Clever Soup

Alphabet pasta letters in a spoon spell out "SOS"

March 26, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

A holodeck and a human actor: a best-case scenario for AI filmmaking. Human actors reacting in human ways to whatever scenario the filmmaker invents, which is not much different from what goes on now.

The thing is, you can’t fake human, and maybe it’s not worth trying. Everything else in filmmaking—sets, props, locations, eldritch horrors—can be represented artistically and therefore generated with digital imaging. It’s the people you can’t fake.

Consider: we pay people to do nothing but be good at emoting. Certain people emote i.e. act more skillfully than others, and we make them millionaires and give them gold statues and big parties and all our attention. One individual, idiosyncratic human with their asymmetrical face and personality quirks and gut biome, singular among all other humans currently alive, can win the hearts of millions. You’re telling me a calculator (which is what a computer is, writ large) is going to be able to fake that any time soon?

AI research has over the years taken up billions of dollars, and we’re still nowhere near faking people. Maybe it can’t be done. A computer as intricately modeled as the human brain might need to be either the size of a mountain or be an actual biological brain, grown in situ.

We are clever soup. But we are like nothing else. We’re cheap to make, easy to teach, endlessly inventive. Why bother trying to mechanically replicate what’s already so abundant?

seo

a fluffy Pomeranian dog in glasses and a sweater works hard at his computer like a good doggo!!

March 3, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

the algorithm told me to post poems on a Thursday

the algorithm thinks that poems rhyme

the algorithm doesn’t think

it’s only code

two digits

what happens if I don’t fi

Bach Door Shenanigans

A metal door in an alley decorated with uplifting graffiti including a rainbow, MLKJr and an avocado

February 10, 2022March 19, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In March of 2020 I started reading this book.

a paperback edition of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter — *Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
(Heck, try and say that five times fast.)

At 777 sizeable pages, it took what felt like all pandemic (ha hahahhhahha, but anyway) to finish. A good eight or nine months at least, in which time I became absolutely convinced that what we call cognition is merely sophistication.

Stack enough layers of iterative analysis on top of one another and the system behaves as if it were intelligent. That’s what our brains are. The cerebral cortex is literally the icing on a cake whose foundation is cellular away/towards membrane awareness. Maybe it’s my own of confirmation bias, but it made some damn sense.

While reading this tome (if ever a book deserved the word) I also wrote some 350,000 words of fiction, most of which I’ve published. My own afflictions and ideas like the preceding have made it very easy to feel the characters are real people who exist independent of my imagination. This is obviously false. However…

Even though there isn’t a thinking mind, stack enough data in a single system, connect the points, allow for feedback, and one begins to observe something like intelligence. Fictional characters do not have minds, but as they say, if it quacks like a duck…

Many writers find a strong character will “come alive” and present them with ideas they might not have come up with before the character was given form. One “gets to know” the characters, even though it is the author who adds the information layer by layer, getting closer to the point where that concretion of one’s own thoughts begins to resemble something that thinks.

This is when characters can “take over” and tell the writer how to change their stories to suit. Who the fuck is doing this? You, but also The-You-That-Is-Not-You. It’s the old witnessing-the-witness epiphenomenon. Which part of you is aware of your awareness? This has yet to be satisfactorily determined by science, and may be, like the sight of the back of one’s own head, not possible for us to fully know.

A fictional character certainly does not have consciousness as we know it. It is, in a sense, an AI script being run by the computer of your brain. However this makes it able to manifest behaviour which seems so much like consciousness that we pragmatically can treat it as such.

Let your characters tell you what to do. It’s just you telling yourself, but these backdoor shenanigans are where the interesting things happen.