╭
𝟙𝟞·
Some online news source or other asked if AI could create anything original. What do you think those Hamlet writing monkeys are doing between Shakespeare plays? If
┊
the monkeys have already produced Hamlet, fix up the any spelling mistakes and obvious grammatical blunders AI can, and those monkeys will have produced a whole lotta
┊
plays Shakespeare never wrote. Change the names of a few characters, reorder some events, and one of those gazillion plays is gonna look very much like that play you
┊
were going to start on next week.
┊
┊
The problem is you have to find the damn thing in all that monkey stuff, most (like 99.9999999999999999999%) of which looks like the email your cat sent out your ex
┊
by walking across your keyboard. So use AI to split out the plays from the cat-walks. Now you have a pile of dervitive shlock along with probably quite a few
┊
variations on that play you've got percolating away.
┊
┊
But can AI recognize your ‘genuinely original’ play as a play? Or can it only recognize plays it's been trained on, kickin others out screaming “you call this a
┊
play!? This is nothing like 12th Night!” The textual structure of a play on the page is mostly recognizable using a few rules, and recognizing grammatical structure
┊
within that is doable by current AI systems. Tuning a ‘play-recognizer’ might reject Oscar Wilde's works as nonsense, but as long as originality isn't exclusively
𝕁
┊
comedic, a trained AI can filter out alot of non-plays without excluding everything unless it is copyright-infringingly similar to what it's been trained on. That
𝕒
┊
leaves us with alot of play-like things, but preserving originality means most of the plays remaining would be described as “distastefully avant-garde”.
𝕟
┊
𝕦
┊
Go back to generation - instead of untrained monkeys, use an AI system trained to write plays. If it only produces mashups of “The Crucible” and “Othello” throw
𝕒
┊
enough monkey stuff in - randomize - and maybe ypu're getting short stories, poems and letters to the editor, but that first AI can filter those in the round
𝕣
┊
receptacle. Sooner or later that randomness a play-object close enough to your ‘original’ that you can expect a call from some strangely simian looking laywers when
𝕪
┊
you head to Broadway. And your monkeys won't have filled up a few galaxies with pages of cat-walk.
┊
┊
A back and forth between generation and recognition led to the first AI word-to-image generators, producing all sorts of stuff in the ‘never seen before’ category.
┊
┊
Can somthing generated randomly be original? It probably will be - hitting on something that already exists is the unlikely case. Is it the result of a creative act?
┊
Not to me - art (and I assume the original question was about ‘art’) is about the creation, not the created. The object is only the receipt for the what the artist
┊
thought and did.
┊
┊
Maybe what we really want to know is whether AI can be creative or not? Are you sure you want to get metaphysical with me? [last edited 2026-01-18]
┊
┊
𝟙𝟝·
I don't know how to address the political situation here in the US - I think outside human norms in too many ways to contribute positively. From that outside
┊
posiition, it's clear that people who saw an unjustified execution in publicly available video of Renee Good's killing have fundamental cognitive differences from
╰
those who saw a justified use of force.
1
𝟮
𝟚𝟜·
I finally got around to watching Jordan Peele's documentary "Get Out" the other night. I have to say, the re-enactments were grisly, but well done.