http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2023-02-03T15:30:20Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#2ee109172e9104dd35c95d8b0e22137c21337927 2023-02-03T15:30:20Z February 3. Backing off a bit from the last post, when we think about AI in creative work, we usually imagine that a given work will be done 100% by AI, or 100% by humans. In practice, I expect a lot of partnership. Someone who enjoys writing could still use AI for ideas, especially to throw a little chaos into the line-by-line writing. In most TV shows, the overall plots have a coherence that AI would struggle with, but the dialogue is so predictable that weird AI dialogue would be refreshing. And someone who doesn't like writing, but loves editing, could crank out AI writings and then pick out the best bits and patch them together.

Related, a Hacker News thread posted to the subreddit, Does the HN commentariat have a reductive view of what a human being is? There are a lot of good comments. I would say it like this: When you work all day with deterministic input-output machines, it's easy to view humans as deterministic input-output machines.

Also from Hacker News, this is something I was hoping someone would do, and they did it! A song recommendation engine that works on how the songs sound, and not what other people listened to. From the comments, it looks like there's a lot of room to do this kind of thing better.

Update: I've played with it a bit, and the best thing I've found, searching from Hawkwind's Space Is Deep, is this ambient black metal song, Death of an Estranged Earth by Old Forgotten Lands.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#e406ddc26286574cefe28c8bba47dea83fc8b033 2023-02-01T13:10:43Z February 1. Quick loose end from Monday, thanks Greg. The Earth Species Project "is a non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication."

I might as well mention my latest thoughts on AI. I hate driving. I'm forced to put my attention constantly on stuff that's not interesting, and if I slip for one second, my life could be ruined. But this is an unpopular opinion. Most people like driving. So it's a safe bet that most people who buy self-driving cars also like driving. They buy self-driving cars not to be relieved from the suffering of driving, but to gain the pleasure and status of having a magical robot chauffeur.

AI is still in the stage of novelty. Wow, look at what my computer can do! When the novelty wears off, when there is no longer intrinsic pleasure in getting a machine to do a job for you, people will go back to doing for themselves, anything they enjoy doing. It follows that any use of AI, to do something that people enjoy doing, is a fad.

Another reason a machine might do a job that a person enjoys, is if they're being paid to do it, and the owner can get more money by replacing them. As a society, we should ask, what about the people who design and build and service the machines? Do they enjoy their jobs? We don't ask this question because we're still in the grip of capitalism. I don't mean the free market; I mean using money as a totemic arbiter of value.

In the long term, feeling good is the only arbiter of value -- but I'm always surprised by the willingness of humans to choose suffering, so I don't want to predict the end of capitalism just yet.

More generally, AI will force a reckoning of process vs product, of getting stuff done vs doing what you love. We understand this distinction, but we don't think about it all that much. As machines get better at getting stuff done, we're going to be asking more often: Is this something I want to get done, or something I want to do?

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