Being able to imitate Monet doesn't make you Monet. AI can't create anything original.

dormento 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I loathe the blasted copyright washing machine as much as the next intellectually honest person, but:

> AI can't create anything original.

Can we? I mean, don't we base our output on experience and reprocess references + memories of things past to create what we deem as "new"?

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Geee 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Many artists have a distinct, original style. Originality is the ability to create novelty in a way which is aesthetically pleasing. I've yet to see AI create a single distinct style which is beautiful.

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JKCalhoun 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my experience, an artist's original style arrives more or less from the artist having imitated and subsumed bits and pieces from other artists over the course of their artistic pursuit.

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scrumper 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It isn't beautiful at all, nauseating uncanny valley stuff in my opinion, but AI images do have a style (or rather one of a number of idiosyncratic styles.) The sort of glossiness and unsettling focus in photorealistic images; the terrifying dreamlike surreality of more impressionist graphics; even the cartoony style used in corporate infographics. They're all quite distinctive to me at least and certainly aren't anything a human would produce. You can see the "influences" (i.e. stolen training data) but it really has come up with something itself.

Not that I think it should have. Kill it with fire and EMPs.

	▲	Geee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True. AI does have a style but it's more of a bug than a feature.

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sd9 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a real Monet.

	▲	Geee 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know, but it could be AI-generated as well, because people can't tell them apart. The point was that even if AI could imitate Monet perfectly, it's not Monet. It's a worthless test.

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setopt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Define «original».

Under many definitions, where novel composition of existing knowledge or techniques is counted, it certainly can.

	▲	Geee 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, there's the Einstein test: can AI figure out general relativity if it's trained only on knowledge up to 1915 or so, before it was discovered. Similarly, you could do a Monet test: train AI on everything before Monet and try to get it to create paintings similar to Monet. Original is something that is out of the data distribution. AI can't do anything original, because it's job is to imitate the data distribution. Originality in itself is not hard, because pure noise is original. It should be original and beautiful.

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pixel_popping 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI can absolutely create an original book, absurdly false.