After The First Stroke, Everything's Recovery



Some words work well precisely because they are somewhat misunderstood. I like the word "bemused" because it implies a mild amusement as well as a deep confusion that stops you in your tracks. So, I am bemused by criticisms of current A.I. tools as fundamentally "boring" and different from what us "creative" humans do.

My first response is to compare the actions and outputs of today's early-generation Artificial Intelligence Agents (e.g. ChatGPT)with those of early-generation Natural Intelligence Agents (NIAs, e.g. children). In both cases, rule-based agents sample the environment and produce what seem (to the agent) to be likely valid conclusions to be drawn. These are then submitted to a higher authority to be judged and corrected in order to produce more valid, interesting results in the future. I don't see a fundamental difference between refining a linguistic prompt and saying "No, Sweetie, it's 'drawn' not 'drawed'". Yet we don't conclude that children's outputs are hopelessly boring and derivative.
My second response has to do with intention. We tend to believe that human creation is suffused with intended meaning put there by the creator. But every artist knows that's not how it works. You put down a mark, a stroke, a note, a sound, a word, a phrase and then you question it. Is that right? What would my models and mentors think? You walk around it, poking at it with imagined perspectives you've picked up from elsewhere until it starts to form something that seems valid and interesting, but probably not what you "intended".

The greatest living artist (I am not taking input on this. I've made up my mind.) is Gerhard Richter. He has a lovely short quote about how everything is in the first stroke of the brush and everything after is merely "correction." But I can't find that quote, so here's a longer one:
"No, I don't have a specific picture in my mind's eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture...I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself."

And from the other side of the art spectrum, here's something similar from the pop singer Lucky Fonz III in today's Volkskrant (https://lnkd.in/eKiVxFsn):
"One of the best things about writing music is that you just write something off-the-cuff, but if you look at it from a distance, it looks like a distillation of everything that's been running around your head. It's a wonder."
It strikes me as misleading to look for meaning in artist intention, whether human or not. The meaning, value, interest and wonder happen when someone "looks at it from a distance," not when it's made.

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