Everything is a Remix (2023 Edition)

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like. I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour. When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees. [1] this video

Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary "Everything is a Remix" (here is the 2023 updated version: this video " ) It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words. Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.

>LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input. There's a pretty compelling argument that this is essentially what we do, and that what we think of as creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining ideas. LLMs are interesting because that compression forces distilling the world down into its constituent parts and learning about the relationships between ideas. While it's absolutely possible (or even likely for certain prompts) that models can regurgitate text very similar to their inputs, that is not usually what seems to be happening. They actually appear to be little remix engines that can fit the pieces together to solve the thing you're asking for, and we do have some evidence that the models are able to accomplish things that are not represented in their training sets. Kirby Ferguson's video on this is pretty great: this video