New essay: On AI
Added 2023-05-19 14:00:06 +0000 UTCDear patrons,
I hope you are well! ☀️
Last week I announced that I'm currently working on an article about AI, including the relationship between AI and Ceative Coding. I finally finished it on wednesday. For me, it was enormously important to sort out my thoughts with it and to state my personal stance on the topic.
https://timrodenbroeker.de/on-ai/
Philosophizing about technology is becoming more and more important in these unbelievable times and I'm sure you've already noticed that my thoughts revolve a lot around this range of topics.
As always, I am enormously interested in what you think about my statements and what thoughts you have on AI. Do you have any impulses for me or aspects that I haven't thought of myself? I am very happy about your comments!
Thank you, greetings and see you next week! 🙏
Tim
PS: I'm so happy that there are a lot of comments here on Patreon! This way I can collect feedback in a very organized way. Thank you all for that!
Comments
Hi Na! I had the same thought some time ago and i think this is a good analogy. I had quite a few conversations with young and older people and what i see is that even if AI could generate technically perfect output there's a lack of intention and meaning, which decreases the value of the output enormously. Nobody will ask you to sell the worst snapshot on your smartphones photo library. Since AI will cause a flood of meaningless media in the future, i believe that trust and meaning will become even more valuable. If you have something meaningfull to say, it does not play a big role if you have used ChatGPT to optimize your code or MidJourney to create a better photo template, for example. Most important is, that we as creatives keep our integrity.
Tim Rodenbröker
2023-05-24 04:54:04 +0000 UTCHi Tim, after reading your comment, I thought about the impact of photography in the art world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems that we are having a similar controversy over the value of AI-generated visuals and what it means for creatives and societies in general. Just like some artists and art movements back then accepted they could not overdo photography or film in terms of depicting realistic images and found new ways to express themselves, I also believe in the potential of Creative Coding and human imagination to allow us to express our views and emotions in new ways, with or without the support of AI tools.
NA
2023-05-22 18:11:26 +0000 UTCDear Nancy, thank you so much for your detailed comment, I really appreciate it! I share your idea that AI tools can definitively help us to enhance out work, but understanding the underlying principles is crucial to do quality work for different reasons. After i wrote this article i had a chat with a friend who is an AI expert in the field of marketing and he said that the very special thing about Creative Coding is that it’s a timeless, basic skill with a rich culture that has the potencial to endure, even if AI is taking many parts of our work. As you said: Pandora’s box is now open and we have to find our own attitude to the changes that AI causes. Actually i look at it as an exciting challenge in a philosophical way. Many thanks for the hint about the sentence about the internet. You are absolutely right, I just changed it. Warm greetings, Tim
Tim Rodenbröker
2023-05-22 10:26:04 +0000 UTCHello Tim, thanks for sharing the article. My previous comment was too long, so I edited a bit... I have also been using DeepL for years to help me in my translation work because the languages I work with - Japanese and Portuguese - are not straightforward for simple translation algorithms so most of the time I go around searching for words/use in English to find the right words in those languages. From your metaphor about ChatGPT and creative coding and my own experiences working with languages, I think that AI can be a useful tool in our work process, giving us extra ideas we would not have thought of, but at the end of the day, if we don’t have a solid knowledge about the field we are in (be it language translation, web/graphic design, generative or procedural art etc) we can’t really tell if the AI tool did a good job or not. Being able to make that distinction and build upon it with our unique views and knowledge of the world seems to be a relevant skill to have, since the box is already open… By the way I have a little correction to suggest in your article… In the paragraph where you mention Tim Berners-Lee, you write that: “In the beginning, there was a promise: Tim Berners-Lee, now known as the inventor of the Internet...". It would be more accurate to say that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the Internet. The Internet is the global network of networks (the infrastructure) that allowed the World Wide Web to be created, and the same is true about the new layers of blockchain technologies and dapps being created today for Web 3.0 - they all rely on the Internet to exist. The Internet precedes the World Wide Web and has some American "fathers" associated with it because those engineers (at the time funded by the US government) built the base of the network and were able to convince international actors to adopt their proposed protocol specifications for the global network in the early days.
NA
2023-05-20 17:35:25 +0000 UTC
