CarlPeligro t1_j05tak6 wrote on December 14, 2022 at 7:21 AM

I was thinking earlier: AI art (AI-made films in particular) is likely to capture the imagination of human audiences in two stages. At first, it will amuse us for the same reason that ChatGPT amuses us today: a kind of "it thinks it's human!" type of novelty. Part of the thrill comes from the understanding that this is an AI, that it has not attained its fullest potential yet. Lots of trial, lots of error, but moments of sublimity -- and these eerie "human" moments register with a mixture of shock and endearment.

But sufficiently advanced AI will understand the human mind, likely better than we will ever understand it ourselves. It will understand the things we find captivating, amusing, spiritual, perplexing, awe-inspiring. Advanced AI will create artistic worlds that we can immerse ourselves in, worlds with all the infinite self-similarity of a fractal -- and we will confront these worlds with a Solaris-type wonder, the same wonder we experience when we stare up at the stars or contemplate the fundamental structure of the universe, the same wonder people tap into during a spiritual experience. We will be in the presence of an infinitely complex mind and the effort to make sense out of it (or, failing that, the delight we get from simply reveling in it) will likely be much more profound and engrossing than any sort of artistic experience any of us have yet had.

(Or we might just skip this stage and find ourselves instantaneously reduced to humanoid batteries.)

OldWorldRevival t1_j07qalb wrote on December 14, 2022 at 5:57 PM

I think predicting what such a superintelligence will discover is fruitless.

Our biological systems are in a sense error reduction systems like AI are. This is a simplification, of course. But, the way this manifests itself is that whatever our present ideology is has no error tells to us internally. So, we see the world through that lens

Likewise, we project our belief systems onto these superintelligent AIs. "It will discover/prove X."

What AI will lack in art are two very important things: conscious experience and limitation.

That is, unless we make human 2.0 with suffering and limitation like we have, AI will not produce real art. It will produce eye candy, and it will push our buttons. But it won't be real, not in the way that matters.

This is going to create chaos and existential crises in people until they eventually understand this.

I do have some suspicions about what AI is going to demonstrate. I think it is going to psychologically unmake people.

See Derek Parfit's discussion on identity, as well as Buddhism more or less noticing the same thing about it before he formalized the illusory nature of identity.

Also, consider the experience of ego death that people experience when taking psychedelics.

That is, I suspect AI that shows people the thing that it discovers to be true is their own illusory nature as individuals. It will render onto people the understanding that they are nothing.

And people will seek this out because humans are curious.

turntable_server t1_j06ims5 wrote on December 14, 2022 at 12:49 PM

That is very awe-inspiring vision, but all LLM's do is, is to hold up a mirror of our culture as it exists on internet (which provides the training material). But there are moments of sublimity and endearingness, because AI does not have the social conditioning that we humans carry around, and like a precocious child can present its output in delightful and surprising manner. But it can also exhibit racist and "unwholesome" behavior for the same reason. That's why those models have heavy censorship filters and ChatGPt's expressiveness is reduced to a fraction of its potential.