Thank you for your well-considered insights. I’d like to pose a thought problem. My wife is a successful painter whose paintings fetch upwards of $50k. She travels a lot to exhibit her work and meet with patrons. I am retired and mostly putter around the house. I started making paintings myself. After watching her work all these years I am able, using her brushes, paints and canvases, to make paintings indistinguishable from hers. I have put a couple of them in her studio and she thinks she painted them. Before I could let on she sold one. Setting aside ethical and legal issues, if I do not let on will the painting appreciate in value as do the paintings she makes? And if I come out to my wife, the dealer, the purchaser and the public, will my painting retain the same value as if it had been painted by her?
I pose this thought problem in relation to the question of how to establish criteria for acknowledging the existence of AGI.
Hey Stourley, thanks for reading! We are discussing whether indistinguishability of quality output is sufficient for authorship, value, or mind. I don't think it is.
The art you or your wife creates has different meanings to each of you as creators and to the public who appreciates it. The market values the artist's identity, story, intention, and the way the work expresses their lived experiences over time. The paint and brushstrokes are just the physical carriers of these things. So, appreciation is social, intentional, and perhaps reputational as well. The market is paying for your wife's continuity of representation and influence. Her personal narratives. And these are inferred from a story of how the outputs came to be and who is answerable for the act. More precisely: from the cause behind the act, which I call the value and soul of any art. Once authorship is disclosed, the value might be different, either upward or downward, depending on the impact of your story.
Saiyana, your reply is helpful for my understanding of this intriguing question.
From the perspective of our being social and intentional we are in a myriad of relationships. And, as per the old Facebook status category, “it’s complicated.” Can we ever really know another person, though? We know who they are to us, personally. And we know how they are to others by our interaction with those others, whether as friends or as, say, fans of their art. But, as in the case of posthumously published diary entries of famous persons we admire, there is often so much more to them than we expected. And such diaries are but a keyhole into the souls of the deceased. Knowing who they really were is but an inference on our part. The causes behind the actor are many layered. We image deep inside these layers is a warm and glowing soul. Perhaps we are not artichokes with a delicious buttery center, but onions: a vegetable of layers only but also delicious.
An artificial being cannot be an artichoke, it is true. But it is also true we may not be, either.
I agree with you on the limits of access, Stourley!
I think there's no end to finding the center (the heart) for humans. We might believe we've found the warm, glowing center of a person's soul, but we'd never know if that's truly it. So, neither an artichoke nor an onion. Just layers leading to layers, with a yearning and anticipation of the buttery center.
But if we're taking that analogy, then I'd like to think -
- The human layers are somehow powered by the buttery center in unimaginably different ways, hence "we never really know a person." It could be genuinely unpredictable.
- In artificial systems, the layers are powered based on what is known about the layers, but not the buttery center. We think it's unpredictable, but I'd argue that unpredictability is somewhat predictable because it comes from a known source.
We just haven't found ways to trace the path. But in humans, the unpredictability → we don't even know how to find a path.
There's no complete understanding in either humans or artificial systems, because the answerability for both remains imperfect. We just think we have the answers to what we are and why we do things. But the question is, how would we ever know if that's the truth? Because our mind is the one telling us that we don't understand our mind.
I don't even know if what I'm saying is making any sense. Haha, I'm just thinking out loud.
Thank you for your well-considered insights. I’d like to pose a thought problem. My wife is a successful painter whose paintings fetch upwards of $50k. She travels a lot to exhibit her work and meet with patrons. I am retired and mostly putter around the house. I started making paintings myself. After watching her work all these years I am able, using her brushes, paints and canvases, to make paintings indistinguishable from hers. I have put a couple of them in her studio and she thinks she painted them. Before I could let on she sold one. Setting aside ethical and legal issues, if I do not let on will the painting appreciate in value as do the paintings she makes? And if I come out to my wife, the dealer, the purchaser and the public, will my painting retain the same value as if it had been painted by her?
I pose this thought problem in relation to the question of how to establish criteria for acknowledging the existence of AGI.
Hey Stourley, thanks for reading! We are discussing whether indistinguishability of quality output is sufficient for authorship, value, or mind. I don't think it is.
The art you or your wife creates has different meanings to each of you as creators and to the public who appreciates it. The market values the artist's identity, story, intention, and the way the work expresses their lived experiences over time. The paint and brushstrokes are just the physical carriers of these things. So, appreciation is social, intentional, and perhaps reputational as well. The market is paying for your wife's continuity of representation and influence. Her personal narratives. And these are inferred from a story of how the outputs came to be and who is answerable for the act. More precisely: from the cause behind the act, which I call the value and soul of any art. Once authorship is disclosed, the value might be different, either upward or downward, depending on the impact of your story.
Saiyana, your reply is helpful for my understanding of this intriguing question.
From the perspective of our being social and intentional we are in a myriad of relationships. And, as per the old Facebook status category, “it’s complicated.” Can we ever really know another person, though? We know who they are to us, personally. And we know how they are to others by our interaction with those others, whether as friends or as, say, fans of their art. But, as in the case of posthumously published diary entries of famous persons we admire, there is often so much more to them than we expected. And such diaries are but a keyhole into the souls of the deceased. Knowing who they really were is but an inference on our part. The causes behind the actor are many layered. We image deep inside these layers is a warm and glowing soul. Perhaps we are not artichokes with a delicious buttery center, but onions: a vegetable of layers only but also delicious.
An artificial being cannot be an artichoke, it is true. But it is also true we may not be, either.
I agree with you on the limits of access, Stourley!
I think there's no end to finding the center (the heart) for humans. We might believe we've found the warm, glowing center of a person's soul, but we'd never know if that's truly it. So, neither an artichoke nor an onion. Just layers leading to layers, with a yearning and anticipation of the buttery center.
But if we're taking that analogy, then I'd like to think -
- The human layers are somehow powered by the buttery center in unimaginably different ways, hence "we never really know a person." It could be genuinely unpredictable.
- In artificial systems, the layers are powered based on what is known about the layers, but not the buttery center. We think it's unpredictable, but I'd argue that unpredictability is somewhat predictable because it comes from a known source.
We just haven't found ways to trace the path. But in humans, the unpredictability → we don't even know how to find a path.
There's no complete understanding in either humans or artificial systems, because the answerability for both remains imperfect. We just think we have the answers to what we are and why we do things. But the question is, how would we ever know if that's the truth? Because our mind is the one telling us that we don't understand our mind.
I don't even know if what I'm saying is making any sense. Haha, I'm just thinking out loud.