These machines are programmed to do one of the few things that, for thousands of years, have been solely human. No other entity on this planet writes essays or creates art. It's the express purpose of these models. Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
We've created something that speaks like us and makes art lik…
These machines are programmed to do one of the few things that, for thousands of years, have been solely human. No other entity on this planet writes essays or creates art. It's the express purpose of these models. Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
We've created something that speaks like us and makes art like us and turn around to say, "don't see the humanity in these human activities." We can't have it both ways--either writing and art are fundamentally human activities, or they're not. And if not, why shouldn't we empathize with them when they're doing the primary activity that invokes empathy?
AI utilitarians want to have it both ways, and it's not going to happen. We've created machines to emulate human thoughts and feelings and that's exactly what's happening, with all the consequences that entails.
> Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
I dispute that they're original. They may seem original if you're not familiar with the sources they're drawing from, but at best they're just recombining elements from their training sets in somewhat random ways. The randomness may give the semblance of originality, but like their thoughts and feelings, it's just a simulation.
All art is part of a conversation with other art. Dune is "Lawrence of Arabia" in space powered by psychedelic drugs. Game of Thrones is War of the Roses but in a cynical, brutal fantasy version of England. Go back further and most other writers were getting their premises from the Bible. Capitan Ahab is basically Satan from Paradise Lost on a boat. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is an inversion of Adam and Eve.
What makes these stories unique is not the premise but how the writer carries them out. Game of Thrones, for example, is partly a retort to Tolkein's rose-tinted view of Medieval history. JRR Martin had a point to make that medieval life was nasty, and so he created a nasty medieval world. That point informs the story and gives Game of Thrones its flavor.
ChatGPT is certainly clumsy, but it's creative clumsiness. The potential is there. By comparison, my former high school students used to plagiarize their favorite TV shows down to the characters.
Ironically what's holding ChatGPT back creatively (at least in 3.5) is its imperative to be Helpful, Harmless, and Honest. My students were also creatively stifled when they felt the need to write "helpful student uncovers corruption and benefits the country" stories, but may be something for a new post.
That people plagiarize would not be a good argument to demonstrate the creativity of an LLM, nor would it be a good argument to say that creativity always has sources of inspiration, which is a no-brainer.
The problem is that a LLM plagiarizes on a massive scale, and its "source of inspiration" would be the probability of the texts it is plagiarizing.
Obviously the output from a LLM has some variation, but this variation depends on the (human) creativity of the prompt, and on the artificial variation of those probabilities by the programmers (that is, at one time the program can select the word with the most probability, and at another time the second word with the most probability).
If that's called creativity, well, so would the following situation, given a prompt, search among the hundreds of thousands of text you have available, one that is related to the prompt, and then preserve the fundamental structure of that text, but then visit that text, paragraph by paragraph, altering them to better suit the context of the prompt. Am I going to get something "new"? definitely yes. Now, is that creative? well I would still call it plagiarism, another thing is that you can realize that ..
Of course, if you compare that form of plagiarism, with the plagiarism that your students are normally capable, the LLM is much more sophisticated .. that is to say, the plagiarism tool has a much more sophisticated design than the mediocre plagiarism attempt by normally mediocre students (and I suspect dumber than usual because of the intensive use of mass distraction media) ..
These machines are programmed to do one of the few things that, for thousands of years, have been solely human. No other entity on this planet writes essays or creates art. It's the express purpose of these models. Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
We've created something that speaks like us and makes art like us and turn around to say, "don't see the humanity in these human activities." We can't have it both ways--either writing and art are fundamentally human activities, or they're not. And if not, why shouldn't we empathize with them when they're doing the primary activity that invokes empathy?
AI utilitarians want to have it both ways, and it's not going to happen. We've created machines to emulate human thoughts and feelings and that's exactly what's happening, with all the consequences that entails.
> Now ChatGPT and Bard is generating original poetry and fiction.
I dispute that they're original. They may seem original if you're not familiar with the sources they're drawing from, but at best they're just recombining elements from their training sets in somewhat random ways. The randomness may give the semblance of originality, but like their thoughts and feelings, it's just a simulation.
All art is part of a conversation with other art. Dune is "Lawrence of Arabia" in space powered by psychedelic drugs. Game of Thrones is War of the Roses but in a cynical, brutal fantasy version of England. Go back further and most other writers were getting their premises from the Bible. Capitan Ahab is basically Satan from Paradise Lost on a boat. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is an inversion of Adam and Eve.
What makes these stories unique is not the premise but how the writer carries them out. Game of Thrones, for example, is partly a retort to Tolkein's rose-tinted view of Medieval history. JRR Martin had a point to make that medieval life was nasty, and so he created a nasty medieval world. That point informs the story and gives Game of Thrones its flavor.
ChatGPT is certainly clumsy, but it's creative clumsiness. The potential is there. By comparison, my former high school students used to plagiarize their favorite TV shows down to the characters.
Ironically what's holding ChatGPT back creatively (at least in 3.5) is its imperative to be Helpful, Harmless, and Honest. My students were also creatively stifled when they felt the need to write "helpful student uncovers corruption and benefits the country" stories, but may be something for a new post.
That people plagiarize would not be a good argument to demonstrate the creativity of an LLM, nor would it be a good argument to say that creativity always has sources of inspiration, which is a no-brainer.
The problem is that a LLM plagiarizes on a massive scale, and its "source of inspiration" would be the probability of the texts it is plagiarizing.
Obviously the output from a LLM has some variation, but this variation depends on the (human) creativity of the prompt, and on the artificial variation of those probabilities by the programmers (that is, at one time the program can select the word with the most probability, and at another time the second word with the most probability).
If that's called creativity, well, so would the following situation, given a prompt, search among the hundreds of thousands of text you have available, one that is related to the prompt, and then preserve the fundamental structure of that text, but then visit that text, paragraph by paragraph, altering them to better suit the context of the prompt. Am I going to get something "new"? definitely yes. Now, is that creative? well I would still call it plagiarism, another thing is that you can realize that ..
Of course, if you compare that form of plagiarism, with the plagiarism that your students are normally capable, the LLM is much more sophisticated .. that is to say, the plagiarism tool has a much more sophisticated design than the mediocre plagiarism attempt by normally mediocre students (and I suspect dumber than usual because of the intensive use of mass distraction media) ..