AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
Still, AI is able to “create” new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
“Roomba in the style of Van Gogh” is a new combination of existing things, but it can never create something truly original. Derivative.
What is an example of something that is truly original and not derivative?
The style of an authors prose is not derivative. Read your favorite book and then tell an ai to write a short story in the style of that author.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
An excellent example will be some sort of pulp novel where the author uses canned phrases. Dan Abbnet has a very repetitive style that lends itself well to ai, yet ai can not write a convincing Ciaphas Cain story. Convincing as in, if you showed it to me and i didnt know what ai was, i wouldnt think it was fanfiction.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
I dont feel like it but here is something I wrote with original prose, fitting the criteria of originality. As a favor for me arguing with you, please give me feedback on my prose
Not to talk down to you, but do you know what prose means? I actually used to not know what that word means so its not an embarassing thing to not know. That might be why I percieve you as “talking past me.” Prose is a writer’s style and choice of language. So purple prose is writing in an overly flowerly and annoying way. Every writer, regardless of talent and skill, has original prose. I think the only amount of practice required to be able to achieve this is to write enough to have a consistent style. So since you completed public school you also probably meet the criteria.
I have done the specific experiment I suggested using Dan Abbnet’s works with Chat GPT because I consider Dan to be my favorite author who makes repetitive pulpy fiction that I think AI idealy should be able to replicate, but it really can’t.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
That’s because the state of AI is “not good”. It’s nothing to do with being incapable of originality. Every word in that book has been written somewhere else. Write a book entirely comprised of brand new words and the reader won’t be able to understand it.
Originality is not binary, it exists on a scale. AI is just not very far up the scale just yet.
But all of human creation is derivative.