danup asked:

Asking bc you're the only person I follow who creates art (loved TNC) and works on AI—what's your sense of what a future with ML tools to write and create art looks like? Since GPT-3 (and brought on this week by all the Stable Diffusion tricks) I get struck every few months w/ a real dread about this world where artists feel obsolete, everything can be credibly faked, "content" is endless + private, etc. (That's not *exactly* right, but I guess I can't quite explain what brings the dread about.)

I can only speak to the creative side of this as a writer, since I’m not a visual artist.

And the two domains are different, here. Existing ML is much closer to being useful for significant automation in visual art than it is in creative writing.

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With writing, ML has a very serious fundamental limitation: the context window.

All of these impressive recent language models can only “see” a fairly short stretch of text at once. Usually it’s 2048 tokens, which is something like ~1500-1800 words, or ~5-7 printed pages. If they’re writing a longer text, they can’t “remember” anything they wrote down that’s further back than this distance.

They are like this because they use an operation (attention) that gets prohibitively slow over long distances.

Many people have tried to invent more efficient variants of attention, and there are now lots of these efficient variants that do pretty well on benchmarks. I’ve heard they’re very effective for some non-linguistic kinds of data, but on text, none of the existing ones are good enough to see serious use in real models.

(GPT-3 did use a kind of efficient attention, but only in half the layers, and the large DeepMind/Google LMs don’t use it at all. This is a big area and there’s more stuff I could comment on, like DeepMind’s RETRO, but in short, no one has found a way to break this barrier for the case of long-form writing.)

You simply can’t write something like a book in this manner, not competently.

I’m aware of one fiction writer who does (or did?) use GPT-3 as an aid for long-form writing, but based on the linked post, it sounds like it’s at best marginally helpful if you’re doing a particular kind of genre fiction and you really care about cranking out words to pay the bills, among other necessary conditions.

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Even putting aside the context window, though, language models just … aren’t that good at creative writing?

The perfect niche for their current strengths is something like “surreal short stories / microfiction.” My bot writes this kind of thing sometimes, and I’m sure the bigger models are better at it.

But IME, the results are at the level where you nod along and think “huh, that’s really quite good!”, knowing it’s from a machine. Not the level where you want to go out and buy this writer’s anthology. And that’s what we get in the most favorable niche for these tools.

Why are these stories so underwhelming? A lot of it, for me, is that if I know there’s no intention behind the text, I stop caring about it.

We can talk about the “intentional fallacy” (AKA the popular sense of “death of the author”) all day, but talk is cheap. I think our psychological relationship to reading really does depend on the notion of authorial intent – perhaps in some complex or poorly understood manner, but that is not the same thing as intent not mattering at all.

If I read a surreal short story by a human, I get an itch to interpret it. This itch persists even if I hear the author explain exactly what they meant, and believe them; it feels like there’s some “true intent” worth discerning that may not be identical with the author’s.

You might suppose this true intent is intrinsic to the text itself, which seems reasonable … until you tell me the story was written by GPT-3, and suddenly, somehow, I don’t care anymore.

I don’t really understand this phenomenon, but I think we’ll encounter its sharp edges more and more as ML gets better.

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That’s all about writing. Visual art is much easier for ML models.

The whole picture can fit into what the model can see, all at once. Also, the domain is narrower: language models are effectively being asked to learn everything about everything, since any topic whatsoever could happen to come up (even in fiction). Whereas even if you’re trying to draw pictures of absolutely anything, you’re still limited to what is visually depictable.

And in fact, to my eye, the image generators come a lot closer to doing what humans do. Although they do it in a way that’s hard to control, which may end up being the limiting factor – see this post.

If I were employed as a visual artist, well, I’m not sure how I’d feel right now.

Although here too, the intention issue I mentioned feels relevant. I’m no more a serious appreciator of visual art than I am a creator of it, but I imagine that a similar dynamic will hold there. The machine can (so to speak) “force” you to notice that its art is pretty, or well-crafted, but it can’t actually force you to care.

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And that, really, is why I’m optimistic about this stuff.

What if “content” becomes effectively free? Well, we already are in that situation, relative to the world of 1980.

The ability to browse many lifetimes’ worth of art and writing using Google search – and all that for $0 – has not made the creation of new art feel spurious, nor has it replaced the age-old need to hunt for stuff you actually like / care about with some automated process where Google tells you your next favorite book.

If I’m looking for the next book to read, I still consult reviews from trusted writers and take recommendations from friends. And I still, often, end up reading some famous book written decades or centuries ago – even though these are becoming a smaller and smaller slice of all “content,” which is being produced at an ever-faster rate due to population and welfare growth.

I can already access more books than I could ever read in a lifetime. Adding way more books to the pile, even good ones, won’t change that. Suppose the machine becomes capable of writing great novels, for free – must I care? I still haven’t read all the great novels that humans have written already! I never will!

“I’ve written a book,” an acquaintance tells me. “I don’t care,” I reply with brusque honesty. “I have all the books I want already. I just find ‘em on Google and Amazon and Goodreads.”

Except of course I don’t say that, because no one ever says that, and not just out of politeness.

“I’ve written a book,” an acquaintance tells me. “I don’t care,” I reply. “I have all the books I want already. The AI writes them for me.”

Except of course I don’t say that. Why would I?