AI: Your New Creative Muse? with Douglas Eck

Amazing talk, best host I have ever heard, so interested in the topic and allowing the guest to talk.❤ the setup is so mint, and the slight angle of the cameras (table)is really refreshing

Prof Fry. Thank you for hosting these and asking excellent excellent questions and pushing these experts to really tell us how they are thinking about these ideas and problems. Kudos to you for keeping these intellectually stimulating instead of letting them turn into a giant ad for google.

It would be Exceedingly great to interview sundai puchai!

I Tried to have a conversation with an arts Professors at uni on AI and arts and was frustrating (by how I handle it, I guess). This video for sure will be my friend to carry on my attempts. I Think that watched something but invite teacher from Uppsala University, would be great.

This was a pretty remarkable talk. Doug Eck is one of the most thoughtful people working in AI right now.

The Ai host voice can be used for Ai voice assistant. Her voice is unique in tone and sound. 😎💯💪🏾👍🏾

Incredible speaker and host. WOW

Jaron Lanier as a suggestion for a guest. Thank you.

The “prompt whisper” Douglas mentions is like a writer for the J. Peterman catalog! From Seinfeld!

Magenta was a sneak peak as a jamming partner. Are you aware of any gen AI projects that function as a live AI jamming partner?

AI art is in an uncanny valley, where the AI can sometimes draw/write/sing extremely well but it has very little understanding of what it's making. Without understanding, there can't be any meaning behind the art at all, and the AI will make tons of ridiculous mistakes. Then once AGI arrives, the art will have tons of meaning, but we'll have such a huge quantity of AGI art that we won't even know what to do with it all.

Cool!

Did anyone notice how crowded the balloon baskets are? Not sure if a balloon would host a party like this?! 😶‍🌫

Interesting!

Great!

I’m Raya Wang, Senior AI Data Marketing Manager at COL Group. May I ask if your company has any needs for data collection, annotation, or Dataset（(multi-domain, multi-industry, and multi-modal data）? If so, I would be happy to discuss how we can support your projects. May I ask which e-maili/person should I contact, if we want to be the suppliers of your company? Thank you so much for your kind reply and I look forward to the opportunity to collaborate.

the timecodes are out of sync

It's pretty amazing what AI can do when you give it a theme, for example; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzU9Vg3R2og

Question: If I take a childs crayons and replace them with an AI that makes their art for them- have I given them something, or have I taken something away? By giving them access to a technology that interposes it's own structure and interpretation on their creativity have I not taken something vital and alive and reduced it to a moribund statistical mediocrity? We all know the answer to this- but there's just too much money in play for that answer to really matter. All the rest is self serving humbug. The idea that superior text and languge handling ability will result in enhanced control of image generating AI is incorrect because it is based on the idea that words can be used to accurately and precisely define images. If that were true I could send only a written description of my face to a portrait painter and from that text alone they could paint my likeness- is this in fact the case? No- of coure not. Visual artists do not engage with their works via the crude medium of written langauge- they operate on the canvas or the clay or the screen with tools that directly implement their artistic intent - this process is non linguistic in it's very essence. Reading a text descrption of the Mona Lisa is not seeing the painting- this should be obvious- just as it should be obvious that no matter how sophisiticated an AI's understanding of written langauge may be this will not enable a text prompt to replace the subtle and non linguistic relationship between the visual artist and their tools. For this reason image generators are doomed to forever fall short, because they fill that gap between the words of the prompt and the intent of the user with their own very special brand of dross- derivative statisical padding that is already becoming a visual cliche- we already talk about the 'AI Art' look and as more and more of this 'art' is made it's presence will become more and more apparent. Machines cannot be creative because creativity begins with intent. The perverse irony of the LLM is that it has superhuman language capability combined with a total absence of intent- they will never create anything truly novel or inspiring because there is nothing they desire to communicate- It's almost too symetrically ironic that machines so capable of fashioning words have nothing to say. Also can we please stop pushing the bizzare notion that a technology defined by autonomus action can at the same time be a perfect vehicle for self expression? Surely it should be obvious that AI is the very antithesis of unique personal expression. We don't need AI for that, we can pick up a paintbrush or a musical instrument. The entire value of AI is precisely that it is NOT under our complete control- and if that is true then whatever we create using AI is at best a collaboration and at worst a parody. But even that best interpretation is flawed because if everyone is filtering their unique creativity through the same black box then the outcome is not more diversity but convergence- there is no such thing as an unbiased AI- so if everyone is using the same handful of biased AI's as a conduit through which they seek to express their own unique creativity can we not see the lnevitable consequnce? Yes that's right- everyone's works start to exhibit the same biases that are inherent in the machines they are using to create that work- the result is not enhanced diversity of expression but the opposite- a subtle yet pervasive sameness creeps into the mix- we end up with a monculture in which the very expression of ideas themselves is 'democratised' via the dead things to which we have ceded our own vitality. For the avoidence of doubt i do not think AI will do anything to enhance the creativity of our culture- on the contrary I think it's likely limpact will be to solidify and perpetuate the past upon which it has been trained, and as a result it will exert a malign and deadening influence on the future.

Here's my take on all this hyper focus on AI's creative abilities (Sora, Suno, Flux, etc): It's all a giant distraction that will prove to be utter fluff once the TRUE capabilities are unleashed. People either 1) have no clue or 2) don't want to have a clue re: what is really coming- how unthinkable the changes will be. Ask yourself- why SO much focus on a field that come on, typically gets a societal sneer: creativity, artists, etc. (I am one too, but I still get how the world works). The answer is it's all just shiny, pretty distractions which will be less than meaningless once true AGI, and certainly ASI is here. In short- we have NO IDEA WHAT IS COMING- only that we will very likely not recognize this current world- within 5-10 years MAX.