AI, Machine Learning and Human Creativity

very true. But um, you are a fiction writer, which I always try to mention on the episodes that you're not on so that you're not like somehow embarrassed or anything like that. But I try to plug Robert's books. Uh, And then I do comics and and in the past I've done music as well, and I didn't know that. Yeah, and you were you like in a band. You were in a band, right, Yeah. And I had a period of time I'm gonna talk about in this episode where

I dabbled with electronic music as well. Um, but yeah, so, but I was in a band for a couple of years. And Uh, there's this interesting thing going on right now that you saw when you went to the World Science Festival two weeks ago. That is sort of like trying to come to grips with what happens when you teach artificial intelligence or really, I guess the correct term is machine learning to be creative quote unquote, and like, how

do people feel about that? And you saw this amazing panel where they had people who were dabbling in that, both in music and culinary arts and drawing, and then they had the psychologist on the panel to who is like the skeptic kind of Yeah, yeah, this was a

really good, good panel. I saw it live at the World Science Festival this year, and if you're listening to this, you can watch it as well, because this one not all the talks are available on video, but this one is available on video, and I'll include a link to that talk on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot Com. But it was

titled Computational Creativity. He was moderated by w n y C S John Schaefer, and the panelist included artist Song Win Chung, computer scientists and musician Jesse Ingle, neuroscientist Peter

you Rock Say, and engineering theorist A lab of Varshney. Yeah, and so the four of them had this interesting discussion kind of a back and forth about what what they were experimenting with in terms of trying to teach machines to be creative, and then more along the lines of defining creativity, uh, systematizing creativity for human beings, so that you could somehow try to take that and apply it

to machines and algorithms. Uh. And that the that's where Peter Rix, say was sort of like the the neuroscientists, not naysayer really, but just like he was doubtful right because he was he could not see a way that quote unquote creativity as he understood it could be replicated uh in machines the way that the other three were pretty excited about. Yeah. He I guess if you were thinking of this as a like a jam band or something.

He was the guy with doing the jazzy solos, like all the other three had had really particular examples tied into their research, and then Say would come in and he'd just kind of he'd weigh a little bit. He had very interesting stuff to add to Yeah. Yeah, he was great, um, and it definitely brought some balance to it. So we thought, after you've seen it, you said, you

gotta check this out. I watched the video, took notes, and we thought this is worth us having a conversation here on the show about it, especially because we're sort of at the intersectionality of science and creativity. Yeah, so, what we're not gonna do here today, We're not going

to just replicate their discussion. We're gonna We're gonna spring off their discussion, uh, talk about our own experience, his own thoughts, and we're gonna drag in a few additional resources as well and in some additional examples, uh, to to bring this conversation to you and then hopefully here back from all of you creative people about your thoughts on machine creativity, machine learning, and the future of human creativity.

So along those lines, Robert, like, when you hear the idea of a machine being creative, how does that make you feel as a person who like you know, I I imagine you're like me, Like it's work, you know, being creative, writing, drawing, playing music. It. You know, there's there's something that feels unescapable human about it. Yeah, yeah, you know. I I hear, I hear about it, and and I read articles or studies where they've taken a computer program and it's writing high coups, or it's where

it's printing paintings, that sort of thing. I see that, and then I I think about these stories of say journalism jobs like local journalism jobs, jobs being outsourced to another country that I hear about, of course, the impact on manufacturing, of the impact of automation on manufacturing, and that makes me, you know, try and envision the future or where suddenly you're going to have programs and machines that can replicate what I do. Yeah, we've actually exactly

to that point. We've actually like encountered that in this business, where like people will occasionally come to us and say, like, hey, you want to make your job easier podcasting. We've come up with this program that will do all the research for you, and all you have to do is just like you know, printed out and go into the studio with it. Uh. And you know that seems really interesting to me. That's I don't like I got that email. I got the one about where you're basically outsourcing it

to other researchers. There's that, but then there's also, um, yeah, it'll just basically just pluck stuff for you and put it into a dock. Uh. This has has been pitched to me before at least. And then the other thing that I've heard about is like, you know, some of our listeners are familiar that we do videos occasionally. Uh, the old stuff to blow your mind videos would be a good example of this. So essentially you punch in

parameters of what your video would be about. In this software spits out a like video for you that has text on the screen and pulls image clips or video clips out of a library to just make something rather than you're working together with a producer, writing script. All the things that we do when we make those videos just makes me feel like we need to be marketing. Our podcast is a craft podcast, you know, because it's like all the research is done by hand, granted, you know,

on a computer screen. A lot of people don't know this. Book Mark Marin, all of his research is done by robot in his garage. Yeah yeah, okay, among the cats I'm imagining it's a robot cat actually yeah, um, but yeah, I kind of feel the same way, especially like when I hear these examples. But then at the same time, like, so I've done commercial art before. I was a graphic designer for a number of years before I got into

the podcasting business. And I've done creative stuff where I've been an illustrator, I've worked as a musician, I write, uh, And so the thing that I've learned is that, like the one of the most iportant lessons I've learned about creativity is that you have to impose limits upon your canvas.

No matter what medium you're performing in, right or else, You're just gonna like stare into this abyss forever with like trying to figure out where to place your creative ideas, um, because there's this infinite possibility of like what could be right, what could be wrong? Which which things should I use? Which combination of words, which kind of ink all those things? Um?

For instance, like writers that I've encountered who have the problem where they'll rewrite the first paragraph that they write over and over and over again and obsessed on making that paragraph perfect before they'll move on, and then they never finished. Right. Yeah, I've I've I've done that before. Like when I first started righting fiction, I was doing that model, and of course the thing I was writing

is still to this day incomplete from from that totally. Yeah, I've been there too, and It's like that's one of those things that they don't ever really teach you. At least they didn't teach me very well in composition, yes, like just move on, um. But when I think about creative machines, then I have to wonder, first of all, are they aware of what their limitations are or are they just executing an algorithm? And how do they do they know how to make those limitations work for them

creatively the same way that human beings do well. It's interesting because you know, when you when you start picking apart your own creative process, you can you can begin to see how a machine could do some of it, you know, because you're talking about it imposing limits on yourself. Like I'm instantly thinking like, all right, I'm writing, I'm

gonna write a I'm gonna write this science fiction short story. Okay, what kind of ideas can I explore within the confines of this story, this setting, maybe this type of character that I want to write? And then you start you start throwing in another parameter. It's like what kind of stories are selling? What? What? What kind of story can I write that doesn't have a vampire in it? You know, stuff like that, And so there's a there's a certain

amount of creativity. Is not necessarily this just magical explosion that takes place. There's a lot of computation that goes into it, and therefore there's an entire side to it that could easily be mastered by an inhuman entity, right, especially if like we as humans are able to go to that machine and input the parameters of those limits to it, right and say like, okay, here's your limitations now right this story or here's your limitations now create

this music. And that seems to be what they're trying to do. Yeah, And I know when when I think about, you know, these various anxieties about you know, future writers and podcasters that are entirely machine. You know, we all tell ourselves, well, they can replicate a lot of it, but there there's a certain spark, there's something I have that cannot be replicated. And we we also tell that's the same thing we tell ourselves when we're talking about

human competition. You can say, all right, well this this individual may be better at at this skill set than me. They maybe have a better voice or what have you, but but there's something special about me, and so do I extend or is that just sort of a self inflating uh fiction that we're telling ourselves all the time anyway. Uh And and so maybe the machines will just swoop

in and take all of our creative jobs. Maybe, Although I have to say, like sitting down and listening to this conversation and then like filling out notes and doing a little extra research for this episode, it made me think about my creative process in a systematized way that I haven't before, And it made me really realize that for me at least, I think like one of the big like jumping points for human beings being creative is when they start creating new tools to be creative in

different ways. And we'll talk about that later because this is something they discussed in the panel as well. Uh. And I can't see a future yet where AI is doing those things where AI says, I like a guitar, and I can write these songs on guitar, But what if I go over to a tree and I carve an entirely different kind of instrument so that I can get this effect. That's true. That's that's a good point,

sort of like meta creativity ideas. All right, so we'll definitely get into the tools here in a bit, but before we roll on, I just want to want to really draw attention to two particular ideas that came up in the discussion um that that I that I thought were particularly striking, and that will come up again and again as we uh as we roll through the episode. First of all, they kept to bring up this analogy of the career of creative technology compared to the airplane.

So obviously we make airplanes that fly faster and higher than any bird, but that doesn't mean we fully understand how birds fly, nor does it mean we can replicate the evolved perfection of their powered flight. So technology essentially gives us a version of the same thing that outperforms the organic in many respects, but also underperforms and other areas.

And this was al rix Says primary argument sort of against the idea that AI could be quote unquote creative, right because birds airplanes are not birds, right, And so he was saying basically that then subsequently the software couldn't necessarily be human in its creativity, But it depends on how you define creativity too. Yeah, it's a great metaphor, and I think all the panelists ended up, picking up and playing with it a little bit, and well we'll

play with it here as well, now chewing. For her part, she highlighted her own projects with creative machine learning, in which she and there's some wonderful like overhead video examples of this, but she draws, uh with or paints with a piano. Believe it was a piano. It looked to me like she was using some kind of stylist tablet thing.

But yeah, like basically she from what I could tell as somebody who does illustration, she was drawing on the right half of a of a canvas, and what she would draw, the computer would then draw on the left half of the canvas. But it wouldn't just imitate her. It wasn't like, I mean, you can do this in like Adobe Illustrator where it just like draws the exact same thing you draw, and you've got like a perfectly

symmetrical drawing. So it's not a mirror image though. This was this was like creating its own thing, learning from her curves and lines. Yeah, I was playing off her movement, sort of improvising with her to create a work of collaborative art. And so she argues that the notion of a robotic agent that creates with you the dreams with you in harmony is quote an underserved narrative in our culture, and I and I definitely agree with that. She was to me the most compelling person on the panel. I

thought they were all really interesting. There was something about her that I was like, this person is going to go on to do like amazing work, and she's gonna come back. Because she was relatively young, I can see her in like ten twenty years coming back to us and just like dropping like some huge revelation on us about creativity and computer learning after the Singularity, after shelded into the mind. They chose me I'm going to be

the go between. But she was like she was dropping some really interesting tidbits into the conversation, Like she was thinking about the way that she draws based on competitive gaming. Like she kept bringing up like, and by this we mean like video games where people are playing I don't know, League of Legends or um Overwatch, and so just the idea that she was thinking about how like the AI in those games was compensating for the human movements or or play styles as opposed to how she drew and

how the computer drew along with her. That's an very interesting connection that I would never have thought of before. Yeah, that's that's that that is that's a That's a really a really great example because you don't think about like this competitive model being applicable to a creative collaboration. And you and I play a lot of video games, you know, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about how the AI in the game is compensating for my movements.

I have the only time I've thought about this, and this is going to be kind of geeky and and silly, but in playing uh, pro wrestling video games, I've thought about this because because there's like certain wrestling styles that the characters have, well, it basically comes down to this weirdness. Professional wrestling is a simulated combat sport. So yes, sorry spoilers, but as you see it on TV, it's two humans pretending,

you know, acting out a combat scenario. We actually have a video about this on KFE that you did a couple of years ago. Yeah, and so when people make a video game of that, they make a fighting game in which too like a huge too humans or a human in an AI or two AI s if you're doing a demo mode, are fighting each other in a competitive in calendar using the moves of professional wrestling. And then on top of that, some players are going to

play that video game just like a fighting game. I'm gonna beat my opponent, but others will play it attempting to tell a story, attempting to get the most dramatic match. And in those cases, I don't know that any programmers have really gained that really strange area of video game playing, but like, like that's that's what I think of when she brings up this example, Like, here's an example of somebody trying to not only defeat an AI opponent, but

to try and tell a story with an AI opponent. Okay, so this is an episode where we're gonna have a little bit of more digressions than we normally do because of our creative backgrounds and sort of things we can bring to this. I have a story that I think can tie into this that we can then maybe bring back to this AI. Okay, So a friend of mine is currently working on a comic book for a w

W E comic. He's just doing like a short story and it's about some missfight between the Undertaker and Mankind is the guy that would okay, and uh so I

never saw this. I'm not as bigger a wrestling fan as Robert, but uh when he told me about it, was like, oh, cool, like you could you could do some fun stuff like that, like have them being a slaughterhouse or have them be in a graveyard and they're hitting each other with gravestones or something, right, and he was like, no, we have to do an exact replica in comic form of this infamous fight they hadn't like I don't know, two thousand or something. And I was like, huh,

that's that's interesting. But to me that like here we go with limitations, right, Like the limitation there is so limiting that I don't see what would be creative about it or interesting other than obviously my friend and his style and how he draws the thing. But he's not being able to express anything. Mhmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I

see what you mean. Because the one thing if you could say, I tell this, tell the story, but they actually have magical powers, like they're Undertakers, really an undead creature exactly, That's how I was thinking it would be. I was like, oh, that this is the benefit of doing it in the comics medium is that you can actually give them weird powers and you can like really

play with the the goofy narrative of like their their roles. Right. Um. But then this this also leads to the creative challenge, Like sometimes just because the constraints are there doesn't mean there's there's not an opportunity exactly. And that's what I'm looking forward to it because when I hear that, I go, man, there's there's too many limitations there. But you know, who knows,

maybe there's a way within all those limitations. I trust that my friend is gonna be able to do this, that that they'll be like a really cool way to depict that fight. All right, but it's gonna take creativity. And so we're gonna we're gonna roll it back a little bit and talk about what creativity actually is, like boiling it down, reconstructing it so that we can understand what we're doing when we're create and in order to

uh make a machine engage in the same process. Right, So they come up with some of their uh kind of limited limitations on what creativity can or cannot be. And this is where I think, like Ultimately, like the split between the four of them, or maybe the three of them versus Alri say came down was that Ria has this sort of broader definition of creativity as being

this sort of magical thing that happens in the human brain. Right, like he talks about at different times in the discussion, talks about the importance of pain, of intent, of consciousness, various attributes that are currently beyond the scope of of AI and would be problematic if we had them, you know, if you could, would it be It's a whole separate issue, but it would it be ethical to make a you know, a depressed artist robot because why what kind of cruel

god are you to make a robot so depressed? You know, it's funny you mentioned that later on in the notes. I have a question on whether robots can be crazy enough to be creative, because, as we know, many creative people suffer mental health issues. Yeah, well that's how we got David and in the Covenant. Well they already answered

it for us, Thanks for at le Scott. Alright, So one of the one of these sort of loose models though for creativity that that is thrown out here is it comes from engineering theorist lab Varshny, and he breaks it all down to a comp to a combination of novelty and high quality that comes together in a way that changes your belief. So like a Venn diagram, I'm imagining here of is it novel, is it knew? Is it something different? And is it of high enough quality?

And when it comes and does it come together in a way that actually have some sort of meaning to me? I think this is a really interesting way to model aesthetics and that I had not thought of before. And when you try to like sort of lay this on top of like creative artifacts and see like how that works, it's interesting, right, like the first thing I thought of.

I was talking to you about this before we went in to the studio, and no spoilers, but the new Twin Peaks is on TV and I've been watching it every week, and as you would expect from David Lynch, it's wacky, right, But in terms of lab varsenyse ven diagram here of novelty and high quality, it's just the right amount of novelty and just the right amount of quality that it works for me. Now maybe for other people,

because obviously creativity and artist objective. It doesn't, but but yeah, I was seeing it like, oh, that is the perfect David Lynch is like the perfect metaphor for this, because, let's be honest, like some of David Lynch's stuff, the novelty factor can get a little too big in that ven diagramic situation and you're like and and Varsny actually

describes it as noise. He says, like, when either one of those things gets too big in comparison to the other, it turns into noise and we're no longer experiencing something like that's communicative. And he also says that if they both are too if there's too much of both at the same time, right, Like, if it's incredibly novel and it's super high quality, then it's just like that overloads people's circuits. Right, So I'm thinking of like Finnegan's Wake

or something like that. Probably well, and it's gonna vary from person to person because you know, obviously, because you're I think we can all imagine movies that we've seen where either like I've seen plenty of movies where there's some great ideas, the quality is not there though you know, maybe the acting is bad, the monster doesn't look right or whatever, and then you see the reverse to some beautiful films and you're just like, my eyes are eating

up everything that's on the screen, but I feel nothing. Yeah, exactly like you get. You get the opposite too, when like these things are too small in comparison to one another, Right, Like, if it's super high quality, but it's a story that you've seen and it's been done three times before, you're not necessarily going to be that engaged with it, right, So there's got to be a little bit of novel

something to it. But at the same time, if it's totally novel, it's this cool idea, it's it's like the ultimate Hollywood pitch high concept, like the Ocean Walker, the rest of Development, Yeah, something like that. And then the qualities garbage. Well, you know that's not going to do

very well either. But but to his point about like both areas being blown out, both novelty and high quality, well, I guess, I guess one example would be if you take somebody who does not have much, uh you know, of of a bedrock understanding of a modern art or surrealism, and you just really throw them into the deep end at a modern art museum, So they might encounter a piece of work that is, you know, it's highly novel uh, you know, created with wonderful you know, high level craftsmanship,

but they're just not in a place where they're going to be able to understand. It's just gonna be essentially over their head and therefore, like the it's going to be a failure of the art in a way. You may have created something wonderful and thought provoking, but if it doesn't connect with people, then does it Does it work? When he says noise, I immediately think of the image of a television and with white noise on it, right,

so the snow. So that for some people that's what it's like looking at modern art is just like staring at the screen while while it's playing, you know, the staticky snow. But rix Say basically argues that because brains and AI are using completely different processes that he doesn't even know that you can call what they're doing creativity, right because he's defining it as being pretty specific to

human beings. Uh. And in that human creativity is seen as simple problem solving by generating a lot of possibilities and then selecting from those possibilities and that's this is how we evolved as human beings, right, So we went from using stone tools to access to eventually Neanderthal's using instruments and actually making cave art. You know, like that process of evolution through our our physical evolution also evolved

our creativity. And he's wondering, like if that topic selection, if that type problem solving is even possible for computers, but where it really skyrockets. And this is what I think is most fascinating about creativity. Here is when you start to imagine things that don't really exist. And possibly he was saying that this kind of creativity is due

to the fact that we haven't evolved prefrontal cortex. And then the video you get to see, like he shows you different um images of various hominids and their skull shapes and how they evolved over time, and then creativity evolved with them. And then you see examples where there's cave art with a with like say, human with a

beast's head. This is something that doesn't actually exist but is a uh, you know, arguably at an example of early creativity creating these unreal things that then have various meanings and an effect on the viewer and then they like, they get to this point in their conversation where they start talking about where the AI quote unquote fails at creativity. And that was interesting to me too, because they seem to be talking about how the machines were failing, but

not how humans could necessarily fail. Yeah, yeah, they're they were talking about how essentially in all of this, you're gonna have this machine essentially brainstorming, but there's gonna be a person that comes along, and the person is is then selecting and judging the ideas in the In the case of Varcheny, he's doing a lot of culinary computation. So humans are gonna cook the food based on the recipe that the computer has come up with, and then

they're going to taste it. And in some cases it's gonna be like, Oh, that's a novel combination that actually works. I wouldn't think it would. In other cases you would say they would say, all right, we'll slow down their machine overlords, because this is not really all that tasty. So, yeah, you get into this idea where there are are failures. Uh, But failures and mistakes are of course an important part

of the creative process as well. For humans. Right. This is where like I stepped back and I was thinking about my creative process because I was like, look, I know that I spend a good amount of time quote unquote failing on every project that I work on. I mean, that's just part of being creative is like doing a thing and then realizing that's not what it is, crossing

it out, moving onto the next thing. You know. It's basically like what they were talking about before, where you're generating all these possibilities and then you're selecting from them. But you have to generate some possibilities that you're not going to use, that you're going to see as failures before you can eventually get to the thing that you

see as a success. Right. Yeah, I mean I think anybody out there who has has engaged in a creative process, you've come up with some They can't all be singers, as they say, You're gonna come up with some duds, and for a while, you might think that dud is pretty amazing because maybe it is really novel, you know, or maybe it is really high quality, but the balance

is is perhaps not there. Yeah, Now there's a there's also the notion of intent in all of this feelings, the later of which is is you know, obviously currently uh uh not present in artificial intelligence and machine learning, but perhaps you're we're just talking about two different sorts of flight. To come back to the bird airplane scenario. And indeed, moderator John Shaffer points brought up the point of apophenia. So this is a this is this is interesting.

This is a concept coined by German scientists Class Conrad in nineteen fifty eight, and it's the opposite of an epiphany, and epiphany being you know, the you know, a true intuition of the world's interconnectedness. And in statistics, apophenia is essentially a type one error or false positive, where you think something's connected and it's not. Uh In. In psychology, according to Conrad, it's the stuff of schizophrenia, right, And that's where it's primarily being discussed in present day as

like a psychological problem. It's when unrelated details seem to be saturated with connections and meaning, but they're those are false. They ultimately lead to nowhere. Right. And I've absolutely had this experience with writing before I'm like, oh, I'm totally on the right path, and then like I look back at it a week later and like that was garbage,

you know. Yeah, And in the like the schizophrenia case, uh, this would be like if you see the same person on the subway twice and you're convinced that if someone following making a connection that isn't there, and it might it might take on you know, a pathological um uh energy. What's interesting to me here, though, is that I think this type one error definition of it is sort of connected to the idea of creativity back to so it's

it's defined as believing something is real when it isn't. Okay, that could be said to be part of the creative process when you're imagining something that isn't real, at least not yet, right either, Like like if you're writing a fantasy story and it's like, Okay, my main character has wings in the head of a lion and carries a flaming sword, right, like, like that doesn't exist, it probably

won't ever exist. But that doesn't mean necessarily that it's not create native, right, But in this sense, it's the actual belief that it's real, right Like that if you are like, so, there's this angel with a lion's head that's following me, around everywhere the flaming sword. Then I can see how that would be schizophrenia. Yeah. So yeah, in real life and in statistics this is a problem. But but in again creativity, uh as John Shaffer points out,

like our brain engages with it. Our brain uses apithania essentially to forward connections where there where there isn't one, and a lot of that is where we end up, you know, creating something unique. You know, like, for instance, the whole why does the human have have a lion for a head and a flaming sword? You feel in the details and you can reach the point where it's like, oh, well now it makes sense I have I have sown these two things together and now I have this complete form. Yeah.

And so when you make those associations in specific ways with different media, right, So, like I'm thinking here of a bum art, because you listen to the music, that's the artifact that the album is ultimately four, But then there's album art that's created kind of as part of the creative package, but also as marketing and ultimately like it gives you, there's connections between those two things, like

when you buy them. It's interesting to me since I moved away from buying physical records and I mainly just get digital music. Now I realized that I had so many emotional connections with music purely because of the artwork that it came with, because of the packaging that it came with, and I wasn't simply just judging the music on its own merits outside of any kind of visual thing. Well, so here's a quick question on this, this idea of

of albums in their album art. What's an example in your opinion where the album art and the music like perfectly matched. Oh. You know, it's funny, as I was actually listening to this record this morning, thinking of you, uh, Tools, is it undertow? Yeah, that like weird sculpture that's on the cover of that. And then okay, surrounding that album coming out, there were like at least three videos that

used that similar kind of like gothic claymation style. Right, None of those things were the music themselves, But when I hear that music, now, for whatever reason in my head, are these like swirling clay sculpture forms. Yeah, I think that's a great example. My example would have been Tools on Automa. Actually, they're certainly a band that has always put a lot of thought into how their art and

music coming together. Now that being said, there are plenty of albums out there where the art and the music seemed to be on separate planets, and you did a fascinating experiment for this episode. I'm thrilled about this, and I can't wait for you to tell the audience. Because it's interactive, they can go and listen and look at

this album art as well. That's right. If you think back to our episode on Ntrarch, Gieger, we mentioned how he was generally cool with just about anybody using his art for their album, provided they went through official channels. You know, it was, you know, on the level. So there are a number of different albums out there that have Geeger covers and the music doesn't always match up with Or, I would argue, rarely matches up with the

the aesthetic energy that he possessed. Yeah, with Geeger, like, I assume that it's going to be something that's kind of kind of industrial or metallic in someone, right. So what I did is I went on Spotify. I made a playlist with like one song from every album I could find on Spotify that had a Geeger cover, like like or Or in one case came out at at a at a certain point with geeger Art promoting it.

So I then listened to each example and I tried to decide, all right, is this something where the album art makes sense for me? Does it do? Is there a an actual connection in my mind between Giger and this artist? Is they're totally not? And can I detect any moments where I feel apophania kicking in and this creative process in my brain bringing the two together, finding and forging the connections. So that's what I did, and

you can do this too. I'm gonna have the link for this Spotify playlist on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot Com. But yeah, I started listening to these. I listened to Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, which, uh, we're talking about this before. I don't know a lot about them, but I just kind of assume it's sort of like a like a Prague post hippie band. It's prog rock, for sure, it's it's many people love them. I think Joe's a

big fan of it. Loves the Tarkus cover for sure. He talks about that a lot. Yeah, so it's it's a bit too jazzy from my personal taste. And so this was an example where I'm like, yeah, I'm just not I'm not not feeling this Geeger, Emerson Lake and Palmber connection. The same thing with Debbie Harry's uh Cuckoo album. I'm straining to make that connection. The same with Steve Simons Electric Playboys, and with the Dead Kennedy's album as well.

And I think on the Dead Kennedy's one, because that was like so hotly contested with the pr MC, it was only in the interior they have like a different cover that's like I think like Shriner's and like little roller Cars or something. Yeah, And then I think on the inside is that notorious controversial thing the landscape with a lot of yeah. Yeah. So those are so those are examples where I'm all, right, no connection at all. I don't get this, the connection between the art and

the music. But then there's stuff on the other hands into the spectrum. So Celtic Frost for example, Uh, that's some some early death metal very much feels uh like a Geeger soundscape. Same thing with the Danzig three. I you know, it's gloomy and dark and you know, as all the this focus on you know, weird ideas, it works, all right. I totally but totally buy these album covers.

But the one area, the one example where I felt things coming together and I had to like kind of struggling, but also I could I could feel the connection taking place was with a group called Magma. So they had this album called Attack A T T A h K. I've never heard of them until today, and it's and it has like Geeger. It's one of these where Gieger made the album art with the the name of the bands. It was like a commission. It looks kind of like

his Atomic Babies very much. So yeah, but I think there's some clothes, some safety pins in there as well, so, you know, very much a Geeger piece with Geegers a signature symbolism and uh. And at first time like I'm not really feeling this connection, but then I started reading about the band French prog Rock. Uh. Their album is

again very weird. The drum the drummer and founder Christian vander He composed the lyrics and a constructed language called Kobayan, and the whole project came together over an ecological, spiritual vision for humanity's future. And so I read about that and I listened to it a bit more, and I have to say, yeah, I was beginning to feel the

connection between the track No No and Gieger's art. So this makes me think of, so you and I are old enough that we're seeing this resurgence with vinyl, and it's like, well, that's stuff that we used to listen on and then it went away, and now it's coming back, and it in a way, it's novel and high quality, right and and uh, but the vinyl resurgence seems to me to be inherently connected to this apophenia into this like creativity that's going on in the consumer's head. Right.

And uh, my friend Charlie actually talks about this because he's a big vinyl fan. He refers to like having the artifact as the material oomph of a thing. And I I just I stopped acting records because I was like, I have too much physical space. I can't carry these around with me anymore for the rest of my life,

and moved almost entirely to digital. But so many of my friends are really into this new resurgence of vinyl, and I understand it, right, because like if you're sitting there between like what you just said about Magma, you look at this record art and then like maybe you look the liner notes while the album's playing, and then maybe you go on Wikipedia or something and you read up on them. It creates this like a series of connections that may or may not exist but add something

to the music. Yeah. So with to bring it back to machine learning and creativity, to what extent is it a case of machines throwing together combinations? Still something begins to catch till you have this Magma moment, and then the randomness touches on possible synchronicity, and then just as our brains try to make sense of it, we engage in the creative process of refining the machine made connections.

So I'll just say this before we take a break, which is that whatever the first album is that's created entirely by AI, it should have an HR cover. That's true. And if it's already out there, the first d A A I album, it needs a new cover by g As we talked about in the hr Giger episode, that house in Switzerland is just full of unused arts. Yeah, contact them,

commission knock on something and get the rights to it. So, okay, let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more about the effects of the actual

technology on the act of creativity. Alright, we're back. So in all of this, we're talking about machine learning and robotic arms that are drawing, uh, computer programs that are taking the various you know, hierarchies of of of values within a particular discipline and then using those to create quote unquote art or fiction or you know, or or or a recipe. In all of these cases, Oh, it's it's essential to point out that the technology is working

as a tool. And obviously, creativity and tools have always co evolved. So think of any great work of human art, and you have to contemplate the tools and the technology is required to create it. The physical tools for carving rock or would working and firing pottery, the chemical technologies

of paints, varnishes, and laquers. The evolution of musical instruments, electrical musical instruments and recording and producing technology, writing technologies from clay tablets two pens to the printing press, the typewriter, word processors, and beyond. Yeah, and so in this conversation, the panelists are essentially arguing that AI. Some of them are arguing that the AI would just be a tool

for humans to use creatively. It's not that the AI itself would be creative, but that we would be using it in the same way we use a guitar or a pen or something like that. Yeah, And and that ultimately it's not going to be any more destructive than you know, the effects of the synthesizer or any of any of these various electronic musical technologies that obviously did not destroy traditional music or or or caused judgment day. Yeah, or caused judgment day. That they didn't destroy the the

artistic traditions that came before. They took the existing traditions in new directions, sometimes surprising new directions. They bring up the example of the drum machine, where when it came out, you know it, there were people who were figuring out ways to use it where you're creating sounds that did you know, they didn't match, They weren't perfectly replicating real world drumming, but they were able to to use them in novel ways that that brought about some some new

sounds and hip hop and electronic music. But then one of the panelists is the guy from Google and forgetting his name right now, but he likened AI to a garden, and he said it's where you're growing things, but you're growing them with intentionality, and that computer systems themselves are not in a state where they can reflect upon that intentionality. Yet, So does this count as create activity when they're doing it without intentionality? And it really depends on what you're

focusing on here. Some of them were focusing on the process of creativity and others were focusing on the artifacts of creativity. Right. So a computer program can certainly currently create an artifact, right, whether it's a recipe, a song, or a drawing, right, as we saw examples of all three in this panel. Um, but it's not necessarily engaged in the process. And so that seems to be where they're diverging, especially because for the latter, intentionality may not

actually be necessary. You can make artifacts without having any intention right. And to your point on the process, Chung points out that the process is vital to what she does, like it's really more important than the finished artifact exactly. I mean, the painting is one thing, but it's it's that that video as well of her interacting with this robotic arm that is that is essentially jamming with her. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think this is really interesting because it forces us

to systematize our own creativity. And ironically, you know, we as human beings like to think that our own internal system, especially when we're being creative, is not computational, right, but maybe it is more than we know. Well. This is always one of those areas where you don't want to fall into the trap of thinking entirely of human cognition in terms of a computer. Um, even though technology is always a a handy way to try and uh and

see our own cognitive processes. But on the other hand, you don't want to You can't dismiss the fact that there are there are aspects of our cognition that they are very much in line with the functioning of a computer. Right. It's the same thing as the bird is not an airplane, right, But at the same time they are, they both learned,

they both carry out the same process. Yeah. Um. I think though, like the tool building thing, is where it really gets interesting to me and determining whether or not computers are creative because for creative purposes, when you actually go out and build old the new tool. For me, that's a sign that a creator has actually like graduated to this other level of making, right. I think I

referred to it as meta creativity earlier. They're somehow not satisfied with the available tools that are there, and they need to experiment, and in terms of that novelty quality divide, this isn't always successful obviously, right, And it's especially fascinating when a creator balances the novelty of that experiment with actual aesthetics and creates like a new tool that other people end up going on to use. You know, we were talking about Burrows, William Burrows and Naked Lunch here.

I think the cutoup machine is an example where the it is a novel approach to take essentially like taking these these these paragraphs and phrases and they're literally cut up and then may combined. And yet when I've when I've read cut up literature, it's noise. It's mostly noise. Yeah, And then sometimes I like it, But most of the time I it doesn't quite connect from me. And when I've tried to do it myself, I've really not not

liked it. So I experimented with it a while ago and what I ended up doing was rather than just like doing cut up method, I guess we should explain what cut up is. So you write something with intentionality and then you cut out all the words up into separate little pieces of paper. At least is how Burrows

did it. I think there are programs that will do it for you know, UM, and you literally randomly paced them together so they form just ungrammatical, oddly formed sentences, and try to see what kind of apothenic connections are formed by these words combined the way they are. UM. The way I was doing it was I would do that and then I would look to see where there were interesting connections, and then I would pull those out and put them in my writing rather than actually use

cut up method to write anything. Well. And that that comes back around to what what the panels we're talking about here? The idea that that it is a tool, that that there's still going to be this this human at the center of it that's walking in this garden of robotic creativity, of machine creativity and saying that's a good carrot. I'm going to pick that one. That carrot looks like crap. We're gonna leave that that carrot was

never meant to be. So this whole thing leads me to ask a question that I don't think they addressed, which is if tool use and making tools is an essential part of creativity, right, Like somebody had to invent the right kind of crow quill pen to illustrate with, or somebody invented a particular style of guitar with pickups in the six strings and the exact kind of materials that are used in the body and the neck right, or narrative style, or even stoves right, particular kinds of

stoves for cooking, So all of those things are actually part of creativity. Our computers then capable of creating their own tools for the sake of experimenting and being novel. And I think the answer to this would be that we would say, well, that's how they write algorithms, right, The algorithms are their tools. But what about actual artifacts that they're using to make other artifacts? Huh? Yeah, I don't. I don't recall any examples of that, whether within this

discussion or or outside of it. Um that seems to me like it might be a good place to draw a line of like when AI starts being creative at least from my perspective. But then again, I mean I think of of great creative minds, and so many of them your prefab tools. Yeah, and they're working within the confines of their genre. But between you know, within say, literary norms in many cases, well in many cases, of course, you see someone sort of mastering the norms and then

figuring out what new spins to put on it. But they're not really I would I would ask are they actually creating any new tools though, or are they just using the existing tools in slightly different ways, breaking the rules? Yeah, I don't know. It's it's interesting, though. I wish we could to ask those panelists this question. Like Corn McCarthy used as a typewriter. I think he uses like an old typewriter to knock out his his fiction, but he

did not create his own. He didn't build his typewriter, like, uh, you know, bowl skulls and children's skulls. This is kind of what I'm getting at, Yeah, exactly, Like, but but you could argue maybe that Cormac McCarthy had created a certain kind of prose style, right that is unique to him. Um or and I don't I haven't read enough McCarthy. So I might be totally off here, but like maybe he's like fiddled with narrative rules in such a way

that it's novel true. Yeah, I mean you can also go back to Gieger when we've talked about how he was using the airbrush. He did not invente brush, but he was using the airbrush in ways that well. I don't I don't want to speak to method too much because I don't really know much about the methodology of airbrush art, but he was doing things with it that

no one else had done. From what I could tell from when we did that hr Geiger episode, he was using ink and paint that hadn't been used in an airbrush for Yeah, So I think that might be part of that. Would that would yeah, I think that would support the idea of using a new tool. I mean, if you're changing the tool, you are creating a new tool.

That's That's something they touched on in the in the panel discussion of the World Science Festivals that one of the things about human tools is that they have evolved and we have evolved with them. Our brain, our culture, our language, this is all been part of the same journey out of out of the Stone Age out of the pre Stone Age. As we as we we adapt these tools, we figure out new ways to communicate the construction of these tools and then create increasingly complex um

bits of pieces of art, technologies, etcetera with those tools. Yeah. So then getting back to limits, right, which is something I brought up really before even we out into these panels, is that, Okay, a I can use the tools, and it can learn the composition traits of art, and it can learn those rules. What we're questioning is whether or not it can learn how to break those rules. But uh, when they're using a tool, they have to kind of figure out the same constraints on the system that humans do.

And so I'm wondering if these patterns are based on quote unquote how the world works as we humans see it, then that's human culture, and the we're just teaching the computers the sort of like mathematics of human culture and then having them replicate that rather than the machines looking at the world and kind of coming up with their own cultural interpretation of it. Maybe I'm leaning more towards Ulrica,

say than I thought I would. All Right, well, let's take another quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about what it means for the future and uh, and also some more compare between the creative process and machine learning and airplanes. Thank thank Alright, we're back. So you were really taken with Chung as I was. I think like she she just stood up. I mean, everybody on the panel was interesting, but Chung just was really fascinating the way she talked about her process and then

when you watched her actual process. Yeah. The second she said that bit about like the narrative of machines and humans cooperating, I totally agreed with because it lines up with a lot of what I've been thinking about with science fiction, is that we we continually see the dystopian vision of robot overlords and evil robots, evil androids, and

I love all that stuff, don't get me wrong. But when I read in in Banks and his view of the culture, uh, this post scarcity, far future um utopian society living with computers live basically having this sort of hybrid cultural scenaria, you know, with super intelligent machines, Like it makes me think, what we should have more of that? We should have more of this This side of the argument for a post singularity world and and the and and not not to say that we shouldn't be concerned

about the potential dire consequences. I mean, obviously we if to whatever extent it's practical, we should try to avoid terminator scenarios. But but there's this whole other side. There's this whole there's this view of the machine as a tool. This machine is a collaborative of process, and I think that's that's very important to keep in mind. Yeah, and I totally admire their intention, but I wonder if there is a point where it's really down to like sort

of what our linguistic definitions are here. I think there might be a little bit of confusing collaboration for tool building. Is the machine actually collaborating with Chung or was she building a new tool that she could use to create new art with. Yeah, because you could argue that in the same way that a French horn, you you buzz your error into one end, and the technology of the horn allows a different sound to come out. So you

could say that that's what she's doing here. She's essentially blowing into a horn, and we're appreciating the the duality of her organic sound and in the manufactured sound of the horn, right, It's like she's developed a new instrument and she's learning how to play it. Yeah, and I think that's a valid reading what's going on as well now in all of this, uh. Jesse Ingle, the computer

scientist musician. UH, he spoke a bit about the Google Magenta project that he's involved with, and he pointed out that with Magenta, there's always a human in the process because again the human as a tool. This is the gardener walking, you know, amid the the creative machines in the garden. But this isn't soil and green. It's not like Google is made of people. Right. But I found this particularly interesting because it closely mirrors the inner workings

of military drones. So a few years back I spoke with this guy, Knowles Sharkley, as a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics of the University of Sheffield and uh and and he he had some some interesting revelations about the necessary human components of u a v s of of unmanned aerial vehicles. He said, quote, these are all man in the loop systems, which means essentially there's someone, uh, someone controls the applications of lethal force. They're not exactly

remote control. They're sort of a hybrid. They have a certain they have certain autonomous functions, meaning they can be programmed to react to their to their GPS, so they can go about on their own. They can navigate themselves, though a pilot will control their height and that sort of thing. It's the first step towards full autonomy. The most recent US Air Force documents describe a swarm of planes.

The term swarm is kind of a technical term in robotics, meaning a bunch of robots that interact with one another on a local basis. The man on the loop would be in an executive control of the swarm, So rather than having at least two pilots in charge of a predator drone in his example, you'll have one person in charge of a swarm of robots. So human technology can

be used to kill people or create heart as well. Yeah, yeah, this is interesting, especially in lieu of the other episode that we're working on right now, which is it's gonna come out after this one. But it's about violence in the capacity for human violence, and drones in general, I think are interesting in that respect because they allow us to create violence from a distance and there is sort

of an apophenia. I don't know what the right application of apophenia is there, but there's something going on there with that right that allows that disconnection. Yeah, So in the case of the drones, it's you know, very much a person uh, you know, checking in and uh in fine tuning everything. And in the case of say Young's example of working with a with a with a machine collaborator a similar case. So it's it's like a feedback

loot process. The machine creates something, the human ads their spin, and the machine adds a spin on that, and the human adds an additional spin and and weeds out what's not working and maybe add some flourishes that that tweak it for human consumption. And this is again what Jesse Engle compared to tending a garden, you know. And this also reminded me of of another conversation I had, and

this was back in two thousand and eleven. I spoke with Atlanta area electronic musician Richard Divine uh, who was a really cool guy. I'll include the link to the full interview on the landing page for this episode, but he said there were at the time against eleven, he said there were more electronic music tools on the market that didn't exist when he was starting out, and it was at the point where anyone could really create something

and put it out on SoundCloud. And he told me quote, there are so many people trying to emulate specific styles, so now you have hundreds and hundreds of people trying to sound a particular way. I find that there is less and less innovation in music, but more and more people creating it. And he also talked about the use of algorithmic music composition, UH, something that's been around for years. Brian Eno has engaged with it, aw Tecker, the famous I d M group, They've they've used it various to

our artists. This is essentially where you you have you have a program ustually have an algorithm for creative output, and you tend it like the garden that is, and and see what it creates. But in those cases, right at least with Eno and Oddiker, they're creating the software themselves,

right with a team of people. I believe, so yes, So I asked, I asked Divine about this, and he said, it's really interesting because you're defining the rules and parameters of that environment, and then you can decide how that environment behave. But then he he closed with the following about the limits of your tools, and this is this is key because it gets into what we're talking about. Imposing limits, he said, I don't necessarily think that always

helps creatively or makes people more creative. I think it sometimes makes people lazy. When I have too many resources at my fingertips, I have a tendency to get really lazy with the creativity. So for me, I try to limit myself with how many tools I use. I try to keep it to just a couple of pieces of equipment and learn those pieces of equipment really really well. Yeah, this gets back to sort of what I was talking

about earlier about like self imposed rotations. Yeah. Um, so this is actually interesting to me because, as I brought up earlier, I did have a little foray in the early two thousand's where I locked myself in my bedroom and made electronic music over a winter. Um, and the way I did it was with this this video game for PlayStation. This is this shows you how far back it's going. It's the original PlayStation It was called the MTV Music Generator. Have you ever heard of this? Yeah,

this is branded MTV. Uh and Basically, it was like the the most basic way that you could create your own electronic music. I had like pre built in beats and pre built in like melodies and things like that, and you could add layers of effects and things like

that on top of it. But what I thought was really cool was you could take c d s at the time, because the MP three's were just just getting off the ground, um, and you could put them in and you could rip segments off from your c d s and then insert those sound files into these compositions that you've created using mtvs just prefab generator. And so I wrote like five songs I think, and like put

them all up online there. I don't know, maybe if the audience is interested, maybe I'll put them on the landing page for this or one or two of them. They're silly, I I wrote under the name Invisible Maniac. And this literally lasted for like three months and then nothing ever came of it. But the thing about it, though, was that that was all I did with the electronic music, right. I never went beyond my CD collection and the PlayStation in this video game that allowed me to do all

these things. But uh, the very idea of doing something like Ottoker or uh Brian Eno going out and writing my own software, or going out and recording my own drumbeats or other sounds to work with. It was like way past the point of my creative interest with electronic music. Right. But I take something like writing or or comics the stuff that I work in now, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the tools that are available in the ways I can use them to tell stories differently.

I think this all comes back to the systematization of art. Right. So you're you're when you start getting to a point with the art form where you're you're so interested in it and you want to take it a step further that you start figuring out like, Okay, well how does the actual form work, how does it tick? And then how can I take that and apply it in new ways. That's that's something really interesting to me. I mean, like, for instance, like and I played in bands, I never

built my own guitars. I never built my own pedals. I have friends who do that though, Like they have you know, little electronics backgrounds, and they build their own pedals and make music that nobody else has ever made before. And I feel like there's a distinction between us. They're like they feel it feels to me like they're more

masters of their craft than I am. They go out and they build something new or likewise, uh for instance, like in graphic design, I have friends who are graphic designers. They'll go and write algorithms for Adobe software to help them make graphic design in ways that they haven't been

able to before. What's interesting from what we're talking about here is that it seems like in music certainly, and then also in UH, in the use of Adobe, Photoshop and digital um digital art creation tools, like there many steps ahead of of the literary model. Right, so we can try to hype right analogy from earlier is exactly right. It doesn't exactly work the same way tool was now. Now granted, we have we're fabulous word processing options out there.

We have we have spell check and grammar checks and all. You know, of course, the what Clippy popping up and giving us tips. But imagine if you know easily it easily imagine I can easily imagine reaching the point where Clippy pops up and says, hey, I see you're writing a short story in the style of Clark Ashton Smith. Would you like to tweak it in this direction, and I wonder, I wonder what it would be like to reach that point where you're essentially you're writing with this

machine filter in place. And you know, certainly you can be a very purist about it and say like, well, that's that's cheating if you're you're writing through a machine and something else is coming out on the on the other side, that's that's not the authentic process of writing. But on the other hand, how is it any different than buzzing into a horn and getting that song on the other end? You know, we don't say, ah, who

is the great trumpeter dizny Llespie? Yeah, that sounds right, and nobody says, ah, if you heard the sound of him just buzzing his lips, it's awful. It's all that more And it was just it's clearly it's the technology. That's that's who's to just be Disney Galpsie's trumpet credited on the album. No, nobody's doing that, like you credit

the lips buzzing into the into the machine. You know what's interesting though, is I think of like the media world that that we exist in today, where in you and I hear this all the time content is king and the idea that just like the the consumption levels for content are so high right now that like almost the human beings creating the content can't keep up right. And so there's all these like businesses that are trying to come up with a lot of like quick and

easy ways to to get more content out there. And this seems to me like a way to do that that might not necessarily be aesthetically displeasing to the audience that's that's consuming it. And that's whether or not you're reading something in an RSS feed or you're listening to an MP three file or whatever you're consuming digitally. Uh, having machines that can create content for you, I can totally see in like less than twenty five years that

being the thing. I don't think it will replace us necessarily, but it could absolutely be a way for what's the word click farms, for click farms to sort of create more stuff. I'll tell you. Another example that comes to mind is, uh, I enjoyed I enjoyed reading. For a brief time towards the end of his life. Hunter S. Thompson wrote for one of the ESPN websites, and he was comment sports stuff is interesting, yeah, and but in this one he just wrote about whatever. So he's often

talking about politics and what have you. For someone who wanted Hunter S. Thompson to essentially come back from the grave and comment on today's political news, you could conceivably, I mean, or I can conceive of a future in which you have the the Hunter S. Thompson AI that and you just drop in the news feeds to it and then it creates commentary in the style of him, and maybe there's a human in the mix as well.

Maybe not right, but I mean I can see people digging that even though they know that Hunter S. Thompson has been dead for a long time. What I mean what you just described, if that existed tomorrow, that would be the news of the week other than like you know,

big current events and things that are going on. But like in terms of like media, everybody would be sharing it and everybody would be like, look what I plugged into Hunter S. Thompson bought and it came out with this, you know, remember that was the Twitter thing that was created that was like Jonathan Strickling would know this because

I think they talked about it on tech stuff. There's like a Twitter bot that was created, and the idea was that it would learn how to tweet from reading other people's tweets, and like, within like a day or something, it eventually was just like swearing and saying like horrible, racist and like things like Like it was like super

quick that it just devolved into this monster. Now along these lines, um, an example that came up in the talk is, uh this a Sony CSL research laboratory project where they use their AI flow machines system to create a new Beatles song. So essentially they just loaded in, you know, all the parameters of of the Beatles discography

and then they created this song. It wrote this song Daddy's Car, and then they got humans to perform it, because you know, we're not at the point where that the machine can perfectly replicate recording that would sound like the Beatles, and this essentially sounds like a Beatles cover band. I listened to it, and it's very weird, like the lyrics are written by humans. That's another thing that's important

to distinguish. But the machine itself decides, you know, what the composition is, and there is something just a little I don't know, I don't know how to like uncanny Valley in music, which I've never thought of before. When you guys talked about Uncanny Alley in that episode, did it come up in any other sense structure other than vision, I do not. I know it didn't come up in terms of music. So yeah, I think this is an interesting example because when I listened to it, I definitely

feel that uncanny effect. But how much of that is me knowing beforehand that this is not a Beatles song? Right? So it was presented to me as hey, here's the lost Beatles song. Would I dig it? Would I be all in on it? And then the additional question is will we reach a point where audiences won't care? So, like I mentioned Tool earlier, I've I've had to wait for the last three albums to come out, and that's

like a twenty something year span there. Uh, But there are new fans who come online and they're like, all the albums are there and they can start waiting on the next album with the rest office and if and if fake material comes out, we're not going to accept it.

I mentioned I mentioned at Tacker earlier. I believe a tecker Is is an example where there have been fake leaks that have come out where someone says, here's the new Autacker and listen to an itch really some other album that somebody else created, and everyone just you know, craps on it. They're like, get this, I can see that being pretty easily not replicable, but like you could get faked out on that pretty easily given their music.

Exactly can you imagine the a point in the future where the fakery, if you want to call it, or at least the AI the machine creativity involved is so advanced that they can come up with something that scratches your itch, that itch for say, another Tool album or another mos Art composition, whatever the uh the need is, and maybe on top of that, it even customizes it to your own particular taste within that group, your own

real time emotional demands. Well, what this all boils down to that I think is really interesting and didn't come up in their conversation at all, is um Are you familiar with Walter Benjamin or Benjamin sometimes pronounced his nineteen essay Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? No,

I don't, I am not. It's this really interesting take on what the difference is between art and copies of art and he throws out this term aura in it, where he essentially argues that mechanically reproduced art is missing this aesthetic uniqueness that the original has. Right, So, if you take the Mona Lisa and then you run it over, you get a like really high definition quality print of it that's not the Mona Lisa though, right, Like, it

doesn't have the aesthetic uniqueness there. And so when you apply that here, I'm wondering, is the art of the computer authentic then? Like, so, for instance, they were talking about the recipes that were being created by the by the computer. If that comes out and it tastes great and you're like, oh, this is really good, does it have that aesthetic uniqueness of somebody figuring it out or

is it a mechanical reproduction? Huh? But this brings to mind an example that also ties into my trip to New York that I kept thinking about Arnold Bocklin's painting Isle of the Dead, in part because I've just seen Alien Covenant and they referenced the painting in the film. Yeah, there's a scene where it's like one of the castles of the Engineers and David and Walter standing out there having a conversation, and it's clearly inspired by this painting.

The The Isle of the Dead coincidentally, is a painting the gieger Um did versions of and in his own style. Is that right? Well, that must be where they got the idea for it from. I would I would assume that's very like when you look at it and you've seen that movie, you can see the influence. Yea. But it's a it has it's a picture. It's an image with a lot of darkness in it, like literal darkness. And there are some fabulous prints out there of it.

There's some fabulous digital versions of it online you go on Getty, etcetera. But seeing it, seeing an actual version of it at the met Or it was actually a little lackluster because there's this gleam on the black on the black paint and it's aged a bit. So it was one of these rare cases where seeing the original it felt unique in many in many cases like here's the thing itself. But on the other hand, it was less satisfying. Wow. So that's like a reverse of Walter

Benjamine's uh Aura. It's like the aura itself was diminished somehow. And I should add that usually I feel the other way around. Usually if I see the an actual painting that I that I care about, like it's it's amazing to get in there close to it or close as you're allowed and uh and see the details, see the brushstrokes, see that like the physical paint. Another example would be like the difference between seeing a band live and listening

to them on recording um. And this makes me think of synthesis and synthesizers because in this talk they brought up synthesizers as being like an early example kind of like the drum machine of this computer generated creativity and synthesis makes me think of blooms taxonomy of learning and within it, synthesis is one of the modes of learning that you're you're supposed to try to achieve, and it's basically one has to put together parts from diverse elements

to form a whole. So the process of synthesis creates a unique form of ideas, communication, operations, relations, and sometimes art. So while machines are currently capable of being synthesizers right there, they have a combination of those elements, but the humans are the ones doing the synthesizing. The machines themselves aren't doing that, So that role still seems to be held by humans in this relationship between us and seems inherent

to the creative process to me. And they sort of get into this a little bit when they start talking about ownership, because they brought up the idea that computational artifacts are actually not owned by anyone under current law. They're defined as public domain. So if a company can't patent what comes out of a computer that generates art, what's their incentive to fund further develop min of AI creativity.

So actually, this goes back to what we were saying earlier, right like if you were going to, uh, let's say, how stuff Works built an army AI robot that would write all our articles for us, and it was able to write like a hundred articles a day based on like whatever it saw coming up in the news. Technically how stuff Works wouldn't own those articles because they'd be

in the public domain because they're created by computation. Interesting, Yeah, I mean this brings back them to mind the idea of having a human in the loop, And so I could see the case where you'd have to have a human in the loop just for for legal purposes, just so that it could be a definite owner because then that that that human can have it in their contract. Of course that anything they create, uh you know on the company clock is property of the company. That's pretty standard. Uh.

And then I assume the machines contributions to that. The machine would be more of a pure tool in that scenario, but a a self aware tool or if you will, is just going to be outside of the confines of existing law. Yeah, yeah, for now at least. So wow, we've had a pretty extended and a deep discussion about this. I knew that this was going to be interesting, but we really dove deep. And one of the things that I, you know, to close out watching the panel, they sort

of said, well, why are we asking this now? Why are we asking these questions about machines and creativity? And they said, well, because this was actually Chung I think said this. She said, we're currently generating these huge amounts of data, right, like just think of like our information systems, just on the Internet in general, all the data that's being generated, and we're trying to wrap our heads around it.

So we're using models that we're already familiar with. So in this case, the model of creativity right again, getting back to systematizing it, and so human culture is being applied on top of he chnology. Uh, and that that's what's interesting, I think, is like we've gotten to this point now where we're like, oh my god, there's so much information that even like we cannot process it and

figure it out. We need to turn to these machines to try to help us do that, but we need to like layer our cultural understanding of the world on top of that. Yeah, So creativity is not it's not it goes beyond just merely using these machines to make our art, but using these machines to make sense of ourselves. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean I guess ultimately that's the point. Well that in like cat videos all right, Well, you know this is gonna be a great one to get some feedback on because I I know for a fact that we have creators out there who create their art while listening to episodes of stuff to blow your mind. So you guys and gals in particular probably have some insightful commentary

on on the material discussed here today. Yeah, and we would love to hear from you about at There are a number of ways that you can get in touch with us. We're all over social media. If you want to write us about your creative experiments or your thoughts on computational creativity, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And has already mentioned we are a craft podcast and uh and we were. We require your support for our for our art, so we're not asking for money,

but we are asking for iTunes reviews. So if you listen to us on iTunes, or even if you don't, you just have an iTunes account, why don't you go on there and leave us a nice review? Throw us five stars, six star, seven stars, however many stars they let you give us, Uh, just give us the maximum and I'll leave a nice review, And that helps us out and helps us to continue to do this show

for it and most of our episodes as well. All of our episodes have landing pages on our website, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, So we always recommend that you go check those out because they have like interesting links to other stuff that we've worked on that's related. But this one, as we've discussed in the episode, is going to have all kinds of cool stuff, including that playlist that Robert put together of all the Gager album

cover songs. Uh so check that out for sure, and as always, you can get in touch with us directly by emailing us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com