TagCreativity
Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
What exactly is a human and how does a human differ from a computer?On December 27, The New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI for violations of their copyright. The Times contends that training chatbots on its content in order to create an information competitor is a violation of its copyright. This suit is sure to bring up a number of old copyright issues that were never resolved, plus some new that need to be worked through. The fact is, the big search engines have been violating copyright from the very beginning. All search engines are in fact derivative works of the sites that they crawl, index, and dish out. Most search engines even provide excerpts from the sites they scan. However, most copyright holders have turned a blind eye to this for two main Read More ›
Creativity Takes Discipline. AI Offers an Easy, but Boring, Way Out
Because creativity requires work, AI systems will stunt human creativity over time.Consider the following scenarios and compare: Leilani considered the images on the screen … choose five, copy them, and paste them from the AI generator to the AI evaluator. Two to choose from … creative juices flowing, Leilani chose one and started working on the type. Which typeface would represent the playful air the client was looking for? Back to the AI selector to describe each face. All of them were playful, but one was fun, too — that’s the right match! After a few more minutes of creative release, Leilani leaned back to consider the result. Paste a copy of the final to her local friend’s group and wait a minute … the first response was: “Wow! You’re as Read More ›
Lawsuit Champions Human Creativity Over AI Mimicry
Copyright laws can protect against sophisticated plagiarism.Why You Are Non-Computable
Usually Robert Marks does the interviewing, but today, the script is flipped. In this episode, we revisit the press tour Dr. Marks went on to promote the seminal ideas of his 2022 book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will, which is about artificial intelligence and the non-computable traits (like creativity and emotional sentience) that make human beings unique. Additional Read More ›
Literature and Personal Consciousness: Why AI Can’t Speak to You
AI can never intend meaning like a human author canMartin Luther King Jr. on the Failures of Communism
The great advocate for justice saw, as George Gilder does, why materialism fails usCreative Computers? Marks and Medved on The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
What can a computer do now and what will it be able to do in the future?What can a computer do now and what will it be able to do in the future? A remarkable amount of confusion surrounds these questions. On a classic episode of “Great Minds” with Michael Medved, Dr. Robert Marks of Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence casts some very helpful light on the limits of AI. Also consider purchasing Dr. Marks’s book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences and other videos related to artificial intelligence and technology. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues Read More ›
More Gale Pooley and More Population Growth
We're living in a time-price revolutionCountering the prevailing narrative of doom, economist Dr. Gale Pooley shows how the incredible power of learning curves has instead brought about an era of unprecedented abundance. Based on his research into time prices (the money price divided by one’s hourly income), Pooley demonstrates that virtually every commodity is substantially cheaper today than it was decades or centuries ago. We are truly in a time-price revolution. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Read More ›
Does ChatGPT Pass the Creativity Test?
What does ChatGPT have to do in order to be considered creative?What is creativity? Where does it come from? Why are some things humans do considered creative, while other things mundane? Can AI be creative? To answer these questions, let’s come up with a definition. Creativity at least means something new has been done. No work that copies what has come before is considered creative. A Creativity Criteria Just doing something new is not enough either. If it were, then I can easily be creative by flipping a coin 100 times. That specific sequence of coin flips will only occur once in the entire history of humanity. But no one would say I was creative when I flipped a coin. This means creativity has to generate a new insight. However, these two criteria are not adequate, Read More ›
New Review of “Life After Capitalism” Amplifies Book’s Core Themes
Returning to the "mind-centered economy" where knowledge is wealthA new review of George Gilder’s latest book Life After Capitalism from Samuel Gregg highlights the need for the return of the “mind-centered economy,” in which governmental bureaucracies no longer hamper human creativity and imagination. When capitalistic, democratic societies fall for materialistic presuppositions of the world, they end up resembling socialist contexts in which the state is everything and individual men and women are squelched. Gregg writes at the Acton power blog, [Gilder]takes this notion of the free human mind as the decisive factor in driving economic growth and applies it across the board to economic theory, technology, and our understanding of money. Looking at the question of incentives, for example, Gilder points out that they would yield nothing in Read More ›
George Gilder on the Eric Metaxas Show: Wealth is Knowledge
Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growthGeorge Gilder, economist, venture capitalist, and author of the new book Life After Capitalism, appeared on the Eric Metaxas Show to discuss his new title and the overarching story of his life. Gilder co-founded Discovery Institute, the parent organization of Mind Matters and the Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, and his 1980 book Wealth & Poverty strongly influenced the economic policy decisions of President Ronald Reagan. In this interview, Gilder speaks with Metaxas about his upbringing, his ascendancy into the public policy sphere, and the philosophy that underpins his life work. Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growth, and that this points to the fact that the activity of Read More ›
You Can’t Have Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet…or Can You?
Busting the myths of population growth and economic scarcityWired recently came out with an interview with economics data analyst Gaya Herrington proclaiming the doom of humanity if we don’t “shift the paradigm” NOW. Herrington said, Very succinctly, we are at a now-or-never moment. What we do in the next five to 10 years will determine the welfare levels of humanity for the rest of the century. There are so many tipping points approaching, in terms of climate, in terms of biodiversity. So—change our current paradigm, or our welfare must decline. The Planet Can’t Sustain Rapid Growth Much Longer | WIRED Population alarmism is not a new chipmunk at the park. It’s been burrowing its nose into the popular imagination for decades now. But is the hype merited? Are we really Read More ›
That Hideous Strength, A.K.A. Transhumanism
C.S. Lewis's classic science fiction tale is about the temptation to reject being humanC.S. Lewis’s 1946 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength is almost eighty years old now. Written during the throes of World War II, the novel is the culmination of Lewis’s cosmic trilogy, preluded by Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There are hosts of other articles attending to the prescience of Lewis’s terrifying novel, and for good reason; That Hideous Strength is a warning against using technology to dehumanize people and ultimately cripple the world into submission. It’s a great book as a novel, but it seems especially appropriate to revisit in lieu of the growing interest in transhumanism and the rapid acceleration of AI development. It feels like much of the talk on AI in recent months involves Read More ›
Life After Capitalism: Human Creativity Drives Economic Growth
Gilder once more rocks the archetypes of modern information theory and economics with a paradigm-shifting salvo of sheer brillianceAuthor of national bestseller Life After Google and generation-defining Wealth and Poverty, venture capitalist, futurist, and pioneering thinker extraordinaire George Gilder pinpoints how the clash of creativity with power at the heart of economic systems leads to global cognitive dissonance and argues that the creation of the novel taps capitalism’s infinite promise and is humanity’s only path of escape from stagnation and tyranny. Gilder once more rocks the archetypes of modern information theory and economics with a paradigm-shifting salvo of sheer brilliance. The capitalist era is over — get ready for life after capitalism. For more than two hundred years, capitalism spread wealth around the globe, bringing unprecedented prosperity and progress, liberating human potential. But something has gone terribly wrong in the world economy. Read More ›
Supreme Court Ruling Strikes a Blow to “Generative AI”
Ouch. That's a big loss for AI. Here's why:Can generative AI “think outside the box” even as it draws from preexisting material on the internet? Are the images it produces protected under “fair use”? The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has decided “no.” AI fails to be “transformative,” meaning it can’t create new meaning apart from its source material. Robert J. Marks reported on the recent lawsuit Warhol v. Goldsmith, writing, Assume AI is trained with all of the musical compositions of Bach. If the AI generates music that sounds like Bach, it is not transformative. The “meaning or message” can be construed as being the same. It’s still like Bach. On the other hand, if the AI is trained only on Bach but generates music Read More ›
Say What? AI Doesn’t Understand Anything
Is that supposed to be a cat, Mr. AI?Whenever I look at AI generated content, whether it be pictures or text, they all have the same flaw. The AI cannot comprehend what it is making. Let me explain. When we humans draw a picture, we are drawing a concept. We are drawing something like “cat climbs a tree” or “cowboy riding into the sunset”. It seems like this is what is happening with a picture drawing AI. We give it a prompt, and it draws an associated picture. On second thought, maybe not… When AI draws the picture, what is really going on is it is finding individual-colored pixels that correlate with the letters we typed in its massive database stored in the neural network. Very different than how we draw. We Read More ›
What Even Is Artificial Intelligence?
When we talk about AI, we're basically talking about computersIn a recent Mind Matters podcast, computer engineer Robert J. Marks puts the AI hype into perspective by investigating what it can and cannot do. Marks is of the mind that AI can offer a myriad of benefits to the modern world, and notes that the technology has already made inroads into various spheres of life including banking, accounting, and facial recognition technology. The danger lies in believing that AI can replicate human creativity and understanding. While AI can do a lot, it can never understand itself the way human beings can. Marks thinks this is essential to keep in mind. We are not machines. Here is a quote from the episode in which Marks sets some terms and definitions: Read More ›
Google CEO: AI is More Significant Than the Invention of Fire
Pichai compared the invention of AI to the creation of fire, claiming it surpassed even great leaps in technology like electricityThe Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared on a 60 Minute segment to discuss state of the art AI, Google’s Bard, and what AI means to humanity. Pichai compared the invention of AI to the creation of fire, claiming it surpassed even great leaps in technology like electricity. When asked the reason, he replied, “It gets to the essence of what intelligence is.” See the clip below: Pichai also discussed some of the dangers posed by AI, such as the potential proliferation of misinformation and false images. ChatGPT, for all its dexterity, still makes mistakes, as Google’s Bard does too, and concern over the ambiguity over the reliability of photographic images will only grow as AI develops. Of course, Pichai may Read More ›
From One Author to an AI
What might John Steinbeck think of AI writing a novel?John Steinbeck was among the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, responsible for works such as The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl. East of Eden, arguably his best work, is a sprawling novel about two families in the Salinas Valley in California and is often interpreted as a modern-day retelling of the book of Genesis, particularly the story of Cain and Abel. If we were to ask Steinbeck today about AI’s ability to write a good novel, what might the celebrated writer say? Well, an interview with Steinbeck from Paris Review, while it doesn’t have anything to do with computers or artificial intelligence, does reveal a significant aspect of Steinbeck’s own philosophy of writing Read More ›