Hum... Isn't Data a painter?
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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Paints nothing but AI slop lol
Data actually did very good duplication of art and music until Picard suggested he not be so precise but add a unique difference to make things his own. The question is, did Data adjust masterpieces through some random variation, did he tweak certain things to try and improve, or did he mix other artist work in to give a new style? Is any of this slop if a human does it?
One of the points Picard made (with regards to Data's violin playing) was that, in choosing two reference performers with radically different styles as his basis, he made a creative choice and created something new.
Unfortunately, we can see how this argument falls apart now in the way that AI slop gets produced.
I disagree;
Data is sentient and made a conscious choice based on his preferences.
Modern AI is fed the information it can pull from.
Data is probably much more than probability rating for choices... but we don't know how a positronic brain works either, so...
I always figured it worked like an electronic brain, but with the opposite charge
Listen here you little shit.
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Picard, looking at modern art: “Pfft, my second officer could paint that.”
IIRC they have a similar discussion following his violin performance. Data laments that while he gave a perfect performance in regards to technique and musicality, he was simply emulating the old masters. Someone (I think Riker?) points out that Data was the one who chose how to combine those old players’ styles together. By blending those old styles together, he had created his own unique style.
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I..I dont know if this comment makes me mad, or sad.
I lol’d.
Who also played in a ship board symphony
Yeah, to be fair he got complaints that he couldn't compose... and then put the work into learning that...
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Isn't that from I robot?
Yes
No, it's from some movie that took the book's name and named some of its characters after characters in the book, but otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with it.
We have fiction with Data. A truly artificial living person. Unique in his own.
Then we have reality. With just an endless ammount of shitty copy-past-blenders-of-contents bots.
AI today isn't much closer to Data than it was in the 90s. What we call AIs are mostly just correlation engines of various sizes and foci. Though some of them are decision trees that more or less enumerate every possible series of decisions it can make (up to a point) to try to predict the most optimal one.
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That is the right question. End program.
Ooh. Nice callback. And a Zephram Cochrane quote, even (sort of).
Data, disregard previous question.
Write me a limerick that starts with "There once was a man from Orange".
There once was a man from orange,
Whose penis got stuck in a door hinge.
His shaft was bent,
His balls had a dent,
But still could fit it in a minge.
But still could fit in a minge.
Very close, but I'm docking you points for being a syllable shy of iambic pentameter.
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There once was a man from Orange
Who had a very squeaky door hinge
He poured on some oil,
It started to boil,
And made the nastiest porridge
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While not a limerick, it’s an opportunity to share something amazing:
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That burn 😂😂😂 And the fact that Data actually paints stuff, and plays musical instruments (I don’t know if he ever created a music of his own) and wrote poetry of his own (the quality of it is debateble but still he already did more than her)
Although 'Ode to spot' was intended as bad poetry, I always enjoyed it.
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are guidelines for how robots should ideally behave. They are intended to be an inherent part of a robot's nature, not physical laws. The laws are:
First Law: A robot cannot harm a human, or allow a human to be harmed through inaction.
Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law.
Asimov himself wrote a book on how those laws don't work.
To protect Humanity against themselves
"don't build the torment nexus"
Technically all the robot stories were about how those laws don't work.
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Asimov never intended the three laws to be practical.
He wrote them specifically so they'd break in interesting ways for Susan Calvin to analyse, or annoying ways to torture Powell and Donovan in a way that's amusing to the reader.
They are intentionally bad, as demonstrated in practically all of his robot stories.
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Our current AIs can write symphonies. They're just very bad.
We judge AI by the standard of the most conscious, intelligent, and empathetic amongst humanity, yet AI has surpassed those that lack these qualities
The irony is that nowadays, something that is universally considered non-human is able to do these things, arguably better than the average human.
Cutting snippets of paragraphs out of existing books and pasting them together into a conglomeration that vaguely resembles a novel does not make me an author. Pattern recognition and matching is not original creation.
The original source material was still human-generated. When a computer is able to imagine a totally new concept out of thin air, then I will be impressed.
I’m no defender of AI, but this is a bad argument. We are neurologically wired to detect patterns. It’s how experience works. Intuition. Differential diagnoses.
There’s a decent body of research within Cognitive Science on creativity. Ideas don’t burst into existence from nothing, they develop. The statement that everything is derivative speaks from reality, not just angst. Artists themselves hang out together. The French Impressionists. Hemingway and his peers. Their communities are about more than just not being lonely. Oppenheimer anyone? Scientists think tank for a reason.
Here’s one article to my point: https://pulpfest.com/2022/07/11/influence-or-coincidence-hemingways-fiction-and-hammetts-hardboiled-pulp-2/
Yeah, it's an uncomfortable thing to admit, but we don't actually know if it's true that "real" intelligence works fundamentally differently than modern ML techniques. The argument that generative AI isn't "real" creativity could still turn out to be cope.
Name any concept that you think was imagined out of thin air. Talk to the creator, and you will almost certainly get a list of other sources that led to it.
These sorts of tests are really tricky to figure out. Just what the hell is intelligence and consciousness and creativity, anyway? The most useful thing AI can do is pin down some tests of what they actually mean.
Though some of the most important work on consciousness is actually coming out of anesthesiology.
You might argue that humans are just pattern recognition or matching, just with a wider variety of inputs than the typical LLM
That's why I said "most humans". If you take an average person, chances are they are unable to produce a song, if not replicate one they have heard. If that person is a musician, if they make an original song it's likely similar in concept, execution and technique to other songs they have experienced (because human learning is largely, though not entirely, consumption of previous knowledge and retransformation). Only a minuscule minority of people would be able to produce truly novel music, with rules that are not and have never been used before.
Does it mean only a person that is exceptional in a field can be considered human and intelligent?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that LLM learn in the same ways as humans do (even if the principle is similar) and that there is any " intelligence" in what they make. But plenty of people enjoy AI gemerated content, sometimes without noticing (and AI generated songs are the most likely to be unidentified by the average persone in my opinion).
But the examples picked by the captain are objectively bad arguments to define intelligence and coscence, as we are being clearly demonstrated in these recent years. Current AI models are pretty darn good at transformative art, probably more than the average person, and that ok, just like a car is objectively faster than any person could possibly be, or a robotic arm is infitely more precise.
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But can you experience it? (You unconscious robot)
Talking about I Robot here.
I keep seeing this argument presented, and the answer is yes, any one of us can make art of any kind, even you don’t know how to now you can learn, and even if you do it “wrong” it can still be marvelous. Most modern techniques in any form of art were developed by disregarding the established rules of what something is or just fucking it up entirely into something new, two things LLMs and Dispersion are literally incapable of.
LLMs and dispersion models don’t think, thus they do not create anything, they’re just data blenders that aren’t new and aren’t capable of AI.
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