Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture

> example of AlphaGo discovering new moves

Is AI, ML, or just 8 jillion Monte Carlo simulations in a fixed search, outcome, and rule space?

The headline's a bit of a stretch compared to what is really going on.

We're nowhere close to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and we may never get there, because humans with malevolent intentions, bolstered by algorithmic utilities, are already quite dangerous. Give a capitalist or imperialist a computer and you have something far more dangerous than any robot that exists now or will in the next 50 years.

AI (which, in today's world, is mostly advanced statistics) isn't inventing racism, of course; it's picking up on the racial injustices that exist in our society. A loan decision engine that is allowed to use ZIP code (or similarly precise residential information, given the history of redlining) will discriminate against racial minorities not because "the AI is racist" but because it's picking up on preexisting social inequities, like the fact that even in 2022, black Americans get fucked over on the job market (longer periods of unemployment, more likely to be the first ones laid off) and suffer financially as a result.

The fact that human culture is adjusting to unexpected innovations (including, in Go, those generated by programs) is not new. Scientific and technical progress have been major influences on human culture since they have existed.

I agree. I practically gave up at this point.

While YT still sometimes is able to surface some interesting gem, IG is horrible. I had my search feed pruned and cleaned and was content with what the algo surfaced for about two weeks. Then from one day to the next, seemingly arbitrarily, it was back to tictok style crap, political enragement porn and clickbaity bs.

But even YT is getting worse every day.

I am glad that I do not rely on recos to consume media. I avoid Spotify, Amazon Music or Netflix exactly because the more often than not do not contain any of the things I like to consume (or hide it behind additional paywalls in case of Amazon).

I feel old, but I remember a great source of music discovery being the head of the music department of a bigger local drug store. We talked a lot and he always came with a bunch of "here, listen to this" back when you could prelisten CDs in the store.

I had little money and he knew that. But every now and then I would find a great piece I absolutely needed to buy. I could have bought way more if I had the money back then. He was a great guy and I still listen to music he recommended to me.

I have not found anything the likes in any artificial algorithm yet.

I've mentioned this before - I'm using the melodies I've created together with my AI songwriting assistant as input for further training. This requires human judgement and I only have around 100 melodies that I've judged as good. But the training set is small, so together with "bad" melodies, this already makes a difference. I don't know if I'm the first to do this for AI art and be able to say that there is a difference (lower loss on the validation set of human melodies). Over time, it could result in style drift and increased originality and I don't see why it couldn't be done for AI-generated images as well with some more effort (because the training set is much larger).

"AI" is not.

Current DL models are just solving math problems, more or less. "Culture" they produce is not much different than other procedurally generated "culture".

For instance, my friend uses L systems to compose music. How is that different?