- Oct 2022
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stevenberlinjohnson.com stevenberlinjohnson.com
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I would put creativity into three buckets. If we define creativity as coming up with something novel or new for a purpose, then I think what AI systems are quite good at the moment is interpolation and extrapolation.
Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?
How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.
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- Jun 2022
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Local file Local file
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This standardized routine is known as the creative process, and itoperates according to timeless principles that can be foundthroughout history.
If the creative process has timeless principles found throughout history, why aren't they written down and practiced religiously withing our culture that is so enamored of creativity and innovation?
As an example of how this isn't true, we've managed to lose our commonplace tradition and haven't really replaced it with anything useful. Even the evolved practice of the zettelkasten has been created and generally discarded (pun intended) without replacement.
How much of our creative process is reliant on simple imitation, which is a basic human trait? It's typically more often that imitation juxtaposed with other experiences which is the crucible of innovation. How often, if ever, is true innovation in an entirely different domain created? By this I mean innovation outside of the adjacent possible domains from which it stems? Are there any examples of this?
Even my own note taking practice is a mélange of broad imitation of what I read combined with the combinatorial juxtaposition of other ideas in an attempt to create new ideas.
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- Apr 2022
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Amie Fairs, who studies language at Aix-Marseille University in France, is a self-proclaimed Open Knowledge Maps enthusiast. “One particularly nice thing about Open Knowledge Maps is that you can search very broad topics, like ‘language production’, and it can group papers into themes you may not have considered,” Fairs says. For example, when she searched for ‘phonological brain regions’ — the areas of the brain that process sound and meaning — Open Knowledge Maps suggested a subfield of research about age-related differences in processing. “I hadn’t considered looking in the ageing literature for information about this before, but now I will,” she says.
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- Feb 2022
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www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
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Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” powered by an RNN trained on a corpus of old sci-fi stories.
I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.
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- Jan 2022
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vimeo.com vimeo.com
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from: Eyeo Conference 2017
Description
Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.
Notes
Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.
Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)
Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4
Writing using the adjacent possible.
Corpus building as an art [~37:00]
Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.
Open questions
How might we use information theory to do this more easily?
What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?
Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?
What sources would you use to train your model?
References:
- Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
- Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
- Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
- Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
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Jean Paul invented a similar system and called it Witz. Like Tesauro, Jean Paul considered that the matter was to cede a prearranged ge-ography of places where everything had its own seat but was also compelled to remain in its own seat without possible deviation. The dismantlement of this architecture was required to change the rhetorical invention--that is, the retrieval of what is already known but has been forgotten--into an invention in the modern, scientific sense of the term.73 Also similar to Tesauro, accord-ing to Jean Paul, such an invention or discovery could occur only through the jumbled recording of notes taken from readings (or, from personal reflections) and retrievable by means of a subject index. By searching and recombining, the compiler would have put into practice the chance principle on which the whole knowledge storage mechanism was based; he would have likely discov-ered similarities and connections between remote items that he would have otherwise overlooked.
73 Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988), 321–22
I'm not quite sure I understand what the mechanism of this is specifically. Revisit it later. Sounds like it's using the set up the system not only to discover the adjacent possible but the remote improbable.
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- Dec 2021
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dogtrax.edublogs.org dogtrax.edublogs.org
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I pulled out my keyboard
Really appreciate how you get the idea that rewilding is often about creating some new niche, a new ecology for an existing idea to live in combined with the willing suspension of disbelief that what you are doing is even adjacently possible.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that werestartling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Nowtheir ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them thatjustifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If socialscientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic,two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anythingoriginal, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists areexpected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is toimpoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our senseof possibility.
The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.
Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.
This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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Every serious (academic) historical work includes a conversation with other scholarship, and this has largely carried over into popular historical writing.
Any serious historical or other academic work should include a conversation with the body of other scholarship with which argues for or against.
Comparing and contrasting one idea with another is crucial for any sort of advancement.
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- Oct 2021
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en.wiktionary.org en.wiktionary.org
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great minds think alike (fools seldom differ)
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- Jun 2020
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link.aps.org link.aps.org
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Liu, Andrew, and Mason A. Porter. ‘Spatial Strength Centrality and the Effect of Spatial Embeddings on Network Architecture’. Physical Review E 101, no. 6 (9 June 2020): 062305. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.062305.
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- Aug 2018
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www.wesjones.com www.wesjones.com
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Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure?
Churchill famously said "...democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
Even within this quote it is implicit that there are many others. In some sense he's admitting that we might possibly be at a local maximum but we've just not explored the spaces beyond the adjacent possible.
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- May 2018
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www.davidtinapple.com www.davidtinapple.com
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The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand.
This keeps rolling around in my head, one marble in a Chinese Checkers tin. And I am not asking what does this mean, but rather what could this mean?
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