Killing Off the Geese that Lay Golden Eggs

May 22, 2024 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

We all know the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, and the idiot who killed the golden goose got no more golden eggs. It’s been considered good practice not to kill something that is producing important things for you¹.

This is what some companies are doing, though, when it comes to AI. I pointed out here that companies have been doing it before AI, too, though in the example of HuffPost the volunteers who once contributed to it’s success simply got left out in the cold.

It is a cold world we live in, and colder each day. Yet more people are being impacted by generative AI companies, from writing to voice acting to deepfakes of mentionable people doing unmentionable things.

Who would contribute content willingly to any endeavor when it could simply be used to replace them? OK, aside from idiots, who else?

I did hear a good example, though. Someone who is doing research and is getting paid to do it has no issue with his work being used to train an AI, and I understood his position immediately: He’s making enough, and the point of doing research is to have it used. But, as I pointed out, he gets paid, and while I don’t expect he’s got billions in the bank, I’d say that once he’s still getting paid to do research, all will be well for him.

Yet not all of us are. Everyone seems intent on the golden eggs except the geese that can lay them. If you can lay golden eggs, you don’t need to go kill geese looking for them… and dead geese…. because it seems that tech bros need reminding… dead geese do not lay eggs.

I’ve often wondered if this didn’t start Hindus not eating beef, as Indian cuisine relies heavily on the products of the cow – so a poor family killing a cow for meat would not make sense. Maybe not, but it’s plausible. ↩︎

AI On AI, in the style of Douglas Adams.

May 20, 2023 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I decided to challenge one of the large language models to see what it thought Douglas Adams might write about artificial intelligence.

Here’s what it wrote:

Dear hoopy froods and fellow lovers of technology,

Let me tell you that when it comes to artificial intelligence, my mind starts racing faster than a hyperactive cheetah riding a rocket to Neptune. The possibilities are endless, the implications mind-boggling, and the potential for chaos and hilarity unsurpassed.

Now, some people might be alarmed by the idea of machines getting smarter than us. But let me ask you this: have you seen the current state of humanity? There are some things even a toaster could do better. Besides, we can always teach the machines the importance of sanity, logic, and the occasional towel.

Imagine a world where AI could help us solve the most complex problems, from climate change to world hunger, while also bringing us closer to each other and to the wonders of the cosmos. Think of how much more efficient and creative our lives could be if we had a personal Jeeves that could anticipate our needs and wants before we even knew them.

But of course, the road to AI enlightenment isn’t paved with harmless chatbots and benevolent cyborgs. As any fan of the Terminator franchise will tell you, there’s always the risk of a rogue AI going all Skynet on us. We could end up with killer drones, mind-reading algorithms, and dating apps that are just too good at finding our perfect match.

And then there are the ethical dilemmas. What if an AI system decides that the best way to protect humanity is to enslave us? What if it decides that some human lives are worth more than others? What if it decides that the ultimate goal of existence is to maximize paperclip production?

As a wise man once said, the only way to deal with these uncertainties is to carry a towel. Because a towel is not just a useful accessory, it’s also a symbol of our humble origins and our infinite potential. A towel reminds us that for all our flaws and limitations, we are still capable of creating something that can surpass us.

With that in mind, let us embrace the future of AI with curiosity, skepticism, and a pinch of humor. Let’s explore the frontiers of consciousness and intelligence, while also remembering to be kind to our fellow humans, to other animals, and to the Earth that sustains us.

In other words, let’s be like Marvin the Paranoid Android, who may be the most intelligent being in the universe, but who still knows how to appreciate a good cup of tea and a miserable existence.

That’s it for now, folks. Stay tuned for more musings on AI, technology, and life, the universe, and everything.

Until next time, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

Yours in frivolity and profundity,

Douglas Addams’s ghost.

Now, what’s most interesting to me about this is not that it mimics Douglas Adams’ style passably… while lacking the depth that Douglas Adams had in just about everything he wrote. No artificial intelligence will bring that back.

Subjective AI Results.

May 20, 2023 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Banality. I don’t often use the word, I don’t often encounter the word, and it’s largely because ‘unoriginal’ seems to work better for me. That said, one of the things I’ve encountered while I play with the new toy for me, Tumblr, used it effectively and topically:

Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. writing nailed it, covering the same basic idea I have expressed repeatedly in things I’ve written, such as, “It’s All Statistics” and “AI: Standing on the Shoulders of Technology, Seeking Humanity“.

It’s heartening to know others are independently observing the same things, though I do admit I found the prose a bit more flowery than my own style:

“…What Chatbots do is scrape the Web, the library of texts already written, and learn from it how to add to the collection, which causes them to start scraping their own work in ever enlarging quantities, along with the texts produced by future humans. Both sets of documents will then degenerate. For as the adoption of AI relieves people of their verbal and mental powers and pushes them toward an echoing conformity, much as the mass adoption of map apps have abolished their senses of direction, the human writings from which the AI draws will decline in originality and quality along, ad infinitum, with their derivatives. Enmeshed, dependent, mutually enslaved, machine and man will unite their special weaknesses – lack of feeling and lack of sense – and spawn a thing of perfect lunacy, like the child of a psychopath and an idiot…”
Walter Kirn, ‘Project Parakeet: On the Banality of A.I. Writing’, Unbound, March 18th, 2023.

Yes. Walter Kirn’s writing had me re-assessing my own opinion not because I believe he’s wrong, but because I believe we are right. This morning I found it lead to at least one other important question.

Who Does Banality Appeal To?

You see, the problem here is that banality is subjective because what is original for one person is not original for the other. I have seen people look shocked when I discovered something they already knew and expressed glee. It wasn’t original for them, it was original for me. In the same token, I have written and said things that I believe are mundane to have others think it is profound.

Banality – lack of originality – is subjective.

So why would people be so enthralled with the output of these large language models(LLMs), failing a societal mirror test? Maybe because the writing that comes out of them is better than their own. It’s like Grammarly on steroids, and Grammarly doesn’t make you a better writer, it just makes you look like you are a better writer. It’s like being dishonest on your dating profile.

When I prompted different LLMs about whether the quality of education was declining, the responses were non-committal, evasive and some more flowery than others in doing so. I’d love to see a LLM say, “Well shit. I don’t know anything about that”, but instead we get what they expect we want to see. It’s like asking someone a technical question during an interview that they don’t have the answer to and they just shoot a shotgun of verbage at you, a violent emetic eruption of knowledge that doesn’t answer the question.

“I don’t know”, in my mind, is a perfectly legitimate response and tells me a lot more than having to weed through someone’s verbal or written vomit to see if they even have a clue. I’m the person who says, “I don’t know”, and if it’s interesting enough to me for whatever reason, the unspoken is, “I’ll find out”.

The LLM’s can’t find out. They’re waiting to be fed by their keepers, and their keepers have some pretty big blind spots because we, as human beings, have a lot more questions than answers. We can hide behind what we do know, but it’s what we don’t know that gives us the questions.

I’ve probably read about 10,000 books in my lifetime, give or take, at the age of 51. This is largely because I am of Generation X, and we didn’t have the flat screens children have had in previous generations. Therefore, my measure of banality, if there could be such a measure, would be higher than people who have read less – and that’s just books. There’s websites, all manner of writing on social media, the blogs I check out, etc, and those have become more refined because I have a low tolerance for banality and mediocrity.

Meanwhile, many aspire to see things as banal and mediocre. This is not elitism. This is seen when a child learns something new and expresses joy an adult looks at them in wonder, wishing that they could enjoy that originality again. We never get to go back, but we get to visit with children.

Going to bookstores used to be a true pleasure for me, but now when I look at the shelves I see less and less new, the rest a bunch of banality with nice covers. Yet books continue to sell because people don’t see that banality. My threshold for originality is higher, and in a way it’s a curse.

The Unexpected Twist

In the end, if people actually read what these things spit out, the threshold for originality should increase since after the honeymoon period is over with their LLM of choice, they’ll realize banality.

In a way, maybe it’s like watching children figure things out on their own. Some things cannot be taught, they have to be learned. Maybe the world needs this so that it can appreciate more of the true originality out there.

I’m uncertain. It’s a ray of hope in a world where marketers would have us believe in a utopian future that they have never fulfilled while dystopia creeps in quietly through the back door.

We can hope, or we can wring our hands, but one thing is certain:

We’re not putting it back in the box.

Artificial Creativity

March 22, 2023 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

On the left I gave DeepAI a prompt of, “Artificial creativity in a cup overflowing with silicon.” in an impressionist style. It didn’t generate what I was thinking of, and it didn’t give me much.

I’d begun fiddling with ChatGPT, as I wrote about in, “A Chat With GPT on AI“. There, the answers were ambiguous – though necessarily so. In querying it on many things, though, I found the same style of answer more than once, and a certain fondness for words. This should be no surprise in present language models.

I’ve split myself in two world, since within me I have much overlap between technology and other interests and being creative. Previous experiments with doing it all on one site just seemed to confuse people. After all, they don’t expect someone to be both. In that regard, KnowProSE.com is more technical, while here on RealityFragments.com I do everything else.

Oddly, artificial intelligence is thought to challenge both the technical and creative and those with the overlap.

So I decided to ask ChatGPT to write something on creativity and see what it had to say. I was impressed with rationality yesterday. Today, let’s see what creativity I can get out of it.

ChatGPT Creative prompt
ChatGPT generated the following:

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress in recent years. From self-driving cars to natural language processing, AI is revolutionizing industries and transforming the way we live and work. But can AI be creative? The answer is a resounding yes.

AI algorithms can generate new and innovative ideas, produce original artwork, compose music, and even write novels. In this blog post, we’ll explore some examples of how creative an artificial intelligence can be.

Art

AI algorithms can create unique and stunning pieces of artwork. These algorithms use machine learning techniques to analyze existing artwork, understand their composition and style, and then generate new pieces based on that information. One example of such AI-generated artwork is the “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” by the Paris-based art collective Obvious. The portrait was sold for over $432,000 at Christie’s auction house in 2018.

Music

AI algorithms can compose original music in various genres, including classical, jazz, and pop. These algorithms analyze existing music and use machine learning to identify patterns and structures. They can then use this information to create new pieces that are both unique and appealing to the human ear. One example of such an AI-generated piece of music is “Daddy’s Car,” which was composed by the Swedish AI startup Amper Music.

Writing

AI algorithms can also write original works of fiction, poetry, and even news articles. These algorithms use natural language processing to understand the structure of language and then generate new pieces based on that understanding. One example of such an AI-generated work is “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel,” which was written by an AI program developed by a team at the Future University Hakodate in Japan.

Inventing

AI algorithms can even invent new things. For example, a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge used an AI algorithm to design a new type of superconductor material. The algorithm analyzed data from thousands of existing superconductors and then used machine learning to identify new combinations of elements that could be used to create a more efficient material.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in recent years, and its creative potential is becoming increasingly apparent. From generating new artwork and music to writing novels and inventing new materials, AI algorithms can produce original and innovative works that are both impressive and inspiring. As AI continues to advance, it’s exciting to think about what other creative feats it may achieve in the future.

Well, that is impressive. It’s a lot like someone showing a resume. But by itself, it doesn’t show much creativity, does it? It basically writes around some references. This is not to say that AI cannot be creative – the images I use these days are from DeepAI, as an example – but that creativity is limited to what the AI experiences through what it is trained on. It is limited by what it experiences, and what that limitation is… looks a lot like what we train it with.

Certainly, I think writing will be affected – and I have been mildly disillusioned about that. But I also believe that since an artificial intelligence only uses the information we share with it, it can’t truly be creative in a human sense because it lacks the human experience. It might throw words together or create images and music, but it can’t tell you how it feels the first time you eat ice cream or the way you feel when it falls.

It regurgitates in our language because it has no experience beyond what we feed it. It has no expectations, no way to love or hate other than the biases we feed them. When it comes to being human, it is not a competitor.

Unfortunately, though, it will be damned good at marketing.

The Tyranny of Productivity

July 20, 2022 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

This morning, while leafing through the Internet with my first cup of coffee, I came across an article that I thought would interest a new friend, so I sent it to her. We exchanged pleasantries, I wished her a pleasant day or something to that effect, and she wished me a productive day.

And I responded, “The tyranny of productivity”. It’s easy enough to tell yourself that you’re going to write stuff today, but to actually write something worth sharing even with the mouse next to your keyboard is not always easy. It’s not always associated with that spark of creativity, which I had been looking for while playing with Inspirobot last night (all images within this post are from there).

Being productive and creative is a tyranny. Some things take time to percolate but after a certain point in time it becomes procrastination. Being productive by itself is often associated with being busy, and I see lots of people who are busy every day who aren’t productive. Getting things done is productivity, and if you’re too busy being productive it’s worth looking at why you’re so busy – but often, we’re so busy we don’t have the time to figure out why we’re not being productive until we have no choice or we burn out.

There’s often a sense of being overwhelmed when this happens. Things become repetitive, you feel you’re in a rut, and you somehow have to push yourself forward or you feel like you’re falling behind. It’s not as if you’re going to wake up in the morning, roll off whatever you were sleeping on and suddenly start pummeling a keyboard and fashion something creative that other people might actually want to read.

After all, the whole point of writing is to be read. I know quite a few people who claim the title of writer, who write things that are published in newspapers that are read with the same gusto that I used to read the sides of cereal boxes with. There’s an entire generation who did not grow up eating breakfast and reading cereal boxes while doing so, and thus it seems that the writers for the ingredients of cereal boxes are sometimes employed by newspapers to make those of us who did read those boxes comfortable. I wish they would stop.

To be considered productive, one has to produce things. And as she and I later discussed on the phone, the things we prize the most are not the things we cherish the most, and the things others prize the most are the things we throw away as crap. Granted, she does photography at a much more professional scale than I have ever contemplated, and I write at a scale that I contemplate too much about, but these things seem to apply to just about any creative…. work. ‘Work’. Nobody wants to work.

creativity fuckup We all want a feeling of accomplishment, though, and growing up as I did, with the engineering side of the family, the intuitive leaps weren’t as appreciated as grinding away at a problem. In a peculiar sense, creativity is often considered a fuckup because to produce things with creativity requires that little spark that you don’t get when trudging away at a problem. It’s that part of software engineering that I hated, but had to become good at.

Yet we need productivity. We need to produce things, creative or not, because we are tied to silly addictions like food, shelter, and clothing. It’s not often we get to merge the both creativity and productivity, and speaking for myself and the people I know, that little nexus is where we live. That eureka moment when writing some software, where you get to solve something in a unique way, or finding a new way to look at something for photography (literal) or writing (figurative) is a form of mental and/or emotional orgasm. Sort of like that guy Nikola Tesla once said:

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

So, we work on it, and like a child who has just made the latest great art piece for a parent, we might expect it to be hung on a refrigerator door, or for fear of it not being good enough, we may hide it away under our beds. Either way, we may not feel that our work is respected, and we may think because we’re not making money, getting page views or some other arbitrary thing that we are not being productive.

Productivity is judged.

So, like this little post about the tyranny of productivity and it’s practical issues… a sense of accomplishment can come from many things. I feel like I have unburdened myself, and in that way, this post is productive.

Creativity, Education and Employment Simplified

September 26, 2019 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about creativity and technical stuff for… well, for most of my life. It was a few decades ago that I made peace with the two in the mind of a son of a poet and engineer.

It’s not complicated, but it continues to be unexplained by so many experts that I won’t bother linking them. And it is a real problem, as even NASA scientists have found.

In one paragraph:

Creativity is basically not thinking like other people do. Education systems create standardized ways of thinking.

Right there is the answer. Albert Einstein alluded to it frequently, speaking of levels of thinking that solve problems being different than the level that created them, or about imagination, etc.

So, in an education system – in any system – you see creativity in outliers. People who don’t think like everyone else are considered creative even when they themselves may not consider themselves creative.

And that is where things get complicated. If everyone approaches problems the same way, they are measured the same way in education and employment systems (the two are almost the same these days)… are we surprised that creativity diminishes within the systems?

Maybe the cause of that surprise is the education system. After all, people studying the systems are byproducts of the systems and are using the standardized tools to study things in the hope to find how to become… less standard.

This is why we should laugh at the world more.

Recoloring Society

August 28, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Snowy Mountains — ‘Snowy Mountain’, by Wasfi Ekab, 1992.

People do amazing things with simple items. Take crayons, for example.

The image at top was done with what we consider children’s tools. We send them off to color between the lines in the hope that they’ll be quiet. Maybe hoping that their hand-eye coordination improves as they grow older so that they can stay within the lines – and society likes things that stay in lines. That follows something someone else drew. Whose vision is limited to what is possible within those lines.

It keeps things safe. Predictable. Unambiguous.

Yet we celebrate those who can do things without lines that we can identify with – we like art we can identify with. With lines. With a framework. A framework we can identify.

Stray too far, and it makes people uncomfortable. Few people like uncomfortable.

People want order. Nice lines of what can be expected.

Everything in it’s place.

Everything explained, even if by a theory incomplete.

The trouble is that we just get the same things when we do the same things. There might be some variance, but it’s the accepted range of things.

The only real moves forward humans have made have been when people color outside the lines.

When the crayons are outside of the box, the framework.

When they’re disorganized.

Mixed up.

When the canvas is clear of lines we thought we needed.

A mess of crayons and a blank page is how we let children play.

When did we lose that?

Or do we still have it?

Victims of The Possible.

August 17, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

The sky is the limit, as the saying goes, yet even on the same planet we see different skies.

What surrounds us limits what is possible.

What we view as possible limits us in a very direct way – and indirectly it limits us what we aspire to, what we dream.

We’ve seen it all our lives, we will see it throughout our lives.

If we look carefully, we can see it right now.

Look around you. Look carefully at the walls that secure you, the window placements and what you can see outside of them, assuming you can.

Where you are right now was framed by an architect and built by contractors. What you see right now guides what you think about.

That is the power of building things, that is the implicit limitation.

Everyone around you is a victim of what they see as possible. Every single person has their own outlook.

Everyone lives in their own cave, as Plato wrote.

We who travel between the caves know this, but what we convey is rarely trusted within the caves of others only because they have grown accustomed to what they think that they can do, what they may be limited by – physically, socially, economically – so they do not trust easily people who fall into their caves.

They are the victims of possibility. And we are the victims of them.

The Creative Space

August 16, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

People have ideas about creativity and most of them aren’t very creative. Others are creative but impractical. And so here I am, considering how to create my own creative space.

Given the opportunity has finally arisen to do it, I find it a daunting task. Sure, you can design something you like today – but tomorrow it may not be that great. Longevity is an issue.

And then there’s the part of me that also understands that a space by itself doesn’t generate creativity. I’m a big fan of motion, myself – a drive, a walk, a run, a swim, anything where I move around and things, therefore, move around me. A camera is good for that, circling around to get a nice shot… and so it is with writing. So it is with any creativity.

And then we get to the people we surround ourselves with. There are those that stimulate us for short periods, there are those that challenge us and make us grow for longer periods.

So, I have ideas of how I’m going to handle this creative space… and the main idea is not to plan it, and to fumble through it as I go along.

The Framework Escape

August 6, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

When we read, we enter a world that someone has created and make it our own. It’s not our world. No matter how hard people will themselves into these worlds, no matter how well they think they fit them like gloves, they are not their worlds – they are the worlds of the writer, the one who dared architect a framework of thought that can guide a willing mind into creating images of a world not their own… that may, sometimes, look almost like the world the writer envisioned.

Textbooks are much the same of course, and texts of a more spiritual nature… they are all frameworks. To create a new framework is a daunting task – to try to be original is almost impossible in a world that constantly regurgitates ideas that sell.

Writers, it is rumored, like to eat, and appreciate a roof over their head. Some even say that they appreciate wearing clothing, though no one can seem to agree on what writers should wear – particularly writers. All of these things cost in the framework we all live in, and so there are two main types of writers: Those who are read, and those who aren’t.

To highlight this, please name only one author you do not know.

I rest my case.

And so, to be popular, it’s not unexpected that a writer would copy a framework – and then, it’s not even their framework. In the mind of a software engineer, it’s object re-use – different attributes, but the same object. This is fair game.

Book stores are filled with unoriginal ideas; trust me: I have become more and more disappointed over the years in bookstores as I look for original minds expressing themselves. Of course, I have read tens of thousands of books by now – willingly! – and so it’s harder to read something ‘new’. Once you see that object with all the different attributes, you know underneath it’s the same object.

It gets harder to stretch the mind with new ideas when the same old ones simply change their clothing now and then. Some even change gender – and these days, without intending to offend anyone – there are so many genders. When I grew up there were only 3 around me (most people only recognized 2).

Technology, business… pretty much the same object re-use concept. It’s boring. Everyone is out there building better mousetraps, and yet no one seems to know what to do with all the mice.

In my lifetime, the global population has doubled. This means that the diversity of the planet as far as humans go has risen exponentially. And yet, everyone reads the same books (if they bother), watches the same movies and television shows, listens to the same music…

And in a world of such wealth in diversity, it’s so hard to find originality. It’s out there, of course, but it’s certainly hard to break out of the algorithmic frameworks social media has been building oh so quietly for such a short period of time.