Generative AI…Here is a test animation, a first playing around with Gen-1 and DALL-E.
I must say, it is fun to test these experimental systems out. From an aesthetic, technical, and formal point of view, as an artist, it feels very much like I’m collaborating with AI, which is to also say it feels like I’m collaborating with humanity on whose data and digital behaviors AI is trained on. Very cool. Essentially, you give generative AI some words, or some images or video, indicate some parameters, click the generate button, then voila, in a short time, you have some complex artistic results!
Never mind the black box of machine learning, now there is a black production box for artists, animators, and filmmakers! Who knows how it works? Who knows what the long term effects will be?
That said, it is all the rage for many other reasons. The recent international call for a pause on AI experiments is well explored in this Lex Fridman interview with physicist and AI researcher at MIT, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, Max Tegmark in a podcast called The Case for Halting AI Development. Tegmark raised issues with the need for deep international consideration, discussion, and regulation of AI experiments and deployment. The aim is to ensure humanity’s safety as we continue producing intelligence of a different order and that surpasses human abilities. I highly recommend listening to this talk.
I also greatly appreciated this brilliant discussion with Yuval Noah Harari—historian, philosopher, and author of the groundbreaking books Sapiens, and Homo Deus. Harari here shares his insights on humanity’s development of narration and collective belief systems, which led humans to become and remain the dominant species on Earth. In this context, he explores AI development, its uses, its potential future, and humankind’s safety. It is a discussion not to be missed.
I thought recently about how someone in the early 1800s would never have imagined that humans would be flying around the globe in airplanes. The harnassing of electricity that made creating powerful industrial machines possible was yet to come. So were cities, skyscrapers, automobiles, and plastic. All the things that radically reorganized human life on earth.
We stand today at the threshold of radical changes to come which are difficult for us to imagine. Generative AI, ML (machine learning), ANNs (artificial neural networks), LLMs (large language models), and many other AI experiments are all the rage, but these are just the first baby steps. Who knows what is to come? I hope we humans will proceed with awareness, insightful questioning, plus collective wellbeing as the motivation, while we move forward. The stakes are high in this next industrial revolution.