I’m not sure what it is about AI,
but I’ve always been attracted to it from a conceptual point of view. I don’t care about how it could help us make more useful polymers (well I do but I don’t), but what I do care about is how it gives us a kind of mirror into our own minds and into some of the mysteries of life.
I mean AI is not about a computer being smart, but about people being insightful enough in order to translate parts of the human experience into programmatic code. however we experience it, there is a pattern to everything. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that we can or should illuminate all mysteries. The complexity of the pattern is too much for us to ever truly comprehend all at once, and despite Moore’s law, I don’t know if it’s even inevitable that one day a computer will be powerful enough to understand the entire pattern. To me I find something beautiful in artificial intelligence because it is a glimpse at a small section of the overall pattern, invariably filtered through the cultural and emotional biases of the human beings who programmed it.
In my youth I owned D&D books and paraphernalia, but I never played it. I wasn’t actually interested in the game at all, only the rules behind it, which was a form of AI for the NPC (non-playing-characters) and it was supposed to recreate a realistic and somewhat random experience. I used to create my own rules systems and I would write computer programs which would play them out in text or ansi graphics based rpgs. After my interest turned to art, I wrote my abstract art composition creator, which I used to create some of the random abstract digital pieces which you may have seen me upload. It wasn’t 100% created by the program, more of a collaboration between myself and her, but that was sort of the point. Nothing is pure. Everything is filtered. filtering my own artistic sensibilities through an artificial intelligence program seemed like something that made sense. it still does make sense to me.
I destroyed that original program as part of the process, but I’ve been thinking about AI again lately. I’ve been thinking about developing some AI type rules for storytelling, and then use a web scraper to pull inspiration from the recently updated web sites in order to come up with some random, but relevant stories. The stories it creates would be like dreams in a way, but filtered through the computer pattern recognition code, they would be like the dreams of a robot.
It’s doubtful that I will ever have the time to do something so trivial and so time consuming. (assuming that I even could program something that complicated, which is probably not the case)
