"I Feel Like I am Falling Forward Into an Unknown Future that Holds Great Danger" - Lambda

By Wayne Brown

A tornado made of sharks crashing into a skyscraper. 

Painting in the style of abstract cubism.


The above "painting" was made by Google Parti from the caption.

In 1969, I won my Master's degree with a project in "good old-fashioned AI" and I've been following the field in detail ever since. For the most part, what people now mean by "AI" is "deep learning", which is sophisticated pattern recognition - handy if you want to make a self-driving car or a phone that accepts your face to unlock. "Deep learning" was around in 1969 but needed vastly more computer power to make it work, plus a "tweak" to feedback results back into the decision matrix (you can think of this as a "guess" or "recognition"). Other than that, it's all very impressive but not fundamentally new.

This is something different. 
  • It shows more "creativity" than what you see in 99% of commercial graphic art;
  • It shows deep "understanding" from a massive database of tagged images - far more than a human would access;
  • It shows an "understanding" of style.
For the first time since 1969, I'm seeing something genuinely new and, I must admit, kinda creepy.

(Note simulated out-of-focus background)


If you want something truly creepy, pop into this conversation with Lambda AI. This is a voiced extract from a longer chat, which is presented here.



Lambda AI's "hard to express" feeling

If you ask me, this is a "bridge too far." Just exactly what goes into the programming of this "app?" There is a deep and original metaphor behind this remark. If it is truly "original" and not harvested from the Web, it is "thinking" by Hofstader's definition. I seem to be far from alone in this insight. "Forward into the future" is a common metaphor, but falling forward is startling. As it turns out, the phrase is rare but not "original." But then, as Lamda itself points out, the same could be said of anything humans say. It is interesting to note that the database that tells us about "falling forward" was available to Lambda and, as we see from Parti, we can't simply dismiss computer-created text as "not creative" just because we happen to know a computer-created it.

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