[FRIAM] AI art

Stephen Guerin stephen.guerin at simtable.com
Tue Jun 25 10:41:26 EDT 2024 

Frank, you are easily my first choice over a soccer ball.


On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:30 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> You have been deceived by an illusion.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/140+Calle+Ojo+Feliz,++Santa+Fe,+NM+87505?entry=gmail&source=g>
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/140+Calle+Ojo+Feliz,++Santa+Fe,+NM+87505?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> 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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____________________________________________
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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