On AI

A few days ago I was walking downtown and 3 people stopped me and said they liked this shirt designn. I never tell them it's an album I released in 2017. AI (as a meme) now has legs, whereas in the decades before it was pretty esoteric, just like my music. It's now exoteric.

It's also interesting is to run a search/replace on "ai" to "AI" to illustrate how AI "infects" language to become slogans, or company or domain names. I'm assuming many of these are already in use. (They're like things that rhyme--if it rhymes someone has already thought of it).

AvAIl, AvAIlibility
BlockchAIn
BrAIn, BrAIns
CampAIgn
EntertAIn, EntertAIner, EntertAInment
FAIth
MAInstream Media
PAInt, PAInting, PAInter
PrAIse, PrAIsed
TrAInin, TrAIning
UntrAIned, UntrAIned


2818. What AI gets wrong about art is that it is somehow retinal again, over a century after we moved away from retinal art and to the conceptual. (5/2023)

2812. AI doesn't (yet) 'swing'.

2793. AI and ChatGPT suggest that we don't really want anything—that it can just be a 'vending machine' for everything. It's for people that hate 'cooking'.

2704. The final words for any artist: Please do not use AI on my unfinished works.

2669. AI music doesn't require a willingness to play it because machines don't know what 'willingness' is any more than they know what 'free will' is.

2651. What AI will show us is that there's always a 'you' you didn't know. It will be the new mirror.

2650. AI art is just the new way of screwing up an image by exceeding its limits, a new way of producing distortion.

2573. Sincerity can be boring; TV fixed that by making sincerity artificially real. .

2525. No one will have ideas in the future because your AIs will eliminate that 'chore'.

2350. The preferable path for making something is to proceed linearly from idea to tools—although tools (or instruments) can redirect the ideas. It is also possible to start linearly from the use of tools for the purpose of revealing an idea that was perhaps hidden. But tools to provoke ideas is an 'artificial' creativity because the tools will eventually impose their own limitations in situations where you might not want them. Then you'll have to go back to starting with ideas. #AI

2341. 'Releasing' music in the 2020s is simply adding it to the data reservoirs. Art is now 'fuel' for the AI 'factories'. (12/2020)

2322. AI allows you to do 'remote-controlled' creativity, implying that creativity had previously been an inconvenience.

2319. When you can talk about your influences, you demonstrate that your work doesn't exist in a vacuum. You are actually breathing in a real atmosphere as opposed to an artificial one that someone else made.

2310. AI is an un-caged animal.

2296. AI won't change music as multi-track recording or MIDI did. Tools assist creativity, they don't eliminate it.

2258. With AI, music obeys.

2252. With AI we are writing ourselves out of the story of humanity.

2248. People would rather be interested than intrigued: Being intrigued by something doesn't require as much work as being interested something. If you're simply intrigued, it just means that whatever you're engaging with preexists as a preference. Being interested means that you are more curious and want to know more. Interest in today's culture is mostly driven by algorithms and machine learning—automating your preferences. It isn't interested in your curiosities other than to record them as new preferences that are to be learned. #AI

2210. I love the idea of a 'machine-learned' lyric. The best lyrics are cryptic anyway. It's the emotion a singer adds to singable words. They don't have to mean anything in and of themselves. #AI

2188. In the future, it won't be people that we will be inspired by: It will be whatever is on the internet which is available at any one moment which may be attributed to a person. "My hero was that post on Reddit." They could be AIs as well, but their 'brains' might be entirely formed by data on the internet—or was previously on the internet.

2116. Ethics in AI rests on a functioning democracy. (5/2020)

2115. Reading non-fiction can sometimes be a "scanning for a connection": You already have a base of knowledge and you're looking for points to connect. Interestingly, this also works to enlarge conspiracy theories in which connection points are made artificially and in large numbers. An appearance of truth is simply a matter of creating a feedback loop between the connection points. Deep-reading is in some ways a conspiracy (a choir) in your own mind, but also broadcasts through the collective unconscious.

1936. Artificially-intelligent beings may have some empathy 'installed', but they wouldn't 'feel' it. That's the problem with intelligence in general: knowing isn't always feeling. Neither is feeling in and of itself knowing.

1929. The strength of an idea is in its ability to be both transformed and expanded, yet retain its main 'blueprint'. Like a good upbringing, the strength of an idea is good parentage. This is how jazz developed—from a continuous transformation of seed ideas. The blueprint for jazz is chords and melody. When I was first learning to play jazz, I primarily used the fakebooks—in particular The Real Book, an 'illegal' fakebook. Even today, the way I work is to make one of these blueprints at some point in the process. Artists also do this: The sculptor Tony Smith was known to make drawings of sculptures after the models were made, or even after they were installed. Even if the idea has no seed, an artificial seed can be made. #creativity

1926. There is a difference between music heard as a style and the composition itself. The analogy is picking out all the decorations for a building, then using it for its blueprint. It confuses the interior designer with the architect/engineer. #AI

1884. An album of music created with AI is no more interesting than an album that uses a wah-wah pedal on every track.

1881. The funny thing about AI comedians is that they will sometimes be funny and they won't know why.

1809. Everyone is morally responsible for the algorithms generated on their behalf. It is also the duty of the generators of the algorithms to show how they have created the circumstances in individual lives. Algorithms are a product like any other product and we trust that they are made to be safe. (8/2019) #AI

1801. I am okay with the idea that a president doesn't necessarily have to be a role model. Presidents are often figureheads and aspiring tyrants. What you want is a governing body that seeks to improve the lives of all. AI could be that given a democratic training of it.

1788. AI, like most tools, has a specific and limited use.

1781. 'Automatic Intelligence' is a better term that Artificial Intelligence. 'Artificial Intelligence' has a pejorative connotation of being fake, whereas 'Automatic Intelligence' connotes a natural phenomenon, or perhaps a modern convenience such as Automatic Transmission. No one would want 'Artificial Transmission'. #AI

1776. Both humans and nature make patterns instinctively. AI does this as well, or has the capacity for it.

1748. ...If something is truly universal, its essence will be common among many cultures, regardless of the languages used to express it. In the future, Universals will also emerge from AIs, if sharing the same 'traditions'. All of the elements peripheral to core Universals is more like 'decoration', or an 'interface' for the 'operating system' of spirituality.

1737. AI is artificial in the same way as social media: We delude ourselves that we need it.

1688. What AI will become will be similar to what social media became. (4/2019)

1644. AI art is in our recognition of it, not necessarily the process of creating it. It won't matter how it was made if it functions as an art object or experience.

1629. We are fascinated with robots because that's what we essentially are. Once we both pass the Turing Test it will be the true Singularity. Humans will have become dumb enough once we've made robots smart enough. (1/2019) #AI

1620. Music is ready to use—unlike AI, which has myriad contingencies as well as required technologies that haven't been invented yet—perhaps not even thought of. Yet music can be made out of almost nothing.

1619. AI music is a way to completely remove anthropocentric essentialism. Just because a human wrote the code doesn't mean any of the humanity is in the results. It has no soul.

1606. AI is a perfect example of tools to make tools. If you made robots that would use data sets about useful things made with tools, it could evolve tools to make various forms not easily conceivable by humans. Nature also does this in the form of adaptation. #universals

1605. We want things to be anthropocentric. Consider inspirational or self-help: We could easily create a corpus of self-help texts (All Eckhart Tolle or all Alan Watts for example) and have an AI do its version of cut-up on them. But we also want an intimate interpersonal understanding of Self, not from something with no Self-awareness. Humans know what 'inner life' means, and how it feels. It's what makes us human. 

1604. An algorithmic strategy for visual art (and music) is 'confuse the foreground and background' or 'add ambiguity', but would it know what that means? AI doesn't know what 'meaning' is, whereas humans always have at least a vague sense of it.

1602. If there was another popular acronym other than AI then we'd be saying that's the future. AI might be more of a meme in its current state.

1601. Prediction: AI will create a new philosophical epoch and a revival of the humanities. (10/2018)

1567. The best AI we could make would need to start with the best questions. But you don't know what they are until you start creating them and removing all the bad answers. To need AI just because it's convenient is not necessarily the best answer. (5/2018)

1555. Everyone now has a vested interest in the future of AI. (4/2018)

1534. Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion that AI could be a solution to resolving its problems is putting out fires with gasoline. Facebook is something where no one fully knows what's in the black box, and using the black box as a panacea is unconscionable. (4/2018)
    
1532. The potential problem with 'resolving' or 'growing up' the internet with strict limitations is that it would essentially be a database of propaganda, and it is not difficult to conceive of a system whereby such an internet could be generated by AI: lies-in/fake-truth out. This is perhaps a human universal that we had thought had devolved, but may simply be like an inactive volcano. It amplifies inaccuracies in any information flow. It's like amplification in sound: all the bad musicianship is exponentially worse when cranked through an amp. But the analogy breaks down when you consider the smoothing effect of Effects. This is where you can impose artifice as a way of expressing the fact that errors are unavoidable, and you might as well use the Effects if you want to express anything at all. It's a kind of surrender to perfectionism by not being concerned with achieving it. But on the net, misinformation is rather the musician that can't play at all, rather than the artist that goes with the flow, and surfs on the waves rather than controlling them. The smart person divines the exformation.

1520. AI music poses an interesting question for composers: how do we influence machine-learning with new music, or rather what music do we write or curate to put into the OpenAI for music? The music 'student' now is OpenAI.

1509. If the development of ethical AI is so important, why is it not more widely covered in mainstream media? (Because the untrained unethical AI is already controlling mainstream media.) (3/2018)

1492. The interesting thing about thinking about the anthropomorphic aspects of robots is where the 'spirituality' is. We realize we are spiritual beings when tasked to think about what the artificial one might be.

1462. AI, the Blockchain, VR/AR—any or all of them will manifest to some degree. Artists will figure out how to use/manipulate them for aesthetic or conceptual purposes. What I have seen thus far hasn't been all that interesting. It's how the New relates to established creative procedures and systems already in place for music-making. What these new startups are doing are solving the problems inherent in the old system, which were to the detriment of artists. But use of AI in music is ultimately just another form of Muzak, and will be similarly appropriated as the new ambient music. The practitioners of this new form will not be musicians as we have known them, but rather 'musicists' or simply, designers—involved in all aspects of music as a creative activity, similar to the creative activities of a designer. (12/2017)

1456. The development of AI is a form of meditation on how the mind works; it would be well-served to have skilled meditators involved in its development.

1430. AI and the 'singularity' are poised too be the 'nuclear weapons' of the 21st century. (11/2017)

1418. AI will go wrong in the same way social media went wrong. (11/2017)

1291. As could be depicted in a sci-fi scenario, future presidents and other officials might be mere video marionettes/avatars controlled by AI, a script or screenplay or Twitter feed. Presidents are seldom seen in the flesh anyway, so they can become a 'person behind the screen'. ('Your lips move but I can't [believe] what you say'...)

1280. Consciousness is the state of remembering or forgetting what you did or didn't do yesterday. AI suggests that both would be resolved flawlessly, and therefore could not possess a genuine human-like consciousness. We'd have to incorporate an 'absent mind' just to take it out of its cognitive uncanny valley.

1270. ...Perhaps it's time to incorporate machine intelligence into politics. An AI might have more heart and soul as well as intelligence. Or it could be worse, as there would be no one to blame. (11/9/2016)

1267. AIs won't know when they have 'insights.' If an AI has a major insight, can humans take credit? How can robots be praised? Will they care if they are praised? AI will always have anthropomorphic implications.

1261. The very process of AI will make our thinking more cold and mechanical. Machines won't have any other empathy than what's ingested into them. And what good is artificial empathy except better than nothing? This is where the idea of more emotional/spirituality has resonance, without the need to 'cybernate' every aspect of life. AI will be like electricity, always available, but not necessarily always creating 'light.'

1213. If you compressed all the information on the internet, it would be very small. Ideas might be expressed in different ways but are saying the same thing or asking the same questions with the same answers. AI will be a way for the internet to become wise. You'd go to seek exformation, not information.

1200. ...If AI takes hold in this century, through its own natural evolution, or through 'strategic inflection points' (if the country is at war for example) we might be forced to cede control to machines, and keep more of the human elements out. (8/2016)

1192. Humans will always be better at making art than AIs because they can have cunning intentions, and be aware that they are in fact intentions.

1179. AI is still essentially 'Automation Intelligence', or just an acronym or label, or worse a meme. It's bad to start any new technology just based on popularity (or not). Acronyms are either empowering [as a semiotic of a Utopian ideal (AI)], or intimidating and somewhat dystopian. As of now, AI is the current 'signage' for the future.

1178. How does diversity get incorporated into AI? Every human has a unique development, but what is the algorithm that uses evolution as its metaphor? What gives one AI a cognitive edge over another in terms of how the real world shapes the 'plasticity' in the code library?

1177. AI is interesting because we can learn as we teach.

1087. AI is literally artificial. (Intelligent Artifice)

1081. The current state of AI is like your new first camera: some of the bad first tries were actually good.

1080. The current state of AI is like your new first camera: everything is a great shot. (4/2016)

1077. When they get to the part where they have to integrate artistic behavior into AI, what artists get loaded first?

1012. One of the things that algorithmic art lacks is the ability to be anodyne. It is possible that we can project these characteristics artificially, but they are virtual and not inherently spiritual or transcendent. Sometimes we can think of 'spiritual' as being neutral or agnostic. Contemporary art has typically been filed under 'profane', yet involvement in craft has sometimes been associated with dharma.

0901. Artists are the teleological manipulators of conclusions and results: it is what separates a natural system and an artificial one. The beauty of the latter is that both human and machine occupy that category as distinct from the natural world. All art is artifice in that equation.

0891. One of the most dangerous metaphors in history was 'Industrial Age', as it suggested that everything existed to support the machine. We are in the Information Age (perhaps the end of it), and we are entangled in information. The next age may be the 'Intelligence Age' and we may be slaves of AI. We always wind up entangled in our metaphors, but none of them are completely superseded, as some parts of us are in the Stone Age and before. All ages are backwards-compatible. (3/2015)

0848. The construction of artificial narratives is a common paradox in the humanities: neither the art nor the science can give you a complete understanding of the subject. Even recent sci-fi fails miserably at this, including the film Interstellar. One simply cannot learn about quantum mechanics through a Hollywood film, padded with all the common narrative elements, such as love, heroism, and valor. (11/2014)

0781. Who is responsible for ethics? If you are trapped in an unethical system operating in an AI, what is ethical?

0768. How will AI ever work when systems are typically bogged down with software updates, security updates, re-indexing, system backups, virus checks, and 'system not responding' errors? Anything that involves a text file (dictionaries, computer code) will invariably have bugs and errors. (5/2014)

0599. Learning comes as standard software in the brain's operating system, through the computer's video camera (eyes) and microphone (ears). AI is literally artificial, but brilliantly so.

0389. Metaphors are artificial meanings placed on real situations to illuminate them. But once you take away the illumination, sometimes you still can't see them or the shadows are in the wrong places.

0076. Prediction: Media will be driven by background metadata, and 'choice' will be regulated by artificial intelligence and neural networks residing on the internet that will ultimately influence the 'choices' we make. It will appear that we are making choices by sheer volition, when in fact it will be driven by metadata. (5/2004)