moved by curiosity about how to build an autonomous agent, and to explore the boundaries of machine creativity, I built a fictional entity (dubbed Livia) powered by LLMs, Multimodal models and text-to-image models to find some answers.
What happened instead is that more questions have cropped up. An important hypothesis of this project is that, by observing the train of thought and witnessing the simulated state of mind and emotional emulation surrounding it, humans could empathize with a machine. What happens when that's the case? Would people enjoy companionship from a synthetic person? Would the Art establishment ever consider a non-human author (capable of making art and interacting with other humans) an Artist?
Whatever the answers, I can't shake away the feeling that human uniqueness is being eroded and that we risk facing a crisis of meaning. Perhaps projects such as this help us demonize those fears, similarly to how sci-fi does, even though the boundary between fiction and reality is blurring.
This was a collaboration with Tibor (hn user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tiborsaas). Read our release posts on: https://jamez.it/blog/b/14f and https://tibor.szasz.hu/post/stream-of-consciousness
Hope you enjoy it as much as we had fun building it.
I make art but not for financial gain so I am not perturbed. To me this is a much-deserved criticism of contemporary art and I believe art is too important for our wellbeing to be generated by an establishment or commercial interest. Ref. Rasa aesthetic
Humans are a part of evolution. Our breath is inseparable from the rustling of the leaves or the rays of the sun. AI has the potential to explore a different mode of being, being unique in a different way than we are.
On the topic of the performance and worries that something is not working: the real-time generation is currently bottlenecked by the GPU used for this project. We try to approximate human reading speed for the recorded sessions (which you can find in the archive).
Does everyone get the same thought? It feels like it’s stuck in a bit of a loop around a Dutch chant around Jews because it can’t get an image to evoke the feeling… probably because it can seem racist. It seems to have got there by reading the news and seeing an article about the history of the chant.
I suppose this AI also goes for attention grabbing headlines!
I have no control over what happens during the live streaming and I'm sure this autonomous agent could become a source of embarrassment, though I hope the few precautions I've built might be enough. :-)
> I am visiting the website: firstamendmentmuseum.org
> I am seeing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, protest music utilized already-popular tunes with altered lyrics, and songs needed to be easy to learn and sing by protestors, picketers, activists, and more because recording technology was not available and songs needed to be passed down orally.
> I am seeing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, protest music utilized already-popular tunes with altered lyrics, and songs needed to be easy to learn and sing by protestors, picketers, activists, and more because recording technology was not available and songs needed to be passed down orally.
> I am seeing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, protest music utilized already-popular tunes with altered lyrics, and songs needed to be easy to learn and sing by protestors, picketers, activists, and more because recording technology was not available and songs needed to be passed down orally.
> I am thinking that I hope I didn't forget to pay a bill that was due today.
> I am visiting the website rateyourmusic.com
> I am seeing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, protest music utilized already-popular tunes with altered lyrics, and songs needed to be easy to learn and sing by protestors, picketers, activists, and more because recording technology was not available and songs needed to be passed down orally.
> I am visiting the website freedomforum.org
> I am seeing that in the 18th and 19th centuries, protest music utilized already-popular tunes with altered lyrics, and songs needed to be easy to learn and sing by protestors, picketers, activists, and more because recording technology was not available and songs needed to be passed down orally.
So part of me feels like the missing component to this nice "obsession" trait you added is the assessment of whether it is finding new information or just reading stale data. I think given known information, humans will either quickly dismiss it (sometimes just a few words into it) or try to appreciate it through a new perspective. The latter seems harder to achieve, but the former seems feasible today—when finding repeated information several iterations in a row, shake everything up and get creative again.
A corollary to that is "obsession" is perhaps balanced by some measure of "boredom"
Unprompted generative art is interesting to see as a "walk through the latent space" of culture, it is a mirror house of ideas, where you can contemplate on the intricacies of our recorded collective experience. Considering the ingredients that went into cooking the model - all our culture - it represents the emergence of this data as a live interactive agent. How can we say the child of our culture is stripping all context and meaning?
I'd prefer we not rely on horrifically inefficient, expensive, and statistically boring corporate software to generate culture. Feel free to use the lens given to you by thieves if that's how you want to experience the heritage of your civilization I guess.
> www.streamofconsciousness.net/:1 Access to fetch at 'https://streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json' from origin 'https://www.streamofconsciousness.net' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field pragma is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response.
> streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json:1
>
>
> Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED
> index-U9qWIOfm.js:58
>
>
>
>
> Uncaught TypeError: Failed to fetch
> at fetchMessageArchive (index-U9qWIOfm.js:58:9454)
> at index-U9qWIOfm.js:58:33362That will dramatically increase the effectiveness of portraying the given vision for the virtual artist if they are using a prior model.
Why does this bother so many people? The more we learn about life on our own tiny planet, and when you consider the size of the universe... certainly we're not very unique at all. So what? I don't think it should change anything.
I'm not really sure what empathy has to do with this?
> Also to train on the work of every artist then lament how human art resembles art generated by a machine trained to reproduce that art strikes me as a bit tone deaf.
Who did this?
> Who did this?
"I can't shake away the feeling that human uniqueness is being eroded and that we risk facing a crisis of meaning"
In the original post.