Where do we start?
Where do we start?
Good morning, afternoon, or evening! If it's later than that, go to sleep. This email can wait.
Research
In the last few months, I have collected plenty of reading material about large learning models, the AI hype, and creativity. I'm still processing them (it's a lot), so for now I'm linking to Molly White's article because it captured my doubts about all this.
"I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things?[...] If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them?"
Do we want more generated images? We add pictures everywhere to please the feed algorithms, but that's driven by all the engagement product metrics of the attention economy1. And those metrics are not aligned with our needs. (Wait, I have talked about this before!) It's consuming time, energy, and resources from humans and machines to add, well, visual noise.
Obviously, not all generated art is noise, artists worked with neural networks way before the hype. However, that’s not the current majority of the use cases, is it?
Drawing
These days I mostly do live drawings and doodles. Expanding my visual vocabulary. Feeding my biological neural network. And get coffee in nice places, while enjoying the almost-summer weather in Berlin, when it's the nicest to be here.
If you can correctly guess in the next 2 weeks where these trees are, I'll invite you for coffee/tea/etc at this place.
The current version of generative AI is a logical continuation of the attention economy, as Meredith Whittaker points out.