Cheryl is doing research for her MFA class at Concordia on Art and AI.
Here is the link to an intriguing essay she came across:
(In order to survive, but more importantly to thrive, in the age of algorithms, we need to cultivate a deep respect for algorithmic literacy and the capacity to ‘read’ the impact of computational influences on our work – not necessarily to resist those influences, but to understand them and use them to become better humans.)
Ed Finn author of What Algorithms Want
Hey Fred,
Link didn’t work for me so I searched it:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic-creativity
I agree with Gary Kasparov, the “algos” enhance or, in the current jargon, “augment” our abilities. The benefit is evident in things like speechmaking and debating. But in “art” we become savvy about, and wary of, the artifice and it smacks of art objects like canned music and preloaded fonts. People are still easily fooled though. I heard Jagmeet Singh today on the radio using the word “affordability” and it sounded as though an algo of millennial preoccupations had fed him the word. Trump’s speeches sometimes sound like weird aggregations of algo-prescribed words: “win,” “stupid,” “weak,” “loser,” “smart,” “tough,” “dangerous.” A robot or puppet might simply be a sociopath who is easily programmed. He doesn’t even need to be articulate, just able to deliver incoherent clusters of prescribed words. The sad thing is in politics or art we may all be reduced to puppeting the output of “intelligent” machines.
Thanks Jesse for pointing out the link failure. It is corrected now.
I suspect I have been subverted by the output of “intelligent machines”
and that it has become an integral part of my ego.
Inhabiting two worlds at once, the old arts and crafts
model with the online thingy.
I kinda think that, way back, there were probably folks that went around saying that “that artist is overtaken by this new fangled perspective thing” or “It’s all about oils now”. Pretty much the same way that books/authorship became a thing in the 15th century. Even Plato had difficulty with the plusses and minuses of writing and memory.
I move between thinking this is a non-issue — because it is a routine feature of life — and we’re not quite looking at this right. AI\computers are machines. All machines [technologies] permit us to do things in a usually easier fashion, and they also allow us to think about the ways we organize life. So a tool will automate tasks, but this frees us to “move up a logical level” and work on tasks that can be done with a series of automated tasks. We spend less time on simple calculations, and more with organization of simple calculations, a version of Kasperov’s point.
There are two fears. One is will algorithms take over life. The other is that we might find out algorithms are life. Neither stress me, and I think the latter is more the case than some folks might wish, and probably worries them more than the former. In either case, the human capability to “surprise” as the author says will kick in, tho he seems to blithely think this notion needs no explanation. It may be just another level of algorithm that is emerging and yet to be reversed engineered. Or, it may be something else, something he takes for granted, but doesn’t really explain how this might be outside computation.
A few years ago, the American science-fiction author Bruce Sterling helped to champion the idea of the ‘new aesthetic’, predicated on the ‘eruption of the digital into the physical’.
Don’t know if Jess remembers this moment, but a few years ago we were at a conference in Victoria. On the way downtown to where we were staying, we passed by this marsh by the sea. In the marsh were a number of herons. Each of them were standing at random distances in exactly the same graceful, curved way. A serial aesthetic moment that was the eruption of the digital OUT OF the physical. No need to worry about this. It is just something else with which to create and to ponder the nature of existence.