28
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Can we get an ~ai?
To me, AI is kind of its own thing. It's too creative to fall under ~tech, but it's not quite ~creative either. It's something brand new, and can't be stuffed into any of the already established categories.
Why doesn't it fit in tech? Plenty technology is creative in nature, plus once you've developed a LLM, it's just derivative, not creative in nature. It just recombines existing phrases and pieces it has seen before.
I agree with this, AI is definitely tech. But it's a pretty huge area so a subgroup under tech might be a good idea.
I wrote this right after seeing an AI post under creative. And I think categorizing it there is just as right or wrong as tech. Prompt writing, for instance, mostly require softer skills like intuition and a good vocabulary. You're basically trying to make yourself understood. In my own head, I feel it makes most sense to see AI as its own beasts.
Feels analogous to digital art where the result probably belongs under creative but talking about the tools and how to use them belongs in tech.
I think its arguably more fitting in tech. But the distinction you're after is probably between using AI (~creative) vs news about AI (~tech). As the context changes dramatically in both instances I think.
Ignoring the discussion about AI being (arguably) a non-creative endeavour. I'd probably just go with an AI subtag on each.
I think it's probably better as a modifier than category. There are some articles about ai in general, but usually they are more focused on the application of AI to some area. In those cases, it makes more sense to have the post in the category that the AI is being applied to.
Basically, go down the list of categories, and add ai to it. Most of them makes sense. They wouldn't necessarily have a ton of content, but would an article about applying AI to analytics in baseball belong more in "tech.ai" or "sports.baseball"? I'd argue the latter. Something just talking about how AI works? Depends on the article's target audience. could be ~comp, ~tech, ~science...
So, ~creative with ai? Absolutely if the article is talking about how AI is being used for "Arts, crafts, and other DIY-ish things."
A tag would be better than a subgroup then, I think.
Maybe for you. For me it's mostly about the technology and new developments and discussions of AI's implications for our future.
It's how the recombination is done. In humans it's done through lived experiences. The music I listen to has a heavy impact on the things I create. Some people get inspiration through architecture or nature or literature. Every person has a different process that's unique to them and their lived experiences. AI has no lived experiences, and prompters can't make the vision in their head real through AI. Just roll the dice until something close enough falls out of the black box. Things like "Well that's what humans do, isn't it?" always fall flat for me because they're far too reductive. Neural networks just fundamentally don't operate like humans do.
Lived experience is a great way to put it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’ve basically come to the realization that so much of human creativity is a result of our struggle to thrive as minds within the confines of our only body. An AI can never know what love, pain, or boredom feels like but so much of creative meaning lies in the human experience.
Depends what you're doing. We're kind of past the point where lost people are just typing in a phrase and just rolling the dice. Anyone serious about ai art is using inpainting, control nets and other tools to exert way more control over the final picture.
It's no longer one big dice roll, yes, it can be a large number of tiny dice rolls. I did have at least inpainting in mind while I was writing and believe what I wrote still holds up against it.
I think tech.business would be a good idea. There are certain to be a lot of posts about it, and it would be easier to find tech posts that aren’t business.
There is a grey area because many business changes have effects on customers.
I think the jury on this is still out. If LLM display emergent phenomenon at certain sizes, that is non-trivial new behavior which can't be dismissed. As an analogy, if you were studying individual water molecules, it would be very difficult to observe emergent phenomenon like ice until the number of molecules reached a certain size.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/
That is an excellent analogy for the emergent properties of LLMs. I may have to borrow that.
I think there's plenty of content about AI in Tildes already
Discussion around AI has, imo, recently taken over the airspace in nearly every corner of the internet. I understand the passion and personal interests that drive the current frenzy, but I myself am starting to grow a bit weary of all the AI news, articles, and discussions. It would be nice to have the option for users to rope off this topic and unfollow, as with other topics. I think AI as a topic has already reached the size where this would now be useful.
You can always filter out the
artificial intelligencetag in your filter settings.Yes, this is a good reason to give it its own group. A similar thing happened during the pandemic.
People new to TIldes are overly focussed on group structure. Ignore the group, focus on tags.
Practically speaking, we just received a number of new groups after a thorough discussion of what people might want.
Theoretically, I can see higher priorities. All of science except for astronomy is in ~science for example. There is a megathread for ai that some people use.
Deimos requested input re groups here. https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/177q/lets_add_and_rearrange_some_groups_a_few_notes_about_other_short_term_plans
Deimos announced changes here. https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/17q7/group_updates_for_july_2023
Piggybacking off of this to add a reminder that Tildes isn't Reddit, and groups aren't subreddits.
It largely doesn't matter what group posts are in, so long as you make a best effort to fit it in to an existing group and tag it appropriately.
It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but you can simply ignore the tag for
artificial intelligence.You can debate all day how something wouldn't fit under a tag and deserves its own thing, while in the end it does fit under one tag and the debate will just end up being inconclusive.
AI is tech-related. It doesn't need to be "just tech, not related to any other existing tags". Otherwise we would need 100k new additional tags...
In this case it's clear you can put it somewhere other than misc. So no, I believe we don't need "~AI".
AI is tech but can be used for creative purposes.
A lot of posts can be put in either/or for categories, but since we do not have cross posting, tagging is the next best bet.
If you were to post about the way AI is made, that would go in tech. If you posted about art that AI created, that would go in Art or Creative.
I disagree. All generative AI we have currently just learns from and combines elements of previously existing works. That is the opposite of creativity.
They didn’t say AI is creative, they said it can be used for creative purposes which I think is an accurate way of phrasing it.
I understand what they said, but to me, this inherent quality of AI makes it impossible to do that.
That's largely irrelevant. Humans do this too and they call it inspiration. We just have more of it because we have other experiences too rather than the ones being fed to us being preprocessed. Though that happens too everytime an artist looks at someone else's work.
I would be careful when expressing how AI works in everyday speech and applying notions from everyday terms like inspiration to AI. Human creativity doesn't work that way, even when they're inspired by someone else's work. There's always some degree of cognitive interaction with patterns you might be aiming to replicate.
No I agree, I mentioned we call it inspiration when humans do it. I don't want to call what the AI does inspiration, but I wanted to create the analogy between the two where the comparison starts (and ends) with the idea that both humans and computer do use other works in some form or manner.
I don't think the computer does a lot different when it draws from other works. I think it's just as unfair to say it's straight up copying from people when at most it's using it as a reference.
I also think the creative part is the prompt the human enters into the system. What gets drawn is still creative because the human envisioned something (or has inspiration!) and wants to get it drawn. It's the mental skill of art and not the physical skill (which I personally also lack).
I remember reading a court case where it was argued that the programs are essentially creating "collages" of their dataset, and I think that idea or something similar is fitting. It's not straight up copying the thing itself, but I'd say what it's doing philosophically is closer to a funky image filter that like inverts the colors, flips it upside down, and puts it next to another image than a truly independent work.
As for there being creativity through selecting a prompt, there's definitely some creativity involved but there's more of a gap in the mental skill of art between the average person and an experienced artist than you'd expect. If you've done coding, you've probably had the experience of having a seemingly vivid idea of a program that you struggled to actually create because working out the logic of the program was more difficult than you were anticipating. The logic of the program is a fundamental part of the idea of the program itself and goes beyond merely knowing how to code. Likewise, there are so many minute details that go into completely fleshing out an idea for an art piece from a vision for an art piece, even if it seemed very vivid, to say that prompt selection is itself a substantially creative process.
It’s randomly choosing words. Randomness is often a useful creative tool that gets you out of a rut. There’s no limit in principle to what it could write that way. It’s true that in practice, monkeys banging on typewriters don’t write Shakespeare, but I notice that GPT-4 is writing sonnets.
In practice, creativity requires both idea generation and critical evaluation. Humans are usually doing the evaluation, so the creativity comes from a collaborative effort. For the idea generation part, on many questions, GPT-4 is already better at suggesting things to try than most people.
AI itself is not creative but it can definitely be used for creative purposes.
AI isn't creative itself, but it can be used for creative purposes. As a writer, I've recently used AI to help quickly find facts and get ideas. Not prompts, but asking questions for lists of potential elements to use. For example: "Are there any mythological creatures that can cause harm by being seen?" It's a question that search engines absolutely don't help with, they always bring up creatures that cause harm through vision. There's no list that fits my question, and trust me, I've looked hard. I even went to the Superpower Wiki and TV Tropes to try to find some.
At this point, search engines are just really bad for looking up questions like that. They bring up articles that are barely related, focus on the wrong words in the search, or only provide lists with the absolute most obvious answers. AI can give me lists that I can then research to determine if it fits, or at least help me narrow down what to research.
I disagree. Aside from the whole, “great artists copy”, bit, raising and being around kids also lends itself to the idea that early stage humans require a great deal of seeding, equivalent to training an AI.
And kids THESE DAYS, omg. They literally do not know what to do until instructed. So even if the underlying mechanisms are different, I would wholeheartedly agree with the idea that both AI and humans are derivative, at least to a certain stage of human maturity.
In fact, AI has an edge because it’s capable to generate “nonsensical” things, and it’s literally humans that tell it what is nonsensical and what is not. To some degree, that’s why AI will always be viewed as derivative, because we judge it against our standards. If we let AI even today venture beyond our own biases of what makes senses and what does not (which can be a definition of creativity), it might be “creative”, we just don’t like it and prune that. Like a child scolded by a parent because it’s drawing a bird with three wings.
I do believe that when AI can self-generate and iterate on the training itself, then we’ll be in for a wild ride. We’re still in early days, but AI has definitely caught up.
Now, if we say creativity is defined as having some kind of emotive element, then perhaps? But even then, what is creative music to one person is cacaphonic rubbish to another. So creativity is in the eye of the beholder.
I can think of making an computer science, mathematics, or statistics group before we need an AI group.
There's ~comp.
Honestly, I'm just tired of seeing it and wish we were more honest about what "Ai" actually was. It's mostly the branding of something that isn't actually intelligent that makes me hate the way we talk about it, thus seeing it in nearly every tech discussion is exhausting.
Like I have no problem talking LLM or LRM because at least then, I know the discussion is going to be how the resources within these models are rearranged and compiled in order to form an output around parameters, rather than get into the speculative "It's thinking, and creating, and is going to replace us all!" discussions I often see around "Ai". Like the fear of being replaced is real, but not because these systems are actually capable of thinking.