AI is boring

doesn't it feel like everything "AI" is boring now?

obviously there's no way to prove this with hard data, since it's just about the vibe of it all. from text, to images, to music, to video, all of it just feels empty now.

…but it didn't always feel that way, did it? the first text-to-image models were blobby and ugly, but the resulting images were undeniably fascinating. when AI Dungeon hit the scene, it didn't take long for plenty of people to be engrossed by its world of non-sequitur. jump a few years to today, and everything made by these machine learning systems just feels boring and sanitized. it's just endless cascades of unwanted slop; made by no one, for no one.

i don't think this phenomenon is just a coincidence. after all, what does machine learning do? it creates a statistical model based off input data to suit a reward function. the better such a model is at suiting this goal, the more predictable and reliable its outputs will be. when something becomes reliable and predictable, it becomes boring.

in most applications, that isn't a problem. nobody wants their robot vacuum to suddenly get creative with how it cleans the floor, nor do you want a self-driving car to have fun with avoiding an obstacle. if anything, the more boring ML is, the more useful it is as a tool. why did we want — or even expect it — to suddenly start being creative in the first place?

tools are not capable of intent. the brush does not make paint into art, nor does the camera make film into art. under this assumption, it becomes apparent why automating the creation of what is supposed to be a creative work entirely inevitably leads to the output containing nothing of value. without an artist's vision, there cannot be creativity.

therefore, when used with intent, i believe ML-based tools can be used as tools to make art; but those who sit back and let the machine do all the work without even bothering to cherry-pick the final results aren't doing that. they're spammers, not artists. and who said artists wanted to make creating things easier, anyways? i find that good ideas are the hard part of making things, and putting those ideas into action comes naturally after.

a machine can make what it's told to,
only an artist can make what they want to.