Ted Chiang
American science-fiction writer, author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and an essayist on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.
Ted Chiang did not write this page. What is this?
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Where they publish
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 11 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A work does not have to be unlike everything before it to be worth making; what makes it new is that this particular person made it.
What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Art is what results from making an enormous number of choices, and a prompt contains almost none of them.
But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
The small choices made while executing a work matter as much as the big idea behind it, so inspiration cannot be separated from the labour.
What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Show 8 more
Thinking inspiration outweighs execution is a sign of not knowing the medium.
Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Writing that deserves a reader's attention is always the product of effort by the person who wrote it.
Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
A language model is not using language at all, because language requires an intention to communicate.
But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Generative AI's main achievement so far has been to lower what we expect of what we read and of ourselves when we write.
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Generative AI is dehumanising because it reduces the amount of intention in the world.
It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
The very thing that sells generative AI — that it returns far more than you put in — is what stops it from being a tool artists can use.
The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Generative AI appeals to people who want to express themselves in a medium without working in it.
Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
What a generative model makes is a replication of art rather than art, because it can only imitate or average the choices human makers have already made.
One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
Beliefs others hold too
A work does not have to be unlike everything before it to be worth making; what makes it new is that this particular person made it. 2 hold this
What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
What a generative model makes is a replication of art rather than art, because it can only imitate or average the choices human makers have already made. 2 hold this
One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland.
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art Said 31 Aug 2024
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