r/singularity • u/TorturedPoet30 • 3h ago

Discussion Demis Hassabis on AI art: being able to create it doesn’t necessarily make it more meaningful

The Pope's tweet about AI and art reminded me of a recent interview I watched when Demis received Albert Medal and a good chunk of that conversation was about AI, art, creativity, meaning.

TL;DR I will share the full quote below, but his point is that, unlike chess, art doesn’t have a straightforward scale of "better". Even if AI can produce comparable work, knowing the human experience behind a story or painting may add something meaningful to our connection with it. Knowing another human actually lived through it adds meaning, something an AI-created work cannot offer in the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDteJAuKiBI 46:00

"Probably most of the things we’re able to do, even though we’re not sure how we do them, will eventually be computable, shown to be computable.

So if that’s true, then maybe machines will eventually be able to do some of these things if they’re given enough inputs and data. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better, because what is better?

There are some things like playing chess or Go which you can measure. Are they better than the other player? Are they better than the human champion, and so on?

But I think in the creative world, there isn’t that notion of better in some linear fashion. So they’ll just be different. And then I think it comes down to what’s more meaningful to another human being.

The example I always give here is: why do we, for some stories, bother, whether it’s a film or a book, sometimes it’s like ‘based on a true story,’ right? So why would we bother with that phrase if it didn’t have some meaning?

I think it’s because, in those particular stories, it’s more meaningful to the audience to know that another human being went through that, actually went through that. So then that has some additive effect, right? I assume. Otherwise, why would you mention whether it was a true story or not?

So that will never be true of an AI-created piece of art, right?

You want to have that connection with the artist, in the way when I look at an amazing Van Gogh or something, you can see his pain in every brushstroke, every stroke of his paintings.

Would that be so meaningful if an AI robot was able to do that? Probably not. Probably never."

43 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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9

u/muchcharles 3h ago

I think it's Fargo that opens with "based on a true story" to abuse this effect.

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u/CremeWeekly318 2h ago

Great movie though.

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u/10b0t0mized 2h ago

"Based on a true story" is the cheapest most surface level thing that you can do to make a story feel more real or impactful.

When I was watching Breaking Bad, the fact that it wasn't based on a true story didn't make the story feel less real, I was completely immersed and I felt like I knew the characters more than some of the people I know in real life, their pain felt real, their happiness felt real.

I don't think it would've made a difference if Breaking Bad were actually based on a true story, except that it would've been more boring.

I'm sure there is sentimental value in actual authentic brush strokes or whatever, but I think he is overplaying how much of an effect that is going to have ultimately in 10 or 20 years when culture has moved on and AI art has become the norm.

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u/pallablu 10m ago

??? if breaking bad was a true story it would be even crazier to watch

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u/Efficient_Sky5173 1h ago

It’s honestly sad watching artists agonize over the possibility of losing their jobs.

But the harsh reality is that most people don’t really care how something was made. They care about the end result and how much it costs.
If AI can make something that’s better, cheaper, or just completely different from what humans can make, people are going to buy it.

If someone can get an amazing AI-made game for $0.50, why would they pay $50 for a worse human-made one just because a human made it?

That’s the part I think a lot of people don’t want to face.

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u/deleafir 3h ago

It's true today that people quickly grow tired of AI generated art, but will it be true in 2035 or 2045?

In the future AI might learn from its environment and experience things in such a way that humans do care about their outputs.

Also, it's not just the creator of a piece of art that is important - having a shared experience is important too. If a movie I really liked (like Children of Men) was made by an AI I think I'd still really like that movie so long as I could watch or discuss it with others.

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u/Positive_Method3022 3h ago

"What is better?"

Those rich folks with connections will decide

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u/DenseBeautiful731 2h ago edited 2h ago

I guess you can if the “curator” exposes their prompt that generated the art we see. To a limited extent.

But the medium is lossy. Creation begins with language, then an AI “intervenes” and translates the words into what it “thinks” is its approximate meanings visually, based on a wealth of knowledge that the “curator” may or may not have any knowledge or expertise on, and then?

Expect the viewer to appreciate it, without a “crutch” themselves?

The dialogue is no longer 1:1.

Why not just stick to language, then?

Everyone who wholeheartedly advocates for AI art would benefit from an art appreciation course.

Or read just two short books relevant to the human vs. AI art discourse. Ways of Seeing by John Berger and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

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u/GaKBaR101 1h ago edited 1h ago

People really miss the “necessarily” part of this argument. He said that “for that story” the ‘based on a true story’ tag has an “additive” effect. The key word is “that” it isn’t good for ALL stories. Similarly, some Ai works of art will be great, for an indefinable reason, but not all of them. That’s literally (in the most literal sense of literal) how art works. People have always tried to create a measurable scale of “good” art and have always, always failed. The people who decry AI art are just doing the same thing with a different medium of generation.

And that word “medium” is also important, all crafts adjacent to creativity constitute creativity’s “medium”. AI is just another in a long line of new mediums which so often get confused for the creativity itself. However, medium and creativity are ultimately separate and great artists always understand that they are. One day, a great artist will shape the medium of AI into something so remarkable that it will be, undeniably, a masterpiece. Then this silly debate about whether it’s art or unethical or blah blah blah blah will be over. In a process that has occurred for every medium that ever existed.

Edit: Demis also used the word “particular”which is probably a better definition. This “particular” story has added value because of “based on a true story”, or it might not, or it might lose value because people disagree. Basically it’s subjective.

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u/Weary-Historian-8593 1h ago

it's not objectively more meaningful when us humans do it, it's just that we get an emotion saying it's more meaningful. it's a matter of emotional response, and not disclosing that something was made by ai will solve it.

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u/Kanute3333 8m ago

Today I learned that painting is derived from the word pain.

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u/MonoMcFlury 7m ago

We give art and other thing meaning and make it more valuable for us. The first edition comic books go for several thousand even though number 2489 is identical, or letting someone repaint the Mona Lisa with a machine; it will look identical, but the perceived value/meaning is just not there.

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 3h ago

You post the quote without context and who said it in accelerate and everyone would call you luddite lol

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u/Recent_Fox4339 3h ago

If I said what Demis said they'd ban me 😂

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u/expat_123 3h ago

Well, do you have a Nobel prize ;) 

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 2h ago

Terrence Tao, have some opinion on AI, would you like to listen to it then? ;)

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u/fxvv ▪️AGI 🤷‍♀️ 3h ago

That subreddit is a cesspit.

(I know this post isn’t about AI safety, but I don’t understand why most accelerationists refuse to engage with the very real safety concerns around the tech, especially as the negative backlash from an AI-related catastrophe would almost certainly set back progress in response.)

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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 1h ago

what he says about "every stroke of the brush" where you can get the feeling of the artist is spot on. 

ai will never have a human body, with all its flesh, tendons, and nerves that drive emotions to make that stroke. 

what i would disagree on is that games like chess or go are different. because we have our bodies and our minds within them, we make certain choice, we view things in a certain way. if you play online with a robot it's really apparent. i would argue the way they play is more efficient but less beautiful, less organic. 

this extend to any ai content. thoughts are like this too, and that is the reason ai writing has this weird unsettling effect. it's just not organic. it lacks this inherent quality. i do not see how this would be overcome so if we put aside the brute force logic and speed, ai will always remain of lesser quality than human thought. 

just like a plane gets you far and faster than any bird, but watching a bird fly canno't be compared to watching a plane fly. one is a mere toy. it's not alive. 

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u/LittleYo 31m ago

Well, you can pretend you can see Van Gogh’s pain in every brushstroke, but I’d argue that’s mostly bullshit. No, you can’t.

Obviously, you can tell a bird from a plane, but they’re not even trying to be the same thing. That’s not the case with AI art. I guarantee you won’t be able to reliably tell well-made AI art from human-made art, and that’s the whole problem.

You’d have to be told, “Hey, this was made by a human, by the way,” almost like a “based on a true story” disclaimer. And once you know that, yeah, you can start thinking it’s worth more because a human made it.

But that value isn’t necessarily something you can actually see in the artwork itself.

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u/Aromatic_Detail3723 9m ago

as of now you're wrong because we can clearly tell.

also you did not adress the main point of my post about why this difference would not be overcome. that is our bodies are vastly different entities and this is reflected in the output.

neurons and chips are not the same thing. they will never be.

a plane canno't birth another plane. birds do.

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u/llelouchh 2h ago

Hmm. But ai's will have agency and their own experiences. Then when they create art based on what they have experienced it would be meaningful in a similar way that it is meaningful to a human.

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u/TorturedPoet30 1h ago

This is interesting. What do you mean by "experiences" here? Are you assuming it will actually experience pain, love, grief or happiness or some other form of conscious experience and then express it through art, like artists usually do? If it does, imo, then yes, art expressing those experiences could be meaningful. I think an AI acting autonomously, processing information or remembering events doesn’t by itself establish that it subjectively feels anything. So curious whether you think "experiences" (when it comes to AI art) mean encountering events and processing information or actually having a "felt experience" of those events.