“Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion.” So said former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov speaking of artificial intelligence (AI). Kasparov sees an optimistic future for humans in their use of AI tools. He accepts that jobs will be lost to AI, but as a whole humans are in for a promotion. He believes we must give AI, and ourselves plenty of room to grow together.
So I thought I would check out some AI tools and see what they can achieve. To do this I used the Midjourney AI image generation tool. When you provide it with a prompt, it generates four image options.
As an example, the four images below were produced in response to the following prompt from user gusgus1111.
“Ultra-detailed ultra-realistic grainy colorful Gregory Crewdson photograph of a 30 year-old blonde woman laying down on a rug with her small Coton de Tulear dog watching tv in a big dark empty room, big stairs, lots of frames on the walls, floral wallpaper, books in shelves, open windows and volumetric light”
At first glance it looks impressive, with lighting and atmosphere being well captured. But on closer examination you wonder what happened to the ‘big stairs’… is the woman laying down?… and it seems like a rather large ‘small’ dog. One would imagine that it would be these details that an AI would get right and less so the more atmospheric features. So maybe AI has more interpretive ability than we or Kasparov might imagine?
To test this, I started with something simple. I wanted to see what the AI thought AI looked like. The result below is somewhat disappointing, reflecting back basic stereotypical images created by humans. No insights here.
So I tried a tweak with the prompt. “Artificial intelligence in the style of van Gogh”… Maybe there’s some insight in this set but its not obvious to me.
Okay, lets do a more sweeping prompt. How about “Humans can dream but what can artificial intelligence do?” Sure it was a trick question, but at this point I gave up.
But on a brighter note in a year with seemingly endless disasters and horrible news, I asked the AI if it could provide some inspiration: “A scene to make us happy and inspired”… Do they work for you?
So perhaps Kasparov is right. AI is only an efficient calculator of stuff already created by humans. The understanding, purpose and passion must come from us humans. And when we work well together: humans providing the process and creativity (like gusgus1111), and the AI doing the crunching, then something special might be created.
As Kasparov says: “There is one thing that only a human can do. That’s to dream. So let us dream big.”
Postscript: An observant reader @FuzzyLogicSci has noted some anomalies in the images of the girl and dog in the gloomy room. If you look closely at the bottom right image, the girl appears to have at least six fingers. In the top left image, the dog appears to have its head at the end of its paw! And in the top right image, one might ask how many legs has the girl got?
The writer is a co-author of Court of the Grandchildren, a novel set in 2050s America.
Main image credit: Gordon Johnson at Pixabay
