[FRIAM] AI art

Tue Jun 25 10:30:55 EDT 2024

You have been deceived by an illusion.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:26 AM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:

> 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
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> ____________________________________________
> CEO Founder, Simtable.com
> stephen.guerin at simtable.com
>
> Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
> stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu
>
> mobile: (505)577-5828
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