Currents 078: John Ash on AI Art Tools

Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society. They discuss the basics of how the latest models work, using AI to communicate complexity, removing noise from noise, style transfer, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge, expressing complex ideas through images, iterative de-noising in human conversation, stochastic gradient descent, receptivity to meaning, latent spaces, a high-order taxon of creative iteration, songwriting, finding the ideal number of iterations, stylistic interpolation, Cognicism, attribution & sourcing, citations in ChatGPT, the coming debates about ownership & permission, why the first court ruling will probably be about porn, the world as a giant interconnected neocortex, propaganda bots, owning our cognition, stochastic terrorism, future shock, solving internal alignment before we solve AI alignment, and much more.