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AI in the fast lane

When reality becomes too weird too fast one might as well take a step back and read some books, which is exactly what I have been doing. I'll comment on some recent reading, but first a thought on the things moving in the fast lane.

Ploum a écrit (et je me crois en gros partager son point de vue) :

J’en ai marre de le répéter, mais ChatGPT et consorts sont des générateurs de conneries explicitement conçus pour vous dire ce que vous avez envie d’entendre.

Mais certainment ça depend de questions que l'on pose ?

Je ne sais pas, n'ayant jamais utilisé le Grand Perroquet Transformateur.

It does sound plausible that some use ChatGPT et al simply for having someone to talk to. Even Richard Dawkins published a long conversation with ChatGPT, asking if it was conscious. A better question, at this point, might be whether Dawkins is conscious or not. I suppose confirmation bias applies as much in dialogue with chat bots as anywhere else, but I think it would also be possible to ask them to come up with counter-arguments and contrasting perspectives. Of course I'm not saying that one should, for several reasons, one of which is that outsourcing critical thinking gives us less practice, till our cognitive capacity completely erodes.

The other day, as I called for a taxi, a voice informed as usual that the conversation would be stored for further analysis and improvement (i.e. grounds for laying off unefficient workers), and added that I could tap some number to consent to have it used to train an AI. When they're done with that the best way to find a taxi will be to grab one on the street, as it is already.

A rather worrying paper was published a few weeks ago which demonstrated that two commercially available LLMs were capable of self-replication. I'm not going into details because I've already written about it elsewhere.

Just after I posted it there was a story about artists who released a silent album in protest, and that silly Dawkins blog post. Then there was this auction of some really ugly AI-generated portraits. It's just impossible to keep up with the insane pace of insanities.

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So let me instead turn to what I'm reading. Still doing research for my book on art theory, I just finished David Balzer's Curationism. Published in 2014, it bears witness to an earlier, more innocent era, before Trump came to power, before covid infected many immune systems and polarised even more people into sternly opposing camps. Balzer's short book is mainly about art curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist and others, but he also argues that many aspects of modern life are, in some sense, curated. My impression of a text from a more innocent era may be due to all the references to consumerist culture. But the parts of the book that are concerned with art curation lays out the history of how the métier developed from the earliest museums to the 1990's curatorial studies programs and the strange concept of "deskilling," or the focusing of education on theory of little practical use.

As I was rapidly approaching the end of unread art theory books I had to order a few new ones. And, by dint of miracle, they eventually appeared. Currently I'm reading, with some effort, Laurent Buffet: Captation et subversion. L'art à l'epreuve du capitalisme tardif. Buffet is not a very easy writer because of his long sentences and literary style, but his argumentation is rather straightforward as far as I'm able to follow it. A key concept is that of a "sociological paradigm of art" which, if I understand it correctly, has to do with how capitalism has borrowed ideas from modern and contemporary art, and how value in art is increasingly measured in economic terms. Not all artists go along with this trend, there is also significant pushback.

Many art scholars are heavily steeped in Marxist jargon, such as Peter Bürger, Peter Osborne, Sven Lütticken, and also Laurent Buffet to some extent. Now, I never studied Marx's writings, but I do believe he made an important observation about how wealth is transfered from workers to those who own the means of production. Beyond that, there is so much Marxist jargon that just leaves me alienated. Maybe it's because the German vocabulary sounds so abstract in its latinised English translations. I can't help being sceptical of the subsumption of a concrete reality under abstract notions. But I wouldn't bother to ask a LLM to explain it in plain terms.