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Tobias Mark Jensen's avatar

Great post. However, generative AI are trained to spit out work that is superficially pleasing to the human eye and mind. On this background, I don't think it's that surprising that average humans will rate AI-generated poems or translations over those of legendary poets and experienced human translators.

First of all, the quality of art and writing is subjective compared to science and math. Secondly, meaningful and deep creative work is often difficult to consume and understand. I suspect that many people would also prefer a BigMac over a three-star Michelin dish if they didn't know what was what.

My point is: perhaps the fact that people are choosing AI-generated over human-generated creative work tells us more about (online) culture than the capabilities of AI? After all, AI-generated work is only impressive because the AI has been trained to replicate the work of humans based on millions and millions of examples. AI still lacks any authentic world knowledge, which is why it's hard for me to see how they could express anything original about the world that is not based on combinations of previos work from their training data.

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The Radical Individualist's avatar

l'd like to offer a few observations.

For the record, while Copernicus determined that the universe did not revolve around the earth, he did believe that the universe revolved around the sun. And, in physics, everything is relative to whatever frame of reference you care to use. It is not mathematically incorrect to use the earth as a reference for the entire universe. But the math becomes simpler when we have the earth revolving around the sun, and the sun circulating within the Milky Way galaxy. And who doesn't like simpler math? Still, the pope wasn't entirely wrong in his disagreement with Galileo.

As for poetry, let's reverse things. Can AI READ poetry and feel enlightened? Can AI read another AI's words, and feel a connection? We do well to remember that AI does an incredible job of mimicking the works of humans, but it is only mimicking. It has no soul, no personality, no hopes, dreams, wishes or resentments.

In this age of technology, perhaps the functionality of AI has supplanted the desirability of the sense of accomplishment in making our own creations. "Look! AI did this in seconds! Why should I go to the trouble of reaching inside myself and attempting to extract my deepest thoughts and feelings, when I can just push a button?!"

Every day, I cuss out this device I am typing on right now. I'm old enough to be experienced on manual typewriters. I don't want to go back to them, but I do have a fond feeling for machines that, correct or incorrect, printed exactly what you typed. The 'smarter' our devices are, the more you have to redirect them to what you want, instead of what they have been programmed to do. And I will never authorize a computer to do my writing for me, even if it's better at than I am.

Here's a post a did a while back, exploring some aspects of AI

https://open.substack.com/pub/individualistsunite/p/thinking-inside-the-box?r=z324w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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