A fork on the hype train's track
We're heading in a different direction than the bandwagon and it's great.
I have formulated some of the thoughts you find below before. But, as thoughts sometimes go, they have become clearer over the last weeks. This piece is a follow-up to my last one, What We Could Not Do Before.
The AI hype train keeps accelerating. We have passed a number of impressive landmarks in the recent weeks. GPT-4 was released. Midjourney v5 and SDXL became accessible, Bard is out in the wild, and Runway just released their GEN-1 video generator1. But what I see on the horizon is a fork. And it’s only the first fork of many to come. The hype train will not take any of them – instead it will split with every fork, going down both tracks until the train is more an avalanche of little trainlets2. And it will assume a quantum superposition of being all possible hype trains at the same time any moment now3.
The fork I am talking about is the split between accuracy and creativity. It is the distinction between precise reproduction and colourful fabulation. While the “generative” in “Generative AI” suggests that the best application of such systems is in generating something new, in practice they are more and more used to replicate something known as reliably as possible. That’s the goal of ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Bard. They want to be search engines that don’t generative semantics, only syntax. And it takes a lot of harnessing to get them to do that.
But human communication, and especially creative work, has different requirements. Linus (@thesephist), a highly creative crafter of interfaces to generative models, recently posted about how his personal chat bot is not based on ChatGPT, because he wants it to be “less pristine and direct”. That the current generation of bots for knowledge retrieval is “overly obedient and hopelessly unimaginative” is of course by design. Their imagination is what makes them unsuitable to replace Google search any time soon. Their lack of imagination is what makes them unsuitable as creative partners any time soon. But they don’t have to be both.
With LAIKA we’re of course going down the road of imaginative generators. Our ensemble cast of brains is clearly not obedient or direct4. Even bias, the bane of general language models, is a strength for us. You just pick the bias you want to work with and the system even remembers every one of your biased robot collaborators.
This means we are decoupled from the main direction Generative AI is heading towards. It’s going to be interesting if we can team up with enough creative minds who want to explore the generative potential with us or if commodification, domestication, and accuracy will turn this endless source of the weird into a corporate desert of boredom.
Here’s to the weird ones!5
I’m pretty sure I forgot about 10 big announcements but there are other sources to follow if you want to read the news than this newsletter.
At this point I have to admit that the one feature of my native German language I miss the most in English is omnipresent diminutives. Especially my Austrian slang, and even more specifically the Viennese dialect is filled to the brim with them.
Or it already has – depending on if you look into Pandora’s Bag or leave the cat in it.
Every one of its voices is a distraction and adds to creative confusion. In the future we will put more weight on having them operate in a more organised fashion – and on having clearer metaphors for what you can do with our tool. The next release will be a banger.
All footnotes dedicated to Terry Pratchett.