... showing us
this:
But that is
not incredible. Everything is credible now that we know A.I. does things like that. It's no more incredible than movies, which amazed people at one time, and in fact, right now, what A.I. did to those famous paintings is
worse than any random few seconds in a well-made movie because it is in low taste and it is a step down from the artist's vision, which froze one moment and presented it to signify everything in the surrounding moments. Unfreezing that moment is utterly banal, and it misunderstands what the painting offers, which is to activate our mind about whatever might relate to that picture.
A.I. steps in and generates the next few seconds in the most obvious and superficial way. Let's have the Girl with a Pearl Earring break out of her subtle expression and into a modern-day movie-star smile. There, now, you are relieved from contemplating the mystery of human emotion and entertained by the comfortable reminder that when young beautiful women smile they are simply fantastic.
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78 comments:
At some point technology will get so good you can just tell the ai, “make me a social media platform in the style of twitter” and it will do it.
Probably the worst one is the Van Gough. Popping in cartoon characters. LOL.
Rule 34 applies. Be prepared to be apalled.
Not just a modern day movie star smile - she was turned into a fucking monster.
My phone already does that Harry Potter thing of having the pictures move a bit and I find it annoying.
Chopin 2nd nocturne, taking repeats.
I thought some of that was cool. Tho -the Vermeer pearl ear-ring girl smile- NOT at all realistic. Probably not many straight-teeth/white-toothed smiles back then.
Movies are bad because story telling is bad. Hollywood is woke leftist lecture central. Even when Hollywood isn't basting us in the juices of their propaganda, - there is nothing fresh to offer. No amount of AI can help them.
Lame stale super-hero re-runs, cliche syrup, woke-lectures, over-the-top violence, and re-runs with yet more tired politically laced narratives.
"Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it." - CaptainSQL
I just glad they didn't include The Scream.
We are already in a multi decade experiment to change reality, history, and public opinion via the media. AI has already shown that it can do Winston Smiths job at the Ministry of Truth faster, and more efficiently.
Well said. Elon is a bit too enamored with some of his toys, AI and FSD for one or two…
Renoir boating party, it violated his all women's faces the same rule with a blonde lady that turns up seated in the distance on the left at the very end.
It appears that the boy watering plants has more water coming out than the cans can hold. Some forty years ago a genius named Doug Lenat got interested in the problem of teaching "common sense" to AI. Things like water taking the shape of its container, gravity pulling in a downward direction, the sort of stuff we humans pretty much learn by age two. The point is that AI will not learn these basic, "common sense" facts from scanning literature because humans don't have to tell each other that, for instance, letting go of an item will cause it to fall (unless you're on board the ISS) or pouring water from one container into another will cause the water to change its shape but not its volume or weight. Among his famous quotes is the following: "Intelligence is ten million rules."
And IMAO between birth and kindeergarten we've learned about half of them.
The biggest and most lucrative application of this will be in the Porn industry. Unfortunately.
Lighten up, Fra...ANN...cis!
Manet's Olympia sniffs her armpit, and the black servant says, "Peeyew!"
AI image generation and text-to-video are in their infancy. I’m experimenting with both. These are tools. Humans will improve at using them, and the tools themselves will improve.
I immediately thought of the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the beautiful ghostly maiden turned into a snarling demon skull.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APF3SO9tqE&t=175s
AI can play Napoleon and the Girl with the Pearl Earring cheaper than Joaquin Phoenix or Scarlett Johansson can.
I did think the clip was incredible, though, and I usually don't like things. It suggests the ability to create an entire virtual environment like that of 19th century Paris. Artistically, it may not be worth much, but as sheer spectacle, it would be impressive -- and this is an age of spectacle and sensation and immediacy, not of artistic masterpieces.
Well said.
Amusing, but still has a ways to go - like the modern cars driving down the street in the caillebotte painting
It's early. Remember that this is a guy who crashed a lot of rockets along the way.
Not that it makes him an aesthete. It isn't a normal thing to "get" Bruckner, for example.
"The biggest and most lucrative application of this will be in the Porn industry."
Connect it to your robotic shorts and completely surrender your humanity. Good luck!
I don't think AI could think up a Dali painting, and AI would probably have difficulty animating some of Picasso's portraits.......Still painters have been around for centuries, and AI is ten minutes old. Miracles are boring, but AI is miraculous......Years ago I remember seeing DeMille's Ten Commandments. It had a wow factor. One used to go to movies for the spectacle, but nowadays the spectacular is commonplace. The last few Marvel movies were kind of boring. One thing though, the fights are getting better. You didn't use to be able to slam your opponent to a concrete floor and twist his arm off. CGI allows you to do those things. The arterial blood spurts are quite realistic.
"Connect it to your robotic shorts and completely surrender your humanity. Good luck!"
thanks for the AM laugh.
Serious Questions:
With Porn as it is Today; what purpose is there, for regular women?
With AI as it will be Tomorrow; what purpose is there, for Actual porn stars?
Humanity is DOOMED.. Humanity will self extinct
This reminds me of the way CGI ruined movies. It used to be interesting to watch scenes done with traditional special effects. Watch Fredric March turn from Dr. Jeckyll to Mr. Hyde in 1931 — here. But who cares about these transformations and difficult feats now that anything can be realized in what looks like photography? I really don't care what they've thought up to show.
for The Majority of today's young women; their hopes and dreams are to become an rich Only Fans girl..
Those hopes and dreams are trashed by AI
Elon Musk is a Peter Pan — a permanent boy, jumping about, excited about toys.
Would humbly submit that the benefit will be when people who think outside the box (like you Ann) can have their ideas put into visual reality (aka the above suggestion) as opposed to just corporate blandness seen in linked video.
Those kids are on your lawn again.
The Elon Musk painting animations reminds me of the newspapers in the Harry Potter movies.
I clicked the link. Watched the video before reading this post. This post sums up exactly my response too. It is interesting in a pedestrian way but it also is deceptively real. People smile and move differently in different cultures, expressions and responses here are imposed. We think we know and see but we see only what our era imposed on the past. It's colonizing the images of the past for our own kitsch amusement. But the past aren't the fools.
But it is the future and is where things are going so no reason to be the radio fan shaking a fist at the moving picture box.
Well put Althouse. The moment is gone. It is no longer art.
But the truth is that the art world long ago abandoned itself to schlock and empty souled performance expression. So bringing back the old art might be better for the contemporary soul. We don't need the little card to tell us how to think amd feel about this AI work
Althouse you should start a companion blog that takes your daily post prompts but is written entirely by AI. Call it AIthouse
We could have AI commenter's respond.
1. Real moving pictures. The triumph of technique over purpose.
2. AI will continue to excel at replacing the college-educated workforce.
Meh.
Vermeer woulda done it, if he coulda
Regardless of the majority snark here, I found this very interesting. It reminded me of the innovative and incredibly beautiful full-length animation film called "Loving Vincent" (2017) that used a rotoscope technique mixing live action with animated action in the milieu and style of Vincent Van Gogh (by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman).
Each of the film's 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, created using the same techniques as Van Gogh by a team of 125 artists drawn from around the globe. Really a brilliant artistic accomplishment.
or The Majority of today's young women; their hopes and dreams are to become an rich Only Fans girl..
Those hopes and dreams are trashed by AI
Actually, I disagree. In the short run, AI will allow people to customize their porn fetishes, creating a dip in the only fans market since they may not be able to fulfil certain fantasies. And fantasy is what it is all about. (Note how some Only fans stars are well outside the normal of attractiveness because it is the unusual that is the driver for the triggering of stimuli.) New and novel is a required element, much like the issue with certain drugs, once you experience it, you need more to reach the same level of effect.
So, with AI porn, it will drive some extreme fetishes that can't be easily performed live, but eventually, that too will fail to satisfy and there will be a resurgence to the real person since that is the only real novel experience. Of course, real copulation can never be eclipsed by porn, but it suffers from the fact that laws restrict transactional sex, and for non-transactional, you have to invest a large amount of personal effort to deal with another person's personal challenges. People gravitate toward porn because real relationships are hard.
"... in fact, right now, what A.I. did to those famous paintings is worse than any random few seconds in a well-made movie ...".
You're starting to catch on.
This reminds me of something I read many years ago, when Bill Gates was Wunderkind of tech. He talked about designing a fully-networked house that would "play your favorite song every time you walked into the room."
That struck me then- an still does- as completely shallow vision of what music is and aspires to be. What if your 'favorite song' changes over time? What if it's not appropriate to the moment?
What if you don't want to listen to it while you take a shit?
It's banal
My one big complaint with Elon Musk is that he seems to get blinded by technology. Technology is great, but it's not that great. In fact, AI has some pretty serious downsides to it.
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” ~ Immanuel Kant
That lesson applies to all would-be humanity straighteners: whether they be Bolshevik revolutionaries or AI evangelists.
There, now, you are relieved from contemplating the mystery of human emotion and entertained by the comfortable reminder that when young beautiful women smile they are simply fantastic.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I agree. We should probably get used to it.
He did fight the pirates
He is in many respects like Syndrome in The Incredibles, a brilliant boy (without the psychological issues). We are very fortunate that he seems to have decided to enlist his talents on the side of humanity (not personal power).
That may be selling Elon short. He does seem to be quite well aware of the potential downsides. It would be hard to focus on the downsides when you know exactly how to make it do what you want.
Musk is shooting himself in the foot. His point seems to be that we can engage the pictures more by watching then move.
But what we lose, literally, is human invention, technological evolution, and how it affects us and changes us. Think of the (Impressionist?) painting with a steam engine in the background. There are worlds of information in that picture. You see the dawn of the industrial age. You see humans, and the artist, none knowing what is to come, but literally participating in the new and old worlds engaging each other. In their time, not ours. In their technology, not ours.
OK. AI. Now do Nude "Descending a Staircase, No. 2" Duchamp.
Had a short AI discussion with my 21 year old last night; he's just home for Thanksgiving break. He pointed out that AI is useless for the Humanities, because by their name they are about human interactions, thoughts, emotions, etc. Add AI into them and they stop being the humanities. Ditto for all the Liberal Arts, really - once you take something that is meant for a free people and you give it to a machine, it ceases to exist in its meaningful form.
If this is what 3.5 years of studying Classics, Literature and Latin in a fairly conservative environment gets me for my money, I have to say I'm well-pleased.
No. No. No.
The Oscar-winning special effects in "An American Werewolf in London" were memorably, horrifyingly realistic. There was not the slightest contribution from AI/CGI in those days. All done with props, prosthetics, and makeup, with none of the "uncanny valley" effect of computerized simulation. It's a shame that this field is likely to become as dead as hand-painted cels for animation.
The evil Captain Hooks of our despicable, monstrous, worthless occupation government are going to get him sooner or later on some bullshit technicality.
Artists 'froze one moment' because they had no choice. And Elon said 'will be' not 'is.'
I think that we should be comforted that AI does these things "in the most obvious and superficial way." That's what AI is meant to be--a workhorse.
If AI starts getting creative, then we have real problems. It's like the self-driving cars decide to start drag racing.
Baby steps to get to something worthy of the Enterprise Holodeck.
The most off-putting CGI is airplanes that wiggle to indicate liveness. The CGI guys have never flown in formation, apparently. You never see a wiggle, just movement as a whole to the side or up or down. A direction-pointed change shows up hundreds of times sooner as such a movement than as a direction pointed. Midway (trailer) cuts are the worst offender.
AA is completely missing the point, what is mind-blowing is the technology that makes this happen, that artificial intelligence is doing it and is capable of doing it. It's not about the result, it is about the process.
People forget how recently the AI they are complaining about was born. I’d say it’s doing pretty well for a five-year-old.
I’m looking forward to twenty years from now, when I can say, “Hey, ChatGPT 12.0, I’ve got some wall space to fill. Make me a copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Only make it better than the original.”
And it does.
This reminds me of the late 80s when Ted Turner colorized the black and white classics. So much destruction
AI is applied statistics. It’s genuinely amazing that these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text. But that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy.
Language is a way of facilitating interactions with other humans. That is entirely different than the sort of next-token prediction, which is what we have with AI tools now.
I remember the film Cast Away. On his island, Tom Hanks has a volleyball called Wilson, his only companion, whom he loves. I think that that is a more useful way to think about these systems. It doesn’t diminish what Hanks’ character feels about Wilson, because Wilson provided genuine comfort to him. But the thing is that he is projecting on to a volleyball. There’s no one else in there.
But ultimately, what makes our lives meaningful is the empathy and intent we get from human interactions — people responding to one another. With AI, it feels like there’s someone on the other end. But there isn’t.
This somewhat feels like what A.I. as a whole does. It takes already existing things, and it modifies them, adds to them, or combines them, but it doesn't really truly create anything. It doesn't mean AI won't be useful, people should just temper expectations. Somewhat related, it seems like hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into AI recently , which means investors are expecting trillions in new revenue from that. I'm not certain all that revenue will manifest.
"Analyze the votes in Congress and tell me which one of the Congressman has been compromised and is voting only because he is being blackmailed."
Do ya'll think there is ANY WAY IN HELL we are ever going to see the REAL AI ... or based on your knowledge of history, do you think it's far more probable that the peons will get the stupidest AI on the planet to draw pictures for them while the rich use AI to analyse the entire stock market and tell them what the price of Tesla will be in 1 year?
I'm not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but a friend said something about that that has always stuck with me: give the products of Hollywood the same care and consideration that Hollywood gave to its great source materials in the books and plays of the past--exactly zero.
“This somewhat feels like what A.I. as a whole does. It takes already existing things, and it modifies them, adds to them, or combines them, but it doesn't really truly create anything.”
Isn’t that exactly what an artist does?
You might be surprised how many human interactions, thoughts, and emotions are derived from internalized templates, not to mention the genetic component to it all.
"The medium is the message"
McLuhan also postulated that every emerging form of media starts by processing the cultural heritage from old media: movies fed on printed books, printed books fed on manuscripts, manuscripts fed on verbal lore…
I think Musk is excited by technology, not arts.
Isn’t that exactly what an artist does?
Maybe sometimes, and perhaps even most of the time if we are talking about artists working in a commercial setting where they have to constantly be putting out a product, but artists are still working from a point of understanding. even if imperfectly so, of how their words, images, sounds, textures, or whatever medium they are working with will interact with human perception and the human mind to create an experience. AI seems like random perturbations thrown together and pushed in certain directions by directives from an algorithm. There is no intent or consideration behind it. At least in this sense, creation always seemed like an intentional act to me.
I don't care, as long as he gets us to Mars.
That very first one showed up on Jeopardy! today.
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