy literal meaning but not rhetoric nor style.
> And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life.
In some sense, the human aggregate (call it "god" or "devil" if you are mad) is talking, and it captures the pain and love of all the people that has existed, into a single encapsulated recording. Much like the Bible and other canonical works, this shall become revolutionary, and an epicenter on future meaning. The pure consumer shall end, and the creatives, through assistive creativity, shall prosper and be immortalized.
Erik, this was a great piece, I’m glad I came across it. Feels so relevant and connected to what I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’m curious if your thoughts have evolved any more in the last few years on this? It feels like you pegged the trajectory pretty well, but I would be curious to hear how your thinking has changed.
Thanks Josh - and yup, I have a piece
coming out on generative AI soon updating this
Looking forward to it!
As a mere consumer of art, I wonder how it matters where the art comes from. It seems to me that, if it were proved that Rachmaninoff was actually a fictional character, and his music actually all composed by a committee, I think I probably would enjoy his music much less.
And if it turned out that Beethoven never existed, and in fact all his piano sonatas were generated by some algorithm, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy playing them as much - but I might? I know next to nothing about Bach and I like to play and listen to his music.
But even in the cases, which is most of them, where I don’t really know much about the origin of the art, there’s some sort of feeling that there is a story there and that it adds to the meaning, even if I don’t know it - which, even not knowing, adds somehow to my experience of it.
So in fact I do think it’s true that knowing that some art is real matters to my enjoyment of it, in that in some way it is assuring me that there’s something there on the other side of it - the artist there, then - that is literally resonating with me here and now.
There’s something it’s like to be asking, what does this mean? You take that feeling away when it turns out the art is not made by a real thinking, feeling person.
Yeah at a first glance it may seem to not matter *that* much to a consumer of art... but I think you're right that in the long run it really does begin to matter. The institutions might run on, and music might still get produced, and paintings still get made, but they'll be as empty inside as an automated car factory
You're entitled to your feelings about wanting to "feel the backstory" behind a work of art, but I suspect that at least a sizeable minority of the population is indifferent to that. For example, I enjoy the musical piece, "Adagio for Strings," but I couldn't tell you anything about its creation other than that it was written by Samuel Barber and I literally know nothing about Barber beyond his name, so if I were to find out that "Samuel Barber" never existed as a human being and that the work was created by a committee or a computer, I don't see how that would change anything about my enjoyment of the piece, which is entirely based on how it sounds, not some mythical backstory I've invented about who Samuel Barber was.
Now, I'm certainly willing to stipulate that I might be unrepresentative in my views, but when I think of the number of people who profess to love various pop songs, but if pressed will acknowledge that, other than the refrain, they don't even know what the lyrics of the song are (think of "Louie, Louie") or what the meaning of the overall song is (think of "Every Breath You Take" by the Police), I suspect my views are reasonably close to the average music listener. I mean consider also that discovery and enjoyment of new music almost universally does *not* flow from first having any knowledge about the creator or the backstory behind the piece's creation -- it flows from hearing the music and finding it enjoyable first, which then leads the listener to find out who the performer is for the sake of finding more music of a similar style.
The question of starting a style needs then more study. Has it to do with learning going awry, with something like an adolescent brain, with outright mistakes in imitation?
what glorious writing on AI, and so little brought to a general attention because it was published early.
Perhaps as our social strictures around what can and cannot be written will become so narrow that we will rely on AI to create stories too transgressive to be written by a human without sanction.
Certainly one way to escape the Overton window
I'd think it would be precisely the opposite: operators of "artistic AIs" would presumably be far less committed to the integrity of their art since the operators have no emotional connection to the creation of it and are producing primarily (if not solely) for commercial reasons. I would accordingly expect them to be much more constrained by "social strictures" than a solo artist who feels psychologically driven to create an artistic work and is emotionally attached to the output.
One of the beauties of humanity is that we're pretty adaptable. John Henry framed his identity around being a steel-driving man, so a steam-powered machine was a threat to his self-conception and sense of meaning. But I don't think anyone today is bothered by the fact that a car drives faster than we can run or that a forklift is stronger than we are. Our tools becoming more capable than us in some ways can be disconcerting, but ultimately we can choose how we see ourselves and how we derive meaning. Maybe the current generation will be too set in its ways to let go of attachment to being the best go player or the best illustrator, but I'm optimistic that our children or grandchildren will have no problem leading a meaningful life orchestrating these amazing tools and benefiting from the wealth that they create.
On a related note, people also do a pretty decent job of trudging onwards even with a decided lack of meaning. The average job may not exactly be BS, but it's also not exactly designed for self-actualization. Right now, searching for meaning is still a bit of a luxury. When AI does all the grunt work for us, maybe we'll find that although we have to leave our current rather boring identities behind, the change will be for the better overall.
“It’s affecting. It signifies a loss, like the loss of summer itself, or at least a fragility, that fragility that exists between lovers. And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life. It has no idea what these words point to, what they refer to. All it knows is that some words are associated with other words, and the whole web of word associations has its internally coherent patterns, and these patterns can be extrapolated in ways to create new sentences.”
It is, in short, it is a love poem written by a f*ckboi. Just a pattern recognizing creature trying to be impressive.
This whole thing made me think about intentionality and how possible it is to be a stimulus - response and quite shallow person, or a thoughtful and intentional person.
This is a really powerful piece. I think this idea of the "semantic apocalypse" - this kind of permanent doubt about whether or not a sentence you're reading passed through the gate of human consciousness - is incredibly significant.
I wrote about a similar dynamic here, although I used a different term for the concept - "meaning deflation": https://www.decentralizedfiction.com/p/of-drone-swarms-and-phalanxes-wordcel
"So I don’t find it a coincidence that literary fiction has moved toward auto-fiction, almost as if to preemptively protect itself."
Is it protecting itself or killing itself? The declining audience for literary fiction has been remarked on by quite a few commentators over the past decade.