[FRIAM] AI art

[glen]

I was teaching a couple of kids (8 and 6, I think) at the pub the other night. I don't like kids. But it is an interesting task to try to draw out their "look ahead" skills. The 8 yr old definitely has them already. But from conversations with their mom, it seems clear they're high on conscientiousness and neuroticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits The 6 yr old seems to have more of the open and extravert traits.

On 6/24/24 20:26, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Jon and Nick,
> 
> How do I like this!
> 
> I'm sure there are AI resources that can technically outperform Nick in teaching Jon how to play chess - but that will miss the human relationship component. It's okay to play chess against AI, but it surely is not the same as to play with other humans!
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 at 05:10, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Jon,
> 
>     I will teach you chess (};-)]
> 
>     I have played the game for 81 years.   I play it the way I do most things in my life, sloppily and with inordinate  reflection.  For me, the game is a conversation about the accumulation and exercise of power  That conversation can go on at any level and is best played by people of roughly equal skill.  When played repeatedly with the same person, it's like a long running conversation between good friends. It's delicious.
> 
>     Nick
> 
>     On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 2:07 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         Chess tends to have a pretty specific culture relative to other similar games. Often whenever I find chess happening in public spaces I will stop to watch a game and occasionally a player will ask if I play. I don't play chess, but I know enough of the rules that I enjoy speculating as to what I might do in a given board position or what the players might be thinking themselves. Typically, my response is that I do not play, that I would love to learn and I would love a teaching game. Players almost never take me up on the offer. I get the feeling that teaching games are not part of the culture, at least not here in the United States. I get the strong feeling that this is because chess players tend not to see the game as beautiful, something to be intimate with and share. The only teaching game I have received to date was from a Georgian who I believe does see the game as beautiful. While I am not a chess player, my love of go gives me an appreciation for strategy
>         games and I find that the audience for public displays of these games are typically others who engage in speculation similarly.
> 
>         It really doesn't matter to me whether or not I am watching a human game or not. My go server, for instance, is deep in the Turing challenge. The server offers not only the opportunity to play mostly anonymous games with others, but also to be a spectator to live games on the server. It is often completely unclear as to the ontological status of the players and lines of differentiation can be drawn nearly everywhere. There are degrees of cyborg, degrees of experimentation versus repertoire, degrees of deception at nearly every level. My go playing friends and I will sometimes attempt to guess the nature of the bot we are witnessing, the degree to which it is MCMC or DCN or simply someone's idea of an entertaining and completely top down rules based engine.
> 
>         When I watch games between strong professionals online (sometimes on servers, NHK, or Twitch) there can sometimes be a significant difference in the rankings of both players. The stronger player is in effect giving a teaching game to the weaker. Often both players are part of the same study group within their organization and while both are interested in winning the match, they both have a dedication to a kind of scientific discovery of the game. They are helping each other to see further. I have no hope of seeing what they see, but in my engagement with their game I am hoping to also see further.
> 
>         Perhaps a year ago now, I mentioned on this forum a discussion I had with Michael Redmond 9-dan on his twitch stream, late one night. He made it clear to me that while the strongest AI bots on the planet are very good, they likely can only see 10-15% into the game of go. At the time of Lee Sedol's retirement games (in which he chose to play a specially made AI), the strongest players on the planet were 30 points weaker than AI. Today, with AI study and related narrative construction, humans have reduced the gap to 10 points. Further, AlphaGo discovered new joseki by exploring directions long thought (200 years or more) to be deadends. Strong players have since learned to understand these openings and those that play them tend to win more often than those that don't. This suggests to me that the AI is capable of finding large scale optimizations that we can leverage beyond being simply local, tactical and narrowly defined computational advantage.
> 
>         The Go community (and here I mean strong amateurs to top professionals) study with AI, play with AI (competitively and collaboratively), and seem to accept AI as both a partner and a tool. I sometimes watch MassGo on Twitch play games where each player chooses a particular AI engine and uses their engine to suggest three top moves. Then the players choose for themselves the move that they find most interesting. Once the game is over they review, co-constructing narratives alongside a third AI analysis tool. I am not sure this kind of thing happens in the chess world, but it does remind me a lot of the kinds of human-computer interactions that do happen in art.
> 
>         I suspect that in the long run, for those communities open enough, purity will matter less and less, while a refinement for what is novel and interesting will become more diverse and specific. In many ways, I believe that it is what we want from studying a game and the agency our tools afford us that determines the excitement we feel in engaging those tools. At present, I am happy with the new directions my community is advancing alongside these AI tools.
> 
>         Last and tangentially, I assume many here have already listened to the recent Ezra Klein podcast with Holly Herndon. I appreciate the sensibility Holly brings to not only uses of AI in art, but also the clarity with which she seems to understand her own relationship to art in general. The podcast begins with Ezra highlighting that mimicry is the present and dominating state-of-affairs for AI art, but that there are some who are pushing to create something we can more honestly call generative.
> 
>         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MJ2D9uCLLA&t=2374s&ab_channel=NewYorkTimesPodcasts <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MJ2D9uCLLA&t=2374s&ab_channel=NewYorkTimesPodcasts>
> 


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