Episode 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence

Darron and Jeff discuss the sudden and ubiquitous onslaught of artificially intelligent apps and the conversation they engender currently pervading our culture. From a position of relatively low information, they try to grapple with the implications of this technology on art, learning, and education, and while they barely make it to the latter topics, they do explore the nature of art and how artificially intelligent tools might contribute, or take away from, what has up until now has been an exclusively human creative endeavor. Where will all of this lead? They certainly don’t know, and even though they do some sense making here, ultimately they're left with more questions than answers, which is essentially the epitome of the larger collective cultural situation. There’s certainly a lot more learning and thinking to do, and they're sure this is a topic they will revisit again and again.

Notes:

• 2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction from June 2024,  in which Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke, MD is referenced and the idea of a “dopamine fast” is discussed.

• 8:28 - See “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)

• 8:56 - According to Russian literary theorist and critic Victor Shklovsky, “Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new” and “Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.”

• 10:40 - See “What is AI?” (IBM) for a good general overview

• 10:55 - See “What Are Large Language Models?” (IBM) and the relevant LLM Wikipedia entry

• 11:43 - See “Can AI and Machine Learning Revolutionize the Mammogram?” (Breast Cancer Research Foundation, 2024) and “Artificial Intelligence in Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Personalized Medicine” (Journal of Breast Cancer, 2023)

• 11:55 - See “AlphaFold” (Google DeepMind) and “Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3” (Nature, 2024)

• 16:20 - Suno and Udio are two popular generative AI-powered music creation tools that work based on prompting

• 17:40 - Listen to “Beautiful Illusions” or “Beautiful Illusions” which are two initial alternate song versions created by Suno (in about 1 minute) using the following prompt and no additional iterating beyond the original output: An early 60's style acoustic folk song called Beautiful Illusions with lyrics about how we all live our own perceived reality, solo acoustic, guitar, strumming, harmonica, folk, coffee house 

• 19:03 - Listen to Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan

• 20:30 - See “Detecting AI fingerprints: A guide to watermarking and beyond” (Brookings Institution, 2024)

• 25:43 - See “Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity” (Nature, 2023)

• 28:10 - See Darron’s “Vonnegut-Style Quotations Challenge,” which was expressly created to test Jeff’s thesis here and see if he can identify genuine Vonnegut quotes versus ones that AI generates

• 30:58 - See “Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems” (Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 2019) and “Artificial Intelligence and Keeping Humans “in the Loop”” (Center for International Governance Innovation, 2020)

• 31:35 - See “What are AI Agents?” (IBM) and “What is Strong AI?” (IBM) for good overviews 

• 32:10 - Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival

• 34:46 - See Artistree or MadeMay for examples of online spaces where art can be commissioned directly from artists

• 36:15 - See “Glue in Pizza? Eat Rocks? Google's AI Search Is Mocked for Bizarre Answers” (CNET, 2024) and “Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination” (Gizmodo, 2024) and “What are AI hallucinations?” (Google Cloud)

• 40:10 - Listen to Episode 280 of Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast featuring François Chollet on Deep Learning and the Meaning of Intelligence from June 2024

• 40:30 - See “In Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher” (Vice, 2022) and “Creating a large language model of a philosopher” (Mind & Language, 2023)

• 41:18 - See character.ai

• 42:48 - Read the op-ed “ChatGPT is at odds with what education is for” (The Boston Globe, 2024)

• 49:31 - Listen to “If I Were A Carpenter” by Tim Hardin

• 54:41 - Watch “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse” by Rick Beato