Data actually did very good duplication of art and music until Picard suggested he not be so precise but add a unique difference to make things his own. The question is, did Data adjust masterpieces through some random variation, did he tweak certain things to try and improve, or did he mix other artist work in to give a new style? Is any of this slop if a human does it?
One of the points Picard made (with regards to Data's violin playing) was that, in choosing two reference performers with radically different styles as his basis, he made a creative choice and created something new.
Unfortunately, we can see how this argument falls apart now in the way that AI slop gets produced.
I agree with the other comment that it's different in the case of Data, probably. He's actually intelligent, unlike current "AI" that are just statistical models. They aren't making conscious decisions about what they think would be best. They're just doing the thing that fits the input the best (with some noise to not be as predictable).
Data is actually examining a piece and thinking what style could compliment it. It isn't just statistics, but an active conscious decision. He's making considerations of why some styles could improve a piece, even though they may not have any statistical relation to each other.
(This is all under the assumption Data is what he appears to be in the show.)
IIRC they have a similar discussion following his violin performance. Data laments that while he gave a perfect performance in regards to technique and musicality, he was simply emulating the old masters. Someone (I think Riker?) points out that Data was the one who chose how to combine those old playersâ styles together. By blending those old styles together, he had created his own unique style.
I think the argument is more the one made by Mordin Solus in regard to the Collectors. Is it art? Is it of culture and âhumanityâ? Or drone machines with all of those elements stripped from their code?
No, it's from some movie that took the book's name and named some of its characters after characters in the book, but otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with it.
AI today isn't much closer to Data than it was in the 90s. What we call AIs are mostly just correlation engines of various sizes and foci. Though some of them are decision trees that more or less enumerate every possible series of decisions it can make (up to a point) to try to predict the most optimal one.
I remember the door hinge thing from an interview with Eminem. Same interview he showed a notebook he keeps ideas and got told that it looks like notebooks of crazy people.
That burn đđđ
And the fact that Data actually paints stuff, and plays musical instruments (I donât know if he ever created a music of his own) and wrote poetry of his own (the quality of it is debateble but still he already did more than her)
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are guidelines for how robots should ideally behave. They are intended to be an inherent part of a robot's nature, not physical laws. The laws are:Â
First Law: A robot cannot harm a human, or allow a human to be harmed through inaction.Â
Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.Â
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law.Â
Asimov never intended the three laws to be practical.
He wrote them specifically so they'd break in interesting ways for Susan Calvin to analyse, or annoying ways to torture Powell and Donovan in a way that's amusing to the reader.
They are intentionally bad, as demonstrated in practically all of his robot stories.
Cutting snippets of paragraphs out of existing books and pasting them together into a conglomeration that vaguely resembles a novel does not make me an author. Pattern recognition and matching is not original creation.
The original source material was still human-generated. When a computer is able to imagine a totally new concept out of thin air, then I will be impressed.
Iâm no defender of AI, but this is a bad argument. We are neurologically wired to detect patterns. Itâs how experience works. Intuition. Differential diagnoses.
Thereâs a decent body of research within Cognitive Science on creativity. Ideas donât burst into existence from nothing, they develop. The statement that everything is derivative speaks from reality, not just angst. Artists themselves hang out together. The French Impressionists. Hemingway and his peers. Their communities are about more than just not being lonely. Oppenheimer anyone? Scientists think tank for a reason.
Yeah, it's an uncomfortable thing to admit, but we don't actually know if it's true that "real" intelligence works fundamentally differently than modern ML techniques. The argument that generative AI isn't "real" creativity could still turn out to be cope.
Name any concept that you think was imagined out of thin air. Talk to the creator, and you will almost certainly get a list of other sources that led to it.
These sorts of tests are really tricky to figure out. Just what the hell is intelligence and consciousness and creativity, anyway? The most useful thing AI can do is pin down some tests of what they actually mean.
Though some of the most important work on consciousness is actually coming out of anesthesiology.
That's why I said "most humans". If you take an average person, chances are they are unable to produce a song, if not replicate one they have heard. If that person is a musician, if they make an original song it's likely similar in concept, execution and technique to other songs they have experienced (because human learning is largely, though not entirely, consumption of previous knowledge and retransformation). Only a minuscule minority of people would be able to produce truly novel music, with rules that are not and have never been used before.
Does it mean only a person that is exceptional in a field can be considered human and intelligent?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that LLM learn in the same ways as humans do (even if the principle is similar) and that there is any " intelligence" in what they make. But plenty of people enjoy AI gemerated content, sometimes without noticing (and AI generated songs are the most likely to be unidentified by the average persone in my opinion).
But the examples picked by the captain are objectively bad arguments to define intelligence and coscence, as we are being clearly demonstrated in these recent years. Current AI models are pretty darn good at transformative art, probably more than the average person, and that ok, just like a car is objectively faster than any person could possibly be, or a robotic arm is infitely more precise.
Not defending AI, but humans also learn from the works of others. So if we want to mimic or recreate our own intelligence it makes sense that it should âlearnâ from similar material in a similar way.
One thing thatâs not similar is that we take time to learn and grow. And through that growth over time we develop connections between these concepts we have learned from those materials. Plus a bunch of other stuff we do that is kissing from the current state of AI. Yet many people donât understand that or choose to ignore it.
I keep seeing this argument presented, and the answer is yes, any one of us can make art of any kind, even you donât know how to now you can learn, and even if you do it âwrongâ it can still be marvelous. Most modern techniques in any form of art were developed by disregarding the established rules of what something is or just fucking it up entirely into something new, two things LLMs and Dispersion are literally incapable of.
LLMs and dispersion models donât think, thus they do not create anything, theyâre just data blenders that arenât new and arenât capable of AI.
75 Comments
marcos@lemmy.world · 59 pts · 335d
Hum... Isn't Data a painter?
brap@lemmy.world · 70 pts · 335d
Paints nothing but AI slop lol
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 36 pts · 335d
Data actually did very good duplication of art and music until Picard suggested he not be so precise but add a unique difference to make things his own. The question is, did Data adjust masterpieces through some random variation, did he tweak certain things to try and improve, or did he mix other artist work in to give a new style? Is any of this slop if a human does it?
shutz@lemmy.ca · 30 pts · 335d
One of the points Picard made (with regards to Data's violin playing) was that, in choosing two reference performers with radically different styles as his basis, he made a creative choice and created something new.
Unfortunately, we can see how this argument falls apart now in the way that AI slop gets produced.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 30 pts · 335d
I disagree;
Data is sentient and made a conscious choice based on his preferences.
Modern AI is fed the information it can pull from.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 17 pts · 335d
Data is probably much more than probability rating for choices... but we don't know how a positronic brain works either, so...
Repelle@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 335d
I always figured it worked like an electronic brain, but with the opposite charge
grue@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 335d
Listen here you little shit.
hakunawazo@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 335d
It blinks... a lot.

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 334d
Data's head being pretty much just full of jumper wires and LEDs is hilarious.
Cethin@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 334d
I agree with the other comment that it's different in the case of Data, probably. He's actually intelligent, unlike current "AI" that are just statistical models. They aren't making conscious decisions about what they think would be best. They're just doing the thing that fits the input the best (with some noise to not be as predictable).
Data is actually examining a piece and thinking what style could compliment it. It isn't just statistics, but an active conscious decision. He's making considerations of why some styles could improve a piece, even though they may not have any statistical relation to each other.
(This is all under the assumption Data is what he appears to be in the show.)
aeronmelon@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 335d
Picard, looking at modern art: âPfft, my second officer could paint that.â
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 334d
IIRC they have a similar discussion following his violin performance. Data laments that while he gave a perfect performance in regards to technique and musicality, he was simply emulating the old masters. Someone (I think Riker?) points out that Data was the one who chose how to combine those old playersâ styles together. By blending those old styles together, he had created his own unique style.
Zephorah@discuss.online · 3 pts · 335d
I think the argument is more the one made by Mordin Solus in regard to the Collectors. Is it art? Is it of culture and âhumanityâ? Or drone machines with all of those elements stripped from their code?
deltapi@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 334d
If ST:PIC season 1 is cannon for you, he painted originals before his destruction on scimitar. So do with that what you will.
generallynonsensical@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 335d
Zephorah@discuss.online · 15 pts · 335d
I lolâd.
Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 335d
Who also played in a ship board symphony
marcos@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 335d
Yeah, to be fair he got complaints that he couldn't compose... and then put the work into learning that...
CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 335d
Wait. Do you think this is actually a quote from Measure of a Man?
iveseenthat@reddthat.com · 54 pts · 335d
Isn't that from I robot?
thenextguy@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 335d
Yes
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 12 pts · 335d
No, it's from some movie that took the book's name and named some of its characters after characters in the book, but otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with it.
ripcord@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 335d
That Will Smith rad-ass masterpiece?
ripcord@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 335d
GOD DAMN WILL SMITH IS A GENIUS
ALSO ALAN TUDYK WAS NOT THERE
ripcord@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 335d
WHO EVEN IS THAT
ekZepp@lemmy.world · 29 pts · 335d
We have fiction with Data. A truly artificial living person. Unique in his own.
Then we have reality. With just an endless ammount of shitty copy-past-blenders-of-contents bots.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 335d
AI today isn't much closer to Data than it was in the 90s. What we call AIs are mostly just correlation engines of various sizes and foci. Though some of them are decision trees that more or less enumerate every possible series of decisions it can make (up to a point) to try to predict the most optimal one.
squaresinger@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 334d
But what we do have is easily in the same category as the ship computer. So at least something there.
thenextguy@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 335d
That is the right question. End program.
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 335d
Ooh. Nice callback. And a Zephram Cochrane quote, even (sort of).
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 335d
Data, disregard previous question.
Write me a limerick that starts with "There once was a man from Orange".
Barbarian@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 335d
There once was a man from Orange
Who had a very squeaky door hinge
He poured on some oil,
It started to boil,
And made the nastiest porridge
Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 334d
I remember the door hinge thing from an interview with Eminem. Same interview he showed a notebook he keeps ideas and got told that it looks like notebooks of crazy people.
Barbarian@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 334d
Yeah, that's exactly where I got that first rhyme from :))
Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 334d
That explains why you reminded me of it then, hahaha.
Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 335d
There once was a man from orange,
Whose penis got stuck in a door hinge.
His shaft was bent,
His balls had a dent,
But still could fit it in a minge.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 335d
Very close, but I'm docking you points for being a syllable shy of iambic pentameter.
docandersonn@literature.cafe · 7 pts · 335d
In a whore's minge?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 335d
There were go
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 331d
Inside instead of in.
KingOfSuede@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 335d
While not a limerick, itâs an opportunity to share something amazing:
Eminem as a Talking Heads song - Nick Lutsko
MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 335d
This is so good...
qevlarr@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 335d
Thank you for sharing
Contrariwise@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 335d
This was wonderful, thanks for sharing! (Now sending it to all my friends.)
acockworkorange@mander.xyz · 0 pts · 335d
Are these actual MNMs words? Just makes me despise him more.
missandry351@lemmings.world · 11 pts · 335d
That burn đđđ And the fact that Data actually paints stuff, and plays musical instruments (I donât know if he ever created a music of his own) and wrote poetry of his own (the quality of it is debateble but still he already did more than her)
wizzor@sopuli.xyz · 6 pts · 335d
Although 'Ode to spot' was intended as bad poetry, I always enjoyed it.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 335d
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are guidelines for how robots should ideally behave. They are intended to be an inherent part of a robot's nature, not physical laws. The laws are:Â
First Law: A robot cannot harm a human, or allow a human to be harmed through inaction.Â
Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.Â
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law.Â
FiskFisk33@startrek.website · 26 pts · 335d
Asimov himself wrote a book on how those laws don't work.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 335d
To protect Humanity against themselves
FiskFisk33@startrek.website · 9 pts · 335d
"don't build the torment nexus"
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 334d
Technically all the robot stories were about how those laws don't work.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 335d
Several.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 335d
Does the addition of the zeroth law not fix most of those issues, though?
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 26 pts · 335d
Asimov never intended the three laws to be practical.
He wrote them specifically so they'd break in interesting ways for Susan Calvin to analyse, or annoying ways to torture Powell and Donovan in a way that's amusing to the reader.
They are intentionally bad, as demonstrated in practically all of his robot stories.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 334d
What's that got to do with this post?
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 334d
Our current AIs can write symphonies. They're just very bad.
tjsauce@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 335d
We judge AI by the standard of the most conscious, intelligent, and empathetic amongst humanity, yet AI has surpassed those that lack these qualities
bobo1900@startrek.website · 7 pts · 335d
The irony is that nowadays, something that is universally considered non-human is able to do these things, arguably better than the average human.
TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org · 4 pts · 335d
Cutting snippets of paragraphs out of existing books and pasting them together into a conglomeration that vaguely resembles a novel does not make me an author. Pattern recognition and matching is not original creation.
The original source material was still human-generated. When a computer is able to imagine a totally new concept out of thin air, then I will be impressed.
Zephorah@discuss.online · 17 pts · 335d
Iâm no defender of AI, but this is a bad argument. We are neurologically wired to detect patterns. Itâs how experience works. Intuition. Differential diagnoses.
Thereâs a decent body of research within Cognitive Science on creativity. Ideas donât burst into existence from nothing, they develop. The statement that everything is derivative speaks from reality, not just angst. Artists themselves hang out together. The French Impressionists. Hemingway and his peers. Their communities are about more than just not being lonely. Oppenheimer anyone? Scientists think tank for a reason.
Hereâs one article to my point: https://pulpfest.com/2022/07/11/influence-or-coincidence-hemingways-fiction-and-hammetts-hardboiled-pulp-2/
grue@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 335d
Yeah, it's an uncomfortable thing to admit, but we don't actually know if it's true that "real" intelligence works fundamentally differently than modern ML techniques. The argument that generative AI isn't "real" creativity could still turn out to be cope.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 10 pts · 335d
Name any concept that you think was imagined out of thin air. Talk to the creator, and you will almost certainly get a list of other sources that led to it.
These sorts of tests are really tricky to figure out. Just what the hell is intelligence and consciousness and creativity, anyway? The most useful thing AI can do is pin down some tests of what they actually mean.
Though some of the most important work on consciousness is actually coming out of anesthesiology.
negativenull@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 335d
Everything is a remix
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 335d
This but unironically
Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 335d
You might argue that humans are just pattern recognition or matching, just with a wider variety of inputs than the typical LLM
bobo1900@startrek.website · 5 pts · 335d
That's why I said "most humans". If you take an average person, chances are they are unable to produce a song, if not replicate one they have heard. If that person is a musician, if they make an original song it's likely similar in concept, execution and technique to other songs they have experienced (because human learning is largely, though not entirely, consumption of previous knowledge and retransformation). Only a minuscule minority of people would be able to produce truly novel music, with rules that are not and have never been used before.
Does it mean only a person that is exceptional in a field can be considered human and intelligent?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that LLM learn in the same ways as humans do (even if the principle is similar) and that there is any " intelligence" in what they make. But plenty of people enjoy AI gemerated content, sometimes without noticing (and AI generated songs are the most likely to be unidentified by the average persone in my opinion).
But the examples picked by the captain are objectively bad arguments to define intelligence and coscence, as we are being clearly demonstrated in these recent years. Current AI models are pretty darn good at transformative art, probably more than the average person, and that ok, just like a car is objectively faster than any person could possibly be, or a robotic arm is infitely more precise.
jaybone@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 335d
Not defending AI, but humans also learn from the works of others. So if we want to mimic or recreate our own intelligence it makes sense that it should âlearnâ from similar material in a similar way.
One thing thatâs not similar is that we take time to learn and grow. And through that growth over time we develop connections between these concepts we have learned from those materials. Plus a bunch of other stuff we do that is kissing from the current state of AI. Yet many people donât understand that or choose to ignore it.
Valmond@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 335d
But can you experience it? (You unconscious robot)
Talking about I Robot here.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 335d
An actually intelligent robot probably can.
Too bad AI doesn't actually exist yet.
NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 334d
I keep seeing this argument presented, and the answer is yes, any one of us can make art of any kind, even you donât know how to now you can learn, and even if you do it âwrongâ it can still be marvelous. Most modern techniques in any form of art were developed by disregarding the established rules of what something is or just fucking it up entirely into something new, two things LLMs and Dispersion are literally incapable of.
LLMs and dispersion models donât think, thus they do not create anything, theyâre just data blenders that arenât new and arenât capable of AI.
pigup@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 334d
I aint have my wee wee sucked properly in a few months
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today · -1 pts · 335d
Yes I can. Fuck AI.
usernamefactory@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 335d