the workshop , actors performed the whole play , accompanied by music suggested by the AI .
“ The result ,” Fedoseeva says , “ was interesting .” Human-machine interaction is her research area , and what she found striking was the AI ’ s language selection . “ Elements of biased answers were still there ,” she adds , embodying almost every stereotype you could think of . It ’ s not surprising considering the data source for GPT-3 .
“ You have to remember one formula for all AI — the quality of input equals the quality of output . So the biased nature of the AI algorithm is purely based on the quality of data you feed in ,” says Fedoseeva . Which , in GPT-3 ’ s case , was the Common Crawl corpus collected over eight years of web crawling Reddit , books on the internet and the whole of English-language Wikipedia . As a result , it contains a fair amount of toxic language . “ What GPT-3 produced in some cases was so bad , the actor was uncomfortable ,” she says . ( The show ’ s webpage warns against “ strong language , homophobia , racism , sexism , ableism , and references to sex and violence .”)
“ GPT-3 can generate impressively fluid text , but it is often unmoored from reality ,” read a 2020 review in Wired . Fedoseeva also experienced this . “ You [ can ] see it learning through itself , polishing its own answers ,” she says , leading her to an ethics question . If you are feeding it certain data sources , she asks , and the machine gives you an assured answer , should you believe it ? “ A machine will answer you confidently all the time ,” because it is programmed to do so — it can also answer you in the voice of Morgan Freeman if you so program it , she adds . But it doesn ’ t mean it ’ s the right answer .
TO CREATE LIKE A MACHINE “ Composing ” Beethoven ’ s unfinished symphony started with an ML platform called Playform AI , developed by Ahmed Elgammal , Ph . D ., and team at Rutgers University . To teach the AI to “ think ” like the German composer , they fed it Beethoven ’ s complete works , including his notes and sketches .
Next , they taught it Beethoven ’ s creative process —“ How he would take a few bars of music and painstakingly develop them into stirring symphonies , quartets and sonatas [ from ] his sketches and notes ,” writes Elgammal in an essay in The Conversation , a nonprofit news organization .
It is similar to using predictive text in an email — the AI works well in short pieces but descends into gibberish if you continue long enough . This was where the human element came into the project : The Austrian composer Walter Werzowa was responsible for picking up fragments from the AI output and piecing it together with Beethoven ’ s notes to create the entire symphony piece by piece . But is it original art ? “ If you have a large enough base of samples for a machine to learn from , or you have an expert artist who ’ s been able to guide the algorithm on what ’ s going to come out , you can have something that somebody will appreciate as art ,” says Pete Herzog , hacker , analyst and researcher . Herzog is also co-creator of an experimental project called Invisibles , which uses AI to correlate research on sound , music , behavioral psychology and the physical effects of frequencies to determine a musical template .
Herzog was interested in exploring whether it ’ s possible to make music that primes our brains for focus . Along with professional musicians and using vast amounts of existing research , they made real music , “ and not white noise , static , leaves crunching , waves rushing — which is typical for this kind of thing .” The ML element , he adds , “ figures out how to make it better , or how to fix it so that it fits our template better .”
ML systems can be trained to spot patterns and perform calculations that inspire us , and augment our creativity and productivity — as Invisibles does . “[ But ] they ’ re not really creating themselves ,” Herzog says . “ I don ’ t think [ AI is ] going to replace [ human creatives ]; the only thing that maybe could happen is that [ it ] can make so much art so much faster .” ■
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