But there is also something soul-crushing about it. People spend decades learning a craft and then see an A.I. make something in a few seconds or minutes that other people see as comparable to their own work.
And it will be widely misused: to create ripoffs of copyrighted works without giving credit, to generate billions of pages of low-quality content in order to game search engines, to make hyper-personalized spam and commit phishing and fraud, to mislead the public with misinformation and customized persuasion and outrage bait, and to create even more intense social media and video addiction.

Then, there are the longer-term consequences of this kind of technology, which are hard to predict but may be truly catastrophic (even according to some of the leaders who run these very companies).

Humanity sometimes creeps along cautiously – as with the development of new medicines, where we (arguable) allow millions to die based on the fear of releasing something unsafe (which is, to a meaningful extent, a legitimate fear – getting the tradeoffs right is hard). And in the case of nuclear power, where regulation impedes its development due to (mostly) ungrounded fears.

Yet with A.I., humanity plunges forward into the abyss at full speed, with no breaks, with the train conductors announcing to the passengers that we can’t predict where the trains are going, that this all may end up a disaster, perhaps cataclysm, as they shovel exponentially more coal into their white-hot furnaces.

This piece was first written on April 11, 2024, and first appeared on my website on April 16, 2024.

1. Music: we prefer songs that are similar to others we like but that feel novel. If a song is too similar to what we know, then it’s derivative or boring (like listening to the same music on loop), but if it’s too novel, it is usually unappealing or dissonant. Music from other cultures can be hard for us to appreciate until we’ve listened to enough of it.

2. Learning: we learn best when an idea connects to what we already understand while also adding something on top. If it’s too far removed from what we already understand, it’s confusing, or we don’t believe it. Learning often works best when bridges are built between a person’s old understanding and some new understanding.

3. Products: we like user interfaces to be familiar, but also like them to let us do something new (or do something we value in a new, better way). An unfamiliar interface feels like a struggle to learn and can leave us frustrated. One of the great strengths of the iPhone, when it was introduced, was that the interface somehow felt familiar even though we had never used something like it before.

4. Dating: most people want those they date to be familiar in most ways (e.g., similar culture, religion, political beliefs, life goals, attitudes) yet highly distinct with respect to a few key variables. The differences being sought differ for each person, but some fairly common ones sometimes sought include: a masculine person contrasting with feminine one, a submissive person contrasting with a dominant one, a breadwinner contrasting with a homemaker, a side-kick contrasting with a leader, a joker contrasting with someone who laughs often, a strong person contrasting with someone in need of protection, or someone successful at rule-breaking contrasting with someone successful at being rule-abiding.

5. Stories: we enjoy stories that follow the standard tropes (e.g., the Hero’s Journey or the “love found → love lost → love recovered” romantic comedy), yet we want them to feel novel in some way and not too derivative. Truly novel movies are rarely as popular as ones that are executed on a classic formula but strategically deviate from it in enough key ways to feel fresh. For instance, I think The Matrix did a good job of telling a very standard “hero’s journey” story but with a number of novel-feeling elements thrown in (an intriguing setting, “bullet time” filming, etc.).

So if you’re making something, and you want people to really enjoy it, you may want to consider how you can make it Familiar Yet Different.

This piece was first written on September 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on June 10, 2022.

Within the limits of my ability to model my own preferences, I think my ideal fine art museum would be what I’m going to call “The Museum of Questioned Quality.” I suspect lots of people would find this museum concept distasteful, to say the least. So before describing what the museum is, I’ll explain why the idea is appealing to me and what the idea sprouts from.

The Museum of Questioned Quality is premised on a few observations:

Observation 1: the visual experience we have when looking at a very well-made replica of a piece of art is indistinguishable from the visual experience we have when looking at the real thing. The only substantial difference is a psychological one (our beliefs, whether true or not, about the history of a set of atoms compared to other atoms that look the same to us).

Clearly, we human beings are not defined by our exact configuration of atoms, as our atom configurations are constantly changing, and moreover, as we age, many (perhaps most?) of the atoms that we consist of will be replaced. So we are patterns, not exact atom configurations.

By analogy between what we consist of and what art consists of: if we think of an artist as someone who invents a pattern, rather than someone who sticks together a particular clump of atoms, then the distinction between an original piece of art and its replica fades. The artist is the original cause of both – they create patterns rather than only clumping atoms together.

Plenty of people won’t perceive a piece of art to be as meaningful if it looks indistinguishable from the original without BEING the original. I would ask them to consider why.

Observation 2: by only showing original (rather than replica) works of art, museums end up showing people way less high-“quality” art.

Is it worth sacrificing the quality of visual experience for the “originalness of atoms”? Very much so, many people seem to implicitly assume. But if museums were willing to show replicas, their budget would no longer limit the quality of the work they show. 

Observation 3: there isn’t an agreed-upon definition of quality. We can reasonably construct multiple definitions of quality and debate what quality means. A curator’s notion of “quality” will not be the same as what your own notion of quality is, and neither will it be the same as an artist’s notion of quality, etc. Quality is to be questioned and debated, not assumed or determined by an authority figure’s proclamation.

Observation 4: by keeping almost all of their art locked away in their storage facilities, typical museums have only a tiny fraction of their value accessible to the public. Is this inescapable? I don’t think it is.

How the Museum of Questioned Quality works:

(1) As a precursor to constructing the museum, a huge survey is conducted of four types of people that have different relationships to art (from all over the world):

• artists (defined as people who have been making art on a continual basis for at least five years)

• collectors (defined as people who own at least 30 works of art that are originals, which must have been created by at least ten different artists)

• experts (defined as non-artists who work in the art world full-time, including academics, art critics, curators, etc.)

• enthusiasts (defined as people who say they really like art but who don’t fit any of the other categories)

Each such person is asked to list what they think the 20 “best” works of art of all time are (specified by finding them in an online search interface of hundreds of thousands of well-known works, indexed and searchable by the name of the work, the name of the artist, the category, the year it was made, etc.). They would also be asked to attempt to explain each answer given in a few sentences. All types of art are fair game, including painting, sculpture, pottery, installation, etc., so long as producing a physical replication of it is possible.

(2) The survey results are used to find those works of art listed most often, and five sets of winning pieces are created. Each set of winners corresponds to one of the five wings of the museum.

The largest wing of the museum, which is housed at the center, is the “Quality” wing. It houses the 100 overall winners when each of the four groups (not each voter) is weighted equally. That is, it has the pieces of art most often listed as being among the greatest works by artists, collectors, experts, and enthusiasts.

The other four wings, “Quality According to Artists,” “Quality According to Collectors,” “Quality according to Experts,” and “Quality according to enthusiasts,” each house those 50 works that were most often listed as being the best by that specific group and that were NOT among the 50 most often listed by the other groups (and not among the top 100 overall). The layout of each such wing is curated by members of the corresponding group (e.g., artists are charged with curating the “Quality According to Artists” wing, collectors curate the “Quality According to Collectors” wing, etc.).

Certain types of art would have to be excluded due to infeasibility (such as some performance art pieces, large installations, and pieces with existing copyrights where the owner wouldn’t agree to a replica being made).

(3) The works of art in the museum are replicas. But they are really good fakes, such that at a distance of three feet, even an expert with good eyesight couldn’t identify it as a fake. Hence, looking at those pieces should produce no discernable difference in visual experience for the visitors compared to viewing the originals.

(4) Old, decrepit items are replicated not in their decaying modern form but as our best guess for the form that the artist created them in. So, for instance, if a Greek statue makes the cut, it would likely be garishly painted (http://bit.ly/2jzTWi1) rather than being a boring white, and the brownish yellows associated with some of the early modernists would be restored to their radiant yellows (https://dailym.ai/2HYEfLQ).

(5) Each piece of art would have two plaques near it. The first plaque would contain a summary of why those in the survey said it should be considered one of the greatest works of art of all time, including a few insightful quotes taken from people’s explanations of why they chose it in the survey (i.e., Zagat review style). The second plaque would contain a vicious attack on the work of art from an artist, collector, expert, or enthusiast saying why they think the original work of art on which the replica is based is lousy, derivative, ugly, or at least greatly overrated.

Visitors can vote for whether the art the replica is a copy of is of high-quality (or not) by touching either the plaque that argues it is (or the plaque that argues it isn’t), and the percentages of people that agree it is of high quality are on display below the plaque for everyone to see.

(6) Visitors are allowed to touch all those works of art that are not easily damageable (e.g., robust statues).

(7) The museum would always contain exactly one non-replica (i.e., original). Visitors would be told this upon entering, and they would be encouraged to try to figure out what the one non-replica is, but the answer would be a carefully-guarded secret. So (other than for those works that are restored pieces or pieces where the owner is well-known), you could not know ABSOLUTELY FOR SURE if you are looking at an original or replica.

(8) Every year, the survey would be re-conducted, with new pieces added and old ones removed based on changing results. The museum would have no long-term storage for art. All of its pieces would always be on display at all times, and when a piece falls from the top of the survey in its rankings, it would simply be given away to one of the survey respondents (chosen at random from among those that listed it as one of the greatest works of all time).

(9) When visitors enter the museum, they are given a token with a symbol of death on it. Each piece of art has a corresponding slot nearby where such tokens can be inserted. On December 31st of each year, whichever work of art has amassed the most votes of death is destroyed in a grand ceremony in the central wing. Visitors are invited to help destroy the work of art, taking turns with various implements of destruction (while wearing appropriate safety equipment): for instance, by means of a crossbow, flamethrower, or battle-ax. Once destroyed, a huge party ensues.

If the work of art selected for destruction by the visitors was the one original work of art (the only non-replica), so be it. Its atoms are lost to the world forever.

This essay was written on July 21st, 2018, and was first released on this site on November 5th, 2021.