Just fyi, the condition that follows ‘let alone’ is usually the more conservative one. But I see plenty of hurdles, and I’m not convinced any of them can be overcome via scale or data-banks alone. Ability to remember and to distinguish truth from fiction are important, but LLMs also lack first-order logic and symbolic reasoning.

I think the last of these is going to be particularly tricky. I’m not aware of any substantial progress on abstraction for neural nets / ML in recent years; in fact, as I understand them, they seem fundamentally incapable of it. Giant functions / prediction machines just aren’t enough, and I struggle to see how people could think otherwise. This type of training detects concrete local patterns in the dataset, but that’s it - these models can’t generalize their observations in any way. Recurrent NNs and LSTMs maybe show some promise. I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up that it’ll just be handed to us soon as an emergent property

I tend to agree. People grandstanding about AI art “stealing” are either unable to appreciate how their use of artistic “influence” is fundamentally the same, or else they’re arguing disingenuously.

There is nothing new under the sun. What artist can point to any aspect of their work that cannot be broken down into a simple mishmash of things other people did before? The only thing “proprietary” about it is the set of weights: a pinch of Bosch’s religious macabre, a tbsp of Escherian perspectives, etc. Some of this is conscious; most is not. That doesn’t make it any less true.

At the risk of over-reduction, all creative endeavor can be viewed as the combination of pre-existing concepts or categories in a novel way. How well your art is received is a function of how cleverly you mix these ingredients and how well you disguise this “trick of the light” so that the whole is more apparent than its parts. If any sufficiently sized “chunk” of pure influence makes it through, you can be accused of plagiarism.

I’d argue the models we have are already playing the game better than a lot of human artists. Soon they’ll be irreproachable.