Via Robin Sloan, found this excellent essay by Frank Lantz about AI, and feeling like you’ve been waiting & training your whole life for this moment. I’m especially into these two parts, one about art:

Art Matters. It matters that this is happening art-first, poetry-first. I don’t think that was just an accident, I think it was inevitable, and I think that tells us something about learning, language, and the world. It matters that the first staticky voices we’ve dialed in with our massive, multi-billion-parameter arrays are dreamers, confabulators, and improvisers. It matters that Chess and Go, the sites where we first encountered their older, more serious siblings, are artworks. Artworks carved out of instrumental reason. Artworks that, long before computers existed, were spinning beautiful webs of logic and attention. Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future.

This is one of those tropes I will ride into the grave: artists need to have not just a seat, but one of the central seats at the AI table. It’s our time.

And another bit:

It feels to me like, by teaching our machines to dream, we have brought the boldest projects of the 20th century back to life, with all the danger and promise that implies. The grand technical, philosophical, and artistic ambitions. The projects of liberation and resistance. The project of constructing a shared future that replaces superstition, tradition, and authority with new ideas, useful theories and evolving knowledge.

The whole post is worth reading!

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