A Journey Using the AI: An Empirical Approach Towards a Better Understanding of Art and Technology in the 21st Century

But these questions over capability distract from the issues that technologies raise with every advance: If the end results are equivalent, do we value the object over the person making it? Or in this case, do we value the artist in all their messy humanity? So what does removing humanity show about how art and creation are being sold to us?

Dan Winters, Photographer“Using the AI was entertaining and somewhat inspirational, especially with complex prompts. The cover is actually better than the one that ran, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Margaret said that she wanted to better communicate the differences between working with an illustrator and DALL-E. This is where I landed: Aside from the fact that DALL-E works in a more literal world of “things,” it also gave me repurposed versions of the information that I supplied. I think it’s the most important aspect. I and the illustrators think different things. They take the information that I give and expand it. They do their own supplementary research, and they offer alternate approaches and unexpected solutions. Some of the DALL-E results were unexpected for sure, but they were based (it appeared) on random data-crunching from the details I provided. Because I wasn’t providing the unexpected ideas in the prompts, I didn’t get the innovative solutions. There is a huge reserve of data but not the desire to look at something from an artist’s point of view. I don’t see severing ties with my illustrator database in the near future.

Late last year, I attended an event hosted by Google to celebrate its AI advances. The company’s domain in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood now extends literally onto the Hudson River, and about a hundred of us gathered in a pierside exhibition space to watch scripted presentations from executives and demos of the latest advances. Jeff Dean promised a hopeful vision for the future, speaking from the West Coast.

Something weird is happening in the world of AI. The field burst out of its lethargy in the early part of this century because of innovation of deep learning, led by three academics. Many of our applications were transformed by this approach to the field of artificial intelligence, and many of them are smart because of it. We’ve spent a dozen years in this AI springtime. In the last year or so there was a big aftershock to the earthquake and a lot of mind bending generative models have appeared.

But Google’s competitors don’t seem to have “slow” in their vocabularies. While Google has provided limited access to LaMDA in a protected Test Kitchen app, other companies have been offering an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord with their own chatbots and image generators. The most consequential release to date was Openai’s latest version of its powerful text generation technology, which came a few weeks after the Google event. Millions of people have tinkered with it and shared its amazing responses, to the point where they are a source of wonder and fear. Will the college essay be lost? Destroy traditional internet search? Put millions of people out of a job?

Answers to those questions aren’t clear right now. One thing is. The open access model has kicked off a hot summer that is good for the tech sector, even as big companies are laying off workers. Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s belief, the next big paradigm isn’t the metaverse—it’s this new wave of AI content engines, and it’s here now. We saw a lot of products that were moving tasks from paper to PC application. In the 1990s, you could make a quick fortune by shifting those desktop products to online. The movement moved to mobile after a decade. In the 2020s the big shift is toward building with generative AI. Thousands of startups will emerge with business plans based on the systems they tap into. The cost of churning out generic copy will go to zero. By the end of the decade, artificial intelligence systems will be the dominate factor in TikTok and other apps. They may not be anywhere as good as the innovative creations of talented human beings, but the robots will quantitatively dominate.

It isn’t a big issue whether the model will one day create a masterpiece, achieve true indistinguishability or become a deus ex machina. At face value, both humans and machines create some form of art.

The Minotaur of Greek Myths: A Multimedia Collaborative Journey through the Mysterious Case of Parenting and Death

One post by Tumblr user @ohevoyev is dedicated to the Minotaur of Greek myth, joining Borges’ short story with paintings, stanzas, and a screenshot of a conversation encapsulating the through line: “the cruelty of being a cursed child” whose parents “use the curse to lose love for you.” Another has multiple users contributing multimedia excerpts in an extended meditation on homesickness. Web weaving is the social media user’s collage: The canvas of the post holds together artful arrangements of online curios and gems, finding order across a sea of content.