[FRIAM] AI art

Tue Jun 25 10:25:48 EDT 2024

2 months ago, Nick and I had a nice in-person visit talking weather and
ocassionally using George to bridge our vocabularies and understandings.

As I was leaving, I asked Nick if he were stranded on an island and could
only have one conversational companion, would he pick me or George.

It was one of the larger laughs I've received from Nick - the realization
for both of us that we were not even close seconds :-)

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:13 AM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>>>> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>>> archives:  5/2017 thru present
>>>> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>>>>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>>
>>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>>> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>>> archives:  5/2017 thru present
>>> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>>>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>>
>> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
>> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>> archives:  5/2017 thru present
>> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
____________________________________________
CEO Founder, Simtable.com
stephen.guerin at simtable.com

Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu

mobile: (505)577-5828
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240625/f453f484/attachment.html>