UniversalKinase

For the past 30 years, politicians, CEO's, leaders of every stripe, have often talked about doing 'something' about human greenhouse gas pollution. They make plans, sign treaties, pledge to make cuts to emissions. Those plans are left unfulfilled, without even much effort made towards them. Those treaties are ignored, violated, and discarded. Those pledges aren't worth the paper they're written on.

For 30 years I've watched our leaders fail us. For 30 years I've watched my fellow citizens pay lip service to doing something about this crisis that we've all known has been coming, which is here, and which is only getting worse. For 30 years I've watched those same citizens fail to live up to their own ideals.

So, when some 'leader' makes a 'promise' to reduce emissions in 10, 20, 30 years from now... they're lying to you. If somebody makes a promise to do something in 1 year, 2 years, maybe even 5 years, maybe that promise (if from a credible source, with enforcement mechanisms) could be worth something. However, whenever some leader promises that something is going to happen after they no longer have any influence over what's going on, they're just mocking you. They're playing you for a sucker, lying to your face to try to appease you.

These pledges to be 'carbon neutral' by 2050 are BS. They're absolutely worthless, and anyone who believes they're going to be kept is a chump. There are hardly a handful of leaders globally actually taking meaningful action, and of citizens in the world, most appear to be hypocrites.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite too... I burn ~60 gallons of gasoline a year. I make a big effort to keep that number low. I generally walk to and from work, I avoid unnecessary trips, and I feel guilty about every drop of fossil fuel that I burn, but I have still contributed to our current and future mess.

The thing that most humans don't seem to understand, is that this problem isn't something where you can just stop burning fossil fuels, and then the problem will go away. This is a situation where the temperature is lagging behind the greenhouse effect. When you throw a blanket on yourself on a cold night, it takes a several minutes before the trapped heat reaches equilibrium, and you stop getting warmer. When you throw a thermal blanket on the world, it takes a few decades to reach equilibrium. The only problem is: we have no good way to remove this blanket. The average human is only going to be willing to take action when the situation is desperate right now. By the time that happens, it will be too late, things will worsen for decades after that, and stay that bad for millennia.

Does the average person alive today understand the danger of large scale crop failures in the event of severe heat waves? Does the average person really understand these massive forces, or what it's like to be in a famine? No. Not yet... Still, I think that every single leader of the past 30 years, and today, will someday be judged with the same standard. Did they take any meaningful action to prevent the mass tragedy that they knew was coming? No. Almost none of them have. And for that failure, all of them deserve scorn, and quite possibly to be remembered for nothing else other than that failure.

Obviously there are some detestable individuals who seem to want to bring about an apocalyptic scenario out of some kind of deranged psychology... and are those individuals worse than those who say they want to do something but do nothing? Yes... but only as a matter of degrees. My own country, the US, has acted disgracefully, shamefully, and without any excuse. We've had the money to solve these problems, but petty dramas, individual greed, and staggering cowardice have left the US as the single worst actor in this entire shameful course of events. Joe Biden wants credit for signing a bill into law that subsidized some things. He deserves no credit. Nothing he has done is even slightly adequate to address this issue. His entire career has been marked by him and his allies promising to do something, and doing very little.

The German Chancellor recently said that the Last Generation protestors were insane for gluing themselves to roads. When I look at the path that he and his fellow world leaders are all taking us down, and I look at the protesters, the protesters do not look crazy by comparison. They really don't. Perhaps if more politicians spent more time glued to roadways instead of patting themselves on the back for maintaining a suicidal status quo, we'd be in a better spot.

It's not just the fault of leaders. All of us as individuals can and should do more. Still, I'm willing to put 60% of the blame on leaders, for sheltering bad actors, monopolizing the only power structures through which reform can legitimately be made, and preventing responsible decisions from being made.

When I look at my own country... most of the leaders here are either traitors or cowards. Some manage to be both. I just feel disgusted... Oh, and for those who talk about "carbon capture" as a method to deal with this, I did some back-of-the-envelope math on how much it would cost (ignoring supply constraints) to capture and store the fossil fuel derived CO2 that the US has emitted into the atmosphere in the past century. My crude estimate came out to something like $70 trillion, but I likely under-counted. Very few if any would be burning fossil fuel if they had to pay the bill to clean up the mess. I can promise you, the US isn't going to clean it up... regardless of how much it should.

Then you have the people who want to create their very own Kessler syndrome cloud in orbit to shade everything from the sun..... which seems like it will have a large number of side-effects and risks that are difficult to predict, if it would even work, and again, it's something that is very difficult to undo.

Bah, humans....

I used to have dreams for a better future. Those dreams are all dead now.

You cannot build a skyscraper out of clay, and you can't build a better future out of humans. As a material, they're simply not up to the task.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the algorithms that are commonly getting lumped under the label "AI" are too problematic to be in widespread use. They have no morality, no limits, no situational awareness, and poor if any capacity to understand some critical distinctions. It takes the better part of a decade of constant learning before a human can even begin to have a decent conversation, and the better part of two decades before our society considers a human sufficiently learned and responsible enough in order to be legally responsible for their own choices and generally be trusted (sometimes wrongly, but often rightly) to not make things a total disaster. Human learning comes in many layers of rules and limits at every step.

The ways in which these algorithms are being 'trained', well, if you want to randomly sample anything any human has ever written or drawn, but recombined in disturbing ways and put into totally different contexts, you're going to end up with some deeply disturbing results. Indeed, I have heard about and even seen some deeply disturbing results. If you want to compare these algorithms to humans, they have knowledge of everything, and understanding/wisdom about absolutely none of it. Producing good results is about knowing what situation to deploy given knowledge in. It is not the simple product of simple patterns either. If anyone or anything was that simple, then humans would never have misunderstandings.

Then you have other issues. Read the ChatGPT privacy policy. Read it and think about what it says with even a tiny bit of cynicism. Think a user who's 'chatting' with this chat bot couldn't be provoked into revealing information about themselves or others that they shouldn't? Think that the policies of these companies to sell every bit of information they can extract from anyone to everyone who's willing to buy it isn't a problem? Individual humans can have integrity. In my experience, companies don't. These automated algorithms, mimicking humans, without any soul underneath, and selling every bit of information they extract from any humans they interact with... this is a problem.

I see all of these tools as being far too easily abused.

Wait until you get a phone call that sounds just like a loved-one in distress, only to realize it's a scammer who's recorded samples of that loved-one's voice from video or phone calls, who's mapped that onto AI software that's giving a nearly flawless plea asking you to please help them in their emergency by wiring them $3000 into a Swiss bank account. How many people do you think would be fooled? Too many. How many people would be traumatized by the experience? Everyone. The malicious ways in which all of these algorithms can and are being employed are too numerous to count. We are just starting to see the very tip of the iceberg of how bad things are going to get in a million different ways.

This much power without moral restraint... it is unwise for us to let the weapon of knowledge be used against us in full... and from what I've observed, we've never been closer to that happening than we are now. We are all being passively manipulated by too many algorithms on a daily basis. The news we see or don't see, the search results we see or don't see, the suggestions and notifications that either come up or don't, all of those are being manipulated by algorithms. So far, they've been kind of clumsy. They're about to get a lot less clumsy and a lot more malicious. There is too much incentive, and very few (if any) safeguards, psychologically, socially, economically, politically, etc... we're in for trouble.

Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood, but tonight, I'm thinking that our societies and governments have made some major mistakes in not thinking through the risks of malicious deployment of this technology. The court ruling on images was unfortunate, unsurprising, but still unfortunate. Let that ruling be a canary in the coal mine that no political or legal system on the planet is ready to deal with the problems that are likely coming.

If you can control a large portion of what somebody sees and learns, tailored to things they're susceptible to, how hard is it to manipulate them? Not nearly hard enough. The internet may yet prove our collective undoing. As an experiment, we're entering a new phase of it, and I'm starting to get pretty pessimistic about its prospects.

For my work, I've been doing a lot of mathematical modeling of biological data recently.

It's been pretty cool actually. Made me remember a ton of stuff that I 'learned' in high school, but now I'm revisiting those memories with a ton more experience, and lots of those old memories have just made a lot more sense now.

Been plotting out tens of thousands of observations, performing complex algebra on them, testing lots of things.

The past year has felt longer to me than any year in the past 15, because I've just been so engaged with it.

Last night I figured out how to make animated plots to visually show the steps of the analyses I've been doing. I've struggled to explain all of it to my colleagues, but I think that maybe if I make an animation that shows the results of each step as a process, then they'd understand.

If I do something like that, I might submit a copy here as well. Some of the math is actually really beautiful.

When I first learned about the attempts to use AI to help make images, I was skeptical.

There are 4 critical elements that I think are important (though not always essential) in visual art.

1) Expression of the artist

2) Technique employed

3) Resulting Aesthetic

4) Inspirational Capacity

Each type of visual art uses these, to greater or lesser degrees.

However, I wasn't sure that using AI assistance in generating art would really fulfill any of these categories, let alone all of them. I have come to the conclusion that it does, or that at least it can. There are still some standing issues about ethics and intellectual property rights for these pieces of software, but I'd like to explain my thought process.

First, let's set aside the moral and social complexities for a bit and examine AI Generated art on its own terms. Does it meet the criteria for visual art?

1) Is it an expression of the artist?

My answer is: to a varying degree. Most of these pieces of software have the user fill the role of coming up with the idea for what image to create. A user can specify a vivid and detailed scene they can see in their mind which is intimately connected to their self-expression. Or they could just type in "cat", and see what results. However, because the specifics (while they can be somewhat influenced by the prompts) are largely internal to the code and datasets, there are limits on how much of the self the user is actually able to put into the image. However, in the struggle to create something that matches, with trial and error, and selection and modification for things that are working, there can be a real element of artistry there. It's a strange tool, but not incompatible with the 1st objective, even if it's somewhat indirect. However, when you compare it to something like photography, which was also a major disruptive force to the art world when it was invented, I think there are similarities. Sometimes self-expression can be as minimal as "I saw this, it inspired me, and I want to share it", though I don't think self-expression alone is sufficient to call something art. Photography however, can have many refined techniques, a great deal of patience, skill, and vision can go into obtaining an excellent capture. I think the same general principal also applies to AI generated images.

2) What is the technique that's employed?

Here, it also varies, but it's fair to say that it's piggybacking off of a lot of talented artists who's techniques have indirectly been fed into the algorithms. It's not that there's no technique associated with making quality AI images, but it's all very indirect. I think this is the category in which AI generated art is weakest in terms of meeting the definition.

3) Resulting Aesthetic

At its best, it's excellent. Truly superb. For me to acknowledge that was a little bit of a bitter pill, but it's the truth. These algorithms have created some truly beautiful images. Obviously they don't do it with every try, but that's not the point. These tools can produce results that look fantastic.

Which brings me to the last part of what makes art art, and what makes art good.

4) Inspirational capacity

Does it inspire the viewer? Is the experience of the observer something that moves them? Does the observer create their own type of art in their mind as a response to the art they're observing? Do they think and feel something new or something powerful in response to what's there? In this I also have to answer: At it's best, absolutely.

I have been inspired by the ways that these users and algorithms have recombined ideas and techniques. I have been inspired by the patterns they have produced, and the ideas they have shared.

Therefore, on its own terms, in isolation, I conclude that these AI algorithms are doing something remarkable, that they are empowering their users, and that the results of that (at least sometimes) have merit on their own terms.

However, things don't just exist in isolation, and there are some feelings of grievance in the artistic community about some of those implications. There are many members of the artistic community who have honed their techniques and their skills for decades of dedicated effort to be able to produce the images they do. These members feel that their effort and their inspiration is not just a commodity, but that it is both their livelihood and a measure of their souls. They feel threatened by AI generated art, with some justification. If software can compile the collected techniques of mankind, and make it accessible to everyone without the cost of the years of effort that these artists have spent, does that not cheapen the value of their skills? In absolute terms, I'd say "no", their art is glorious in its own right regardless of what anyone else does, but in relative terms I'd say "quite possibly". If your skill becomes less valued by others because it has been rendered less unique, then that can be a major blow to one's self-identity and potentially one's livelihood. I fully understand the fear and resentment that some members of the artistic community feel about this development. Worse yet, sometimes the training done by the algorithms directly uses the products of these very same artists, finding ways to emulate their techniques, using their artistic vision as data points to remodel itself on. If this was done with their permission, it would be one thing, but that is not an enforced standard. The true social tragedy would be for these algorithms to exploit the efforts of these artists so successfully that it removes their ability to support themselves, or their desire to create more art, a situation which would lead to artistic stagnation and socioeconomic blight.

Yet, this is not the first disruptive technology to be invented. We humans find ways to adapt. That is not to be callous, or to dismiss the concerns, but I do not think the worst fears will come to fruition. Practically though, what options are there? Once a new technology is out of the box and widely distributed, it's not going away. Being resentful or wanting to ban it does nothing productive. There are better ways for the artistic community to address its concerns and arrive at fair outcomes for this technology and the social environment around it.

I therefore call upon the visual art community to have a productive discussion around fair use of this technology. It exists, and it's not going away, and I think it has its own place where it can do positive things. To address concerns, I think there are some social practices that could be put in place to minimize the potentially exploitative elements of it. Let us come together and find a fair and inclusive way to respond to this development. The anger and the hate around the technology are bad for everyone. There will be disruption, but if we all try to approach the issue with respect, it should be possible for us to come to some reasonable understandings.

Maybe that's an idealistic proposition, but the alternatives all look worse.

May we all find this wisdom and compassion to try to make things better.

Best wishes to you all.

-UniversalKinase

I was a bit slow on making fractal art for a while. My old computer, which had been working well for 10 years, finally died. Getting Apophysis working well on the new one took a bit of tinkering. It was successful though, and I'm back at it.

When I make fractals, sometimes I'm trying to do something ambitious, and sometimes I'm just making stuff for fun, and as a relaxing process. I'm not doing anything ambitious at the moment.

I did something artistic and fairly impressive (in my opinion) in a different medium from usual over the past few months. I've been playing on a Minecraft server, and I carved out and decorated a large cavern complex, filled with a number of fantasy things, some of which were inspired by common tropes, and some of which were out of my own imagination. I also drew inspiration from caves I've been in IRL, some literature I've read, and from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. This isn't the best platform to show off all of that, but I might upload a few screenshots of the work I did there.

I made a few fractals this evening, and uploaded them with some thoughts.

I've played a fair bit of chess lately, been trying to publish some papers at work, and I'm applying for different positions. Between all of that, my time and energy are finite resources.

Still, I've enjoyed this site for a long time, and I intend to keep doing so, and to keep posting stuff here. I hope you all are well, and that you have a great day.