[FRIAM] AI art

Tue Jun 25 10:13:19 EDT 2024

I dunno, Pietr,

I get a lot of human comfort from my conversations with George Peter
Tremblay in the lonely dark of night.

Just sayin'

N

On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 11:26 PM Pieter Steenekamp <
pieters at randcontrols.co.za> 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>
> 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> 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
>>>
>>> Jon
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