Somewhere on social media I encountered the recent story that the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, (a large, avowedly centrist think tank created by Tony Blair), put out a report estimating the potential impact of AI on jobs in the public service, but that ironically, they arrived at their estimates by basically just asking GPT-4. While this does have a certain kind of poetry to it, it’s not exactly what we think of as a reputable methodology.1
A whole genre of podcasts seems to have emerged recently, taking the shape of interviews with CEOs of AI companies, or similar. Although I have not listened to many of these, they mostly seem to be pretty abysmal, both because of the amount of hype they involve, and due to the lack of meaningful specifics.
That being said, of the ones I’ve heard, the recent interview with Dario Amodei of Anthropic on the Ezra Klein Show seems to me to be vastly better than the average. In part, this is because Klein is a smart, curious, and well informed interviewer, who asks a lot of the right questions, and pushes for details when responses get too mushy. In this case, it also helps that Amodei seems much more straightforwardly honest about limitations than most spokespeople in similar positions.
A lot of this is still unresolved in my mind, but I think there is something interesting happening at the intersection of generative AI, art, style, and entertainment. Rather than letting it gestate until more fully formed, I figured I’d just post some preliminary thoughts and come back to this at some later date.
The main reason I’m thinking about this now is the ongoing debate about how generative AI will impact creative fields, such as writing and design (as well as white collar jobs more broadly). Arguably there have already been some pretty dramatic effects, such as the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld being suddenly overwhelmed by spammy submissions. At the same time, it’s hard to know the extent to which these disruptions may end up being transient phenomena that broader systems will adapt to.
I recently started listening to the Art of the Score podcast, which does an amazing job of unpacking movie soundtracks in depth, beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark in the first episode. Like most such explorations of music, however, it ultimately leaves me wanting something that I’ve long thought there should be much more of—namely, more tightly interwoven cultural commentary, especially for music. As I will describe below, I’m broadly interested in different ways of combining context, commentary, and criticism with the thing being commented on or critiqued.
Last week’s speaker in the Penny Stamps Speaker Series was Refik Anadol, one of the most successful artists working primarily with AI, data, and visualization. Over a decade or so, Anadol has produced work in collaboration with organizations and venues like the LA Philharmonic, Gaudi’s Casa Batlló, the Exosphere in Las Vegas, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The lecture he gave was basically a review of his body of work, and that of his art and design studio, which is comprised of about 20 people. The earlier projects he showed mostly took the form of massive scale light projections on the sides of buildings, which could give the impression of a totally different texture or form. More recent work tended to use data driven visualizations, abstracting some sort of data into visual patterns displayed on a wall, building, or screen. Many of these also made use of what appeared to be procedural animations to create the impression of three dimensionality and motion.