Ken Goldberg Isn't Afraid of Artificial Intelligence
Roboticist and artist Ken Goldberg takes the temperature of the current AI moment in this alumni magazine interview!
From the interview:
And when you think about how these large language models are supposed to work, predicting the next word—it feels like it requires some understanding of physics for it to suggest a miniature sail.
Yes; it feels that way. But what’s really interesting is that there may be some structure in language that allows this sort of synthesis to occur. Language evolved to be a very efficient way to encode our experiences and ideas. There are some who say it’s just memorizing the internet. That isn’t accurate. ChatGPT has compressed a vast number of texts into a set of relationships between words that somehow allows it to be creative, or what we might call artificial creativity. It’s not quite the same thing that humans do, but it’s undeniably creative.
By the way, all researchers and artists use material from prior work. As Picasso purportedly said, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.”
See the full interview here!