Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…p some special mental models, and we're using some external tools, paper, pencil, blackboards, computers, to help us with them. Because, actually, formal logic is not something that we're built to do. So I guess I I expect I expect these systems to once they can really play with all of these modules, including ones that we don't have, like visualizing things in 7 dimensions, they'll be able to do a lot just as when they start I'm not sure if we should do this, but when we give them access to 3 d printers and fab labs so that they can start building things and seeing whether they work, well, maybe we should solve the alignment problem first. Yes. What what what you were saying about the pastiche, you know, like the kind of GPT generated text was was very interesting to me. So so they they model this statistical distribution, and and they they they greedily sampled, and they just give you tokens from the bulk. And you know, 1 school of thought is, well, we'll make them more creative. We'll just turn up the temperature and we'll just sample tokens from the tail. And and you you really get garbage there because you're kind of, you know, you're you're a little bit out of distribution now. And 1 thing that would lead me to think they were learning these kind of, you know, factored representations of the world is when when you did sample the tail, it actually gave you something creative and and useful. Right. But I did I did wanna kind of like say that I'm not entirely sure whether it's that, whether it is about learning meaningful structured representations about things which are grounded in the world. Or I'm a creative professional, so I've learned about video editing and a higher script writers and so on. And and I've noticed that there might be something else at play. I've noticed, you know, you were saying you can add noise to problems, and and that actually makes them more tractable. And in in audio and video, if you add noise, then you're actually training, you know, just textures, high frequency patterns. You're training human perception to to look away. So you could blur, you could add a texture, and and so on. And it's the same in writing, that there are so many creative motifs just using slightly different language, that deliberately taking it away from the head of the distribution, but such that it respects the epistemic phylogeny. So it needs to be meaningful, but still creative. And it doesn't necessarily have to have any grand meaning or be grounded in the world. So I guess the question, just is kind of aesthetic creativity? Or does it really need to respect the rules? This reminds me of Martin Amos, and he has this book called The War Against Cliche. And and he makes some of the same points in a memoir about his friendship with Hitchens. And his feeling as a prose writer is that any string of 3 words which other people have used should be avoided, basically. I mean, I'm paraphrasing him, but, you know, if if you say, okay. Now I I'm having trouble thinking of strings of 3 words that other people put together. You know? But, you know, if you say anything which is a visible reference to something else Yep. You better be doing it on purpose, but you shouldn't just be doing it because you've heard it before and because it has a high probability in the distribution. So I think his goal as a prose writer was to constantly produce new juxtapositions and in order to, well, to intrigue the reader and to access a space in the, you know, to access a region of the creative space, the writing space, which hadn't been accessed before. And I guess and, you know, I'm sure you know this as a creative person as well. Just as a just as a mathematician might look at a proof and say, you know, hold it to the fire and say, okay. Does this proof really work? And we have lots of processes, both individual and collective, to do that. Artists make something and then hold it to the fire. Is this really good? Right? And, of course, the pain of artists and mathematicians is that we crumple up a lot of pieces of paper and throw them in the trash, and it can be emotionally exhausting. But we have this very, you know, we have this very high standard for our own work. We don't just produce things. We then reflect on them and show them to our friends and perhaps show them to our critics, and then try to modify them or improve them or abandon them. And this this loop, right, I guess it's a little bit like if you were a physicist, you'd do an experiment and see if the experiment works out. If you're if you're a mathematician, you do the, quote, experiment, but in a formal space of whether it's logically sound. And if you're an artist, you do the experiment of looking at it and judging it in the ways we do. Right? And you don't 1 thing I've learned from artists is that art is not this kind of floppy thing. Right? It is a very exacting thing. My PhD, advisor, Philip Holmes, wrote poetry, and he said this is much harder than doing math. Know?…

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