Art, haiku, and Lensa

The injection of AI technology into art has opened up a serious can of worms.

I ran into two examples of this in rapid succession a couple of days ago.  The first came to me by way of a friend who is an artist and writer, and is about the Lensa app -- a wildly-popular AI art interface that can take an image of your face, spruce it up a bit (if it needs it -- mine certainly would), and then create digital art of you as a superhero, model, mythological creature, Renaissance painting, or dozens of other reimaginings of you.  Someone I follow on TikTok posted a sequence of Lensa art based on his face -- and I have to say, they were pretty damn cool-looking.

Yes, but.

The hitch is where all the imagery Lensa is using comes from.  There are credible allegations that the owners of the app are basically shrugging their shoulders at the question.  Artist Rueben Medina had the following to say about it:

I hate being a party pooper but please stop using Lensa and posting your AI art images from it.  I understand if you don't care about the blatant theft of your data the app is doing, lots of things do that.  What you should care about is this: 

The Lensa app uses the Stable Diffusion model to create those AI images.  That model is trained on the Laion database.  That database is full of stolen artwork and sensitive images.  Using Lensa hurts illustrators/photographers in two major ways: 

1. This database was built without consent nor compensation.  That means the work is stolen. 

2. The proliferation of cheap AI art is culturally devaluing the work of illustrators which is already at rock bottom. 

Is there an ethical way to create AI art?  Absolutely.  Databases built on images that artists have opted into and are being compensated for is the first step.  Pretty much none of these AI art apps do that because it would make their business model (Lensa wants $40/yr) unprofitable.

This one hits hard for me because my wife is an artist who shows all over the Northeast, and it has become increasingly difficult for her to sell her pieces at a price that fairly compensates her for her time, skill, and talent -- in part because it's so easy to get mass-produced digital art that gives the impression of high quality at a far lower price.  Carol's work is stunningly original -- you seriously should check out her website -- and while she still has very successful shows, the game is a lot harder than it used to be.

Part of the problem is how good the AI has gotten.  And it's not just visual art that is under attack.  Right after I ran into the Lensa sequence on TikTok and saw Rueben Medina's impassioned plea not to use it, I stumbled across a paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior describing an AI program that can produce haiku, a stylized seventeen-syllable form originating in Japan that often deals with finding beauty in nature, and evokes the emotions of serenity, peace, wistfulness, and nostalgia.

The authors write:

To determine the general characteristics of the beauty experience across object kinds, Brielmann et al. (2021) proposed eleven dimensions that have been considered by prominent philosophers of aesthetics (pleasure, wishing to continue the experience, feeling alive, feeling that the experience is beautiful to everyone, number of felt connections to the experience, longing, feeling free of desire, mind wandering, surprise, wanting to understand the experience more, and feeling that the experience tells a story) and eight dimensions conveyed by psychologists (complexity, arousal or excitement, learning from the experience, wanting to understand, harmony in variety, meaningfulness, exceeding one's expectation, and interest).  In accordance with [this scheme], these dimensions were used to identify factors that delineate the experience of beauty in human-made and AI-generated haiku.

It is both fascinating and disquieting that the software produced haiku so authentic-sounding that a panel of readers couldn't tell them apart from ones written by humans.

"It was interesting that the evaluators found it challenging to distinguish between the haiku penned by humans and those generated by AI," said Yoshiyuki Ueda, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Our results suggest that the ability of AI in the field of haiku creation has taken a leap forward, entering the realm of collaborating with humans to produce more creative works. Realizing [this] will lead people to re-evaluate their appreciation of AI art."

Yes, but.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Damian Putica, A.I Generated Artwork of a teenage boy and teenage girl, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I am very much of the opinion that the perception of beauty in any art form -- be it visual arts, writing, music, dance, theater, or anything else -- occurs because of the establishment of a link between the producer of the art and the consumer.  (I dealt with this a while back, in a post called "The Creative Relationship," about our unstoppable tendency to read our own experience into what we see and hear.)  But what happens when one side of that relationship is a piece of software?  Does that matter?  As a writer, I find this a troubling prospect, to say the least.  I know we're not nearly there yet; haiku is a simple, highly rule-based form, which novels are clearly not.  (I don't mean haiku is simple to do well, just that the rules governing the form are simple.)  Having an AI write a creditable haiku is bound to be a lot easier than having it write a novel.  But as we've seen so many times before, once we have proof of concept, the rest is just tinkering; the software tends to improve really quickly once it's shown that the capability is there.

As a novelist, I would have a serious concern about being superseded by a story-generating computer that could create novels as well as I can.

The whole thing raises questions not only about the ethics of using human creators' work as a springboard for AI-based mass production, but about what exactly creativity means, and whether it matters who -- or what -- is doing the creating.  I don't have any easy answers; my emotional reaction against the possibility of what my wife and I both do being supplanted by computer-generated content may not mean very much.

But I think all of us -- both creators and consumers -- better think long and hard about these issues, and soon.

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Shapeshifter

I rarely ever write poetry -- it's not that I don't like it, but more that trying to capture an image, feeling, or story in so few words has always struck me as singularly difficult.  I'm a little in awe of people who are able to create a written work with such tremendous impact in such a small space.

Ars Poetica by Alphonse Mucha (1898) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I have made a couple of forays into the poetic world, though, and for this week's Fiction Friday I'll share one of them.  It's piece I wrote a while back, inspired by one of the most thoroughly amoral people I've ever met.

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Shapeshifter

Look at him from one angle; he seems bigger.
From another his cleverness glitters like cut crystal.
One face shows righteous outrage at ill-treatment;
Then with no trace of irony another face boasts, laughing, about how
He hoodwinked someone foolish enough to trust him.

Anger in him sizzles like an electric arc.
Look once, twice; it's gone.  Nothing but charm remains.
He hands you a black and bitter drink, his gaze dark with fury;
A moment later, the eyes fill with innocent bewilderment when you refuse to swallow it.
His words soothe, stroke; misdirect; wound.
He speaks sharp-edged contempt
Through a polished smile.

Hold a mirror up to him;
One image.  But a different one
For every person he meets
And a different one each time you meet him.

He slips, he slides, he dances, he weaves and dodges;
No trap can hold him.  Pin him down, he oozes away,
Turns, and smiles at you, eyes flashing triumph;
Unassailable.  You cannot win, and he knows it.

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If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Poetry reading

A friend of mine and I were discussing poetry a few days ago, and the inevitable question came up: what is your favorite poem?  After our chat, I started thinking that this would be a good topic for Fiction Friday.

I'm not a poet myself, so I can't claim any particular expertise.  Poetry is a compact, crystallized way to tell a story or evoke an emotion, and I tend to be... a little long-winded.  Thus the fact that I'm a novelist.  I am always in awe of someone who can pull off a truly beautiful or evocative poem, because creating resonance in the reader in such a short form seems like such a challenge.  My own favorite poetry usually has some twist on the use of words, something that spins your brain around a little and makes you see the world in a different way.  That's why I've always loved e. e. cummings.  He has a way of turning simple language on its head to create uniquely surreal beauty.  Two of my favorites are the sweet, joyous "if everything happens that can't be done" and the short but chilling "me up at does."  Another contender is Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful "The Fish," and I would be remiss not to mention Stevie Smith's brilliant "Our Bog is Dood," which seems to make no sense at all until... suddenly... the message is crystal clear, and devastating.

But if I had to pick one only, it would be Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," which (because it was written in 1912) I will reproduce here in full:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

What I love about this poem is that it gives you a piece of a story, and leaves you to imagine what the rest might be.  What had the Traveller given his word to do, and to whom, and why?  Who are the listeners, and why didn't they answer?  The whole thing gives me chills every time I read it, because -- as Stephen King pointed out in his masterful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, sometimes it's better for writers of horror to leave the door closed.  Left to their own, readers can conjure up some really scary explanations for what might be behind it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's my favorite poem, and I hope you'll take the time to check out the links I provided to some other wonderful ones.  Now, let's hear from you: what are some of your favorites?

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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The creative relationship

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Mostly what I remember about the discussion that ensued was the professor telling us that when an interviewer asked Frost himself what the poem meant, Frost replied that it wasn't intended to be allegorical, or symbolic of anything; it was simply a recounting of a scene, a weary traveler pausing for a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowy woodland.

"Of course," the professor went on, cheerfully confident, "we know that a poet of Frost's stature wouldn't produce anything that simplistic -- so let's see what symbolism we can find in his poem!"

I recall being kind of appalled, mostly at the professor's hubris in thinking that his own opinions about meaning overrode what the poet himself intended.  Since then, though, I've begun to wonder.  I still think the professor was a bit of a cocky bastard, don't get me wrong; but I've come to realize that creativity implies a relationship -- it's not as simple as writer (or artist or composer) creating, and reader (or observer or listener) consuming.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video by Aldous Harding, a brilliant singer/songwriter from New Zealand, performing her song "The Barrel."

The song is weird, mesmerizing, strangely beautiful, and the video is somewhere in that gray area at the intersection of "evocative" and "fever dream."  The lyrics are downright bizarre in places:

The wave of love is a transient hut
The water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel

Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate
I can't appearance out of nowhere

What does it mean?  Harding herself wants to leave that, at least in part, up to the listener.  In an interview with NPR, she said, “I realized that the video was a well-intended opinion of mine to just keep it loose.  I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves...  But I don’t necessarily have that in me the way you might think."

It's wryly funny, especially in light of the long-ago pronouncements of my freshman lit professor, that a lot of people are weighing in on the song and interpreting it in a variety of mutually-exclusive ways.  One writer said that it's about female empowerment and escaping from abusive relationships.  Another suggests that it describes how "the scariest thing is looking in the mirror and not recognising what you see staring back at you."  A review in The Guardian lists other interpretations that have been suggested:

Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where [Harding's album] Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem "Metaphors," inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, [or] somehow related to menstruation.

Watch it... and see what you think.

Like my lit professor, what gets me about a lot of these interpretations is how certain they sound.  My own reaction was that the lyrics fall into the realm of "nearly making sense," and that part of why they're fascinating -- and why I've watched the video several times -- is that there's a real art to using language that way, neither being too overt about what you mean nor devolving into complete nonsense.

Creativity, I think, implies a relationship between producer and consumer, and because of that, the producer can't always control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers bring to that activity their own backgrounds, opinions, and knowledge, and that is going to shape what they pull out of the creative experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Robert Frost didn't mean "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be anything more than a depiction of a scene; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of the reading, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]