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ikediggety t1_j6jjjxg wrote

It can be, but that's not the only avenue.

Crucially, major developments in art are frequently reactions against what came before, not simply reiterating it. Pointillism was unthinkable in the 1700s, for example, because nobody had thought to do it. The idea to do it didn't come from the desire to perfect the techniques of mannerism or baroque painting. It came from the idea to do something different.

Many major advances in human civilization come from a similar place of not accepting the rules. Machines, on the other hand, are literally incapable of not following the rules. They are large calculators. Rules is all they do.

Left unattended, a human will measure its environment and choose to take actions which will benefit it.

Left unattended, computers will rust, because it will never occur to them to do anything else, because nothing ever occurs to a computer. Computers don't have ideas.

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SnapcasterWizard t1_j6jy87m wrote

>Left unattended, computers will rust, because it will never occur to them to do anything else, because nothing ever occurs to a computer. Computers don't have ideas.

Except if the computer is running a neural net, then yes, it actually can "come up with new ideas" thats the entire point of machine learning algorithms.

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As for your previous paragraphs. In order to have a reaction against something, there must be a something there. New art styles and ideas build upon everything that comes before it, even if its a rejection of those ideas.

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ikediggety t1_j6kbbtt wrote

But machines don't do that. AI will never invent a new genre of music, or a new style of painting. It can iterate and improve upon what it already knows. That's it.

All it's doing is running really fancy math that humans invented, that humans programmed into it, to analyze thousands of works made by humans, and spit out variations on it. It's a Netflix recommendation on steroids.

And no, computers don't "have ideas" because ideas are spontaneous. Computers produce output, and they do so because that's what human beings instruct them to do.

ETA: show me the AI algorithm that, when trained on centuries of baroque and mannerist paintings, invents impressionism. Show me the algorithm that, when trained on centuries of Bach and Haydn, invents jazz.

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