Should we allow for AI-generated fiction writing?
- Thread starter Sgt_G
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That's my point. It's detrimental to developing any skills other than typing a prompt in.
As others have said, AI-generated media cannot be stopped, is already winning awards and praise from people who assumed it was made by humans, and is rapidly becoming increasingly difficult to detect, so whether it's allowed is irrelevant.
Also, creativity does not require sentience or sapience. Evolution is a highly creative process with no sentience or sapience behind it. Training an AI on existing content is no different from training a human on existing content. Neither is theft.
Also, creativity does not require sentience or sapience. Evolution is a highly creative process with no sentience or sapience behind it. Training an AI on existing content is no different from training a human on existing content. Neither is theft.
This discussion is not entirely about the quality of the work. For human written stories, a human put hard work into. For AI stories, they automatically generated things, but are getting just as much credit as a human, nonetheless. This is flawed.
Evolution is not creative. It's random. It tries everything, and whatever sticks sticks.
It is creative in the most literal sense.
Serendipitously, the story in Star Trek Beagle Episode 3 - Yours Is No Disgrace (currently being posted here) is very much about AI gone awry.
i have already written and posted the full episode elsewhere and alas, I did not think about it at the time, but it would have been a fun and clever irony for me to use an AI program to write a few short passages of this story...
Thanks!! rbs
i have already written and posted the full episode elsewhere and alas, I did not think about it at the time, but it would have been a fun and clever irony for me to use an AI program to write a few short passages of this story...
Thanks!! rbs
Are we certain of that? Or is it that we just can't imagine a mind other than our own? For thousands of years, we have always assumed animals, other than Human, had no sentience. Many of us still do. However, recent observations have show pretty concretely that elephants, orca, and other creatures care deeply for their family members, crows have creativity enough to actually fashion tools for specific, complex tasks. Animals teach each other skills and culture, such as hunting techniques, specific and regional songs, and they chimpanzees, as well at other primates, dogs, etc. have a sense of fairness and experience jealousy and embarrassment.
To assume that, in the extraordinarily complex dynamics of nature, which includes sentient beings, there can be no thought, no creativity, no self-awareness, is concluding that there is no such thing as electricity because we have never seen an electron.
Like art, creativity is a matter of definition and perspective. There have been art movements founded in randomness. "the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality,"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
-Will
Natural selection is certainly not a conscious process but rather an unconscious, iterative process which creates the illusion of conscious thought but upon close examination is seen taking routes no intelligent designer would. The process which led to consciousness is not conscious itself (yet also not random).
Very true. The theory of Natural Selection is tautological. But, are we certain that is all that is going on? If so, how could we describe learning as anything but randomly trying everything and only repeating that which is successful?
Of course, now one needs to define successful, as well as discuss motivation. Why try anything at all? We often talk about Nature as though it has reason a motivation. This species developed this adaptation to better accomplish..., Nature is reacting to the poisons humans put in the...
You get the picture. What if AI actually was given motivation? I mean, its own reason for acting. AI is just a human tool until it begins to make decisions for its own reasons outside of human desires. Now we are talking a good scifi plot.
-Will
Couldn't have stated it more succinctly myself. An over-arching creative intelligence, while not impossible, is neither necessary nor explanatory and, sans evidence, generally ruled out per Occam's Razor.
More to the point of this discussion, the artificial is a subset of the natural and subject to the same creative processes. AI does not need to be conscious to become impressively creative. It simply needs to learn by trial and error and feedback. Whoever doesn't think Ai can become a great, creative writer should try playing chess against one.
As a computer scientist and physicist, it annoys me the way the popular media portrays AI. AI is not intelligence any more than rolling a die. AI is just a die that a data scientist took and loaded so it landed on the right side most of the time.
I think AI crossed the Rubicon when we started having to convince computers that we're not one based on our ability to identify pieces of motorcycles, bridges, and/or crosswalks.
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
That sort of flies in the face of the distinction between intelligence and sentience, doesn't it? My own compute science professor defined Artificial Intelligence as, "a system (computer) that did what it should." However, that could describe any designed system that worked as intended.
There's that word 'intended' or 'should'. Doesn't that imply a motivation or goal as determined by a conscious mind? Artificial Intelligence was originally conceptualized as a perfect mimicry of human Intelligence. The Turing Test is fundamentally flawed in that Intelligence doesn't have to be human-like. However, I would argue that an intelligent system has to do more than just work as it should.
Intelligence implies finding solutions to problem without experience.
It must be able to synthesize something unique from whatever data, models, logic available, without having an exact replica of the product it produces to emulate. Simply following a branch of a decision tree to get to a concussion is not the same as building a new branch to that tree.
As a computer scientist myself, I don't know why that would annoy you. Science fiction is all about the mental experiment. Mostly it's a what if..., then how would society deal?
In the movie Ex Machina, a brilliant computer scientist was given the task of determining whether or not the AI had sentience. In other words, did it pass the Turing Test. While the scientist fell for the thesis, in the end, the machine didn't pass the Turing Test because it was constrained by its programmed motivation. It had to achieve the goal given it by its programmer. Once the goal was achieved, there was nothing of the intelligence any more, just an android standing on a street corner.
-Will
By the way, @Disposable_Ensign, as a physicist, you might enjoy my thread on The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...
It would be good to have another physicist participating. The other one is not me, by the way. I'm just an interested artist and part time philosopher.
-Will
It would be good to have another physicist participating. The other one is not me, by the way. I'm just an interested artist and part time philosopher.
-Will
Exactly. A lot of proponents of AI will say, "well, humans are just loaded dice too", but that ignores the very definition of intelligence.
I'm sorry I meant the news and pop science magazines, not fiction, of course.
In the world of fantasy and science fiction, where imagination plays a key role, the introduction of artificial intelligence into the storytelling process raises many questions. Some may believe that using AI to generate a basic plot, which is then edited by a human, is perfectly acceptable as it is simply a tool to assist and not a replacement for the creative process.
The surface (Step 6 of Scott McCloud's six steps of art) is the most meaningless phase. Generating the plot is the key creative involvement of the writer (Step 4). Having AI generate a plot for you is forfeiting the creative process.
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