Always very appreciative of ABC explainers of mystifying tech trends - so bravo!!!! and thank you.

Currently Ian Cheng's BOB is on display at the Serpentine, about which I have mixed feelings.
It is very very clever and technically accomplished.

It also presents a view of "life" as something to be best studied and understood in a petri dish. The degree to which this is a comment on the sterility (or threadbare engagement with sociality) of AI development cultures at this time, is not clear to me. Perhaps we will know the answer to this question in the upcoming phase two of Cheng's exhibition called The Emissaries.

One of the difficulties in parsing BOB as an artwork arises from the fact that (like a lot of products of digital culture) it is a black-box, or perhaps a better analogy would be an iceberg. We know that there is a huge and complex machine under the surface but we have no idea, and no way to gain understanding of what is going on. It's body is unlike ours, so it doesn't feel like we do. We can't learn together with it. All we can do is project our own idea of what an evolving system looks like onto its surface. And I think BOB is doing very clever pattern mirroring.

So for me - with a creative Neural Net artwork I want to know about the "body" of the artwork and to be able to observe the glorious gap between what I might project onto it and what is actually going on.

cheers
Ruth

On 25/03/18 05:20, BishopZ via NetBehaviour wrote:

Been building some Neural Networks.

There are two ways you can build them...

Analytical or Creative.

An Analytical NN takes a lot of data

and boils it down to an answer.

This is what the business world is so on about.

It's a replacment for anything that was formerly

random decisions, like which banner ad to display.

You can also make a Creative NN,

which taks a small amount of data

and makes up a whole bunch.

Examples of Creative NNs:

1. You press a button, and the NN creates an image. You tell it whether you liked the image or not.

2. You select 1 of 4 colors, the NN writes a poem for you. You tell it whether you liked the poem or not.

Techniques for Creative NNs:

(1) NN's only do what you train them to do. If you include the previous answer as part of the input data, then you can train it to not give the same answer twice.

(2) The higher you set the learning rate, the more "in the moment" it becomes.

Dear Netbehaviour,

Any ideas, thoughts, comments? Is there room for creative NN artworks? Seems like this kind of thing could take over the interactive installation space. Maybe art-tech can become surprising again?

If they make manipulation machines that drag on your worst fears, maybe we can make happiness bots that make you fearless?

Any ideas, thoughts, comments? What if we made the entire museum into a rube goldberg of intelligent automation? Anything else we could do?

Skynet's the limit.

Bz

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