[MUSIC]
The purpose of art is to wash
everyday's lives dust of our souls.
I always deeply believed this
Picasso statement.
Art and more broadly the beauty I
find in an object, in nature,
what even in a cherished
bittersweet memory has this
transcending power over me.
That puts me in a call mindset,
where I find new ideas.
Put by these forces, I even formed
a friendship with a painting once.
I was 14 years old,
foreign students in New York City
and it was the first time I stayed
away from my family.
Respect to my Hungarian home,
everything just felt so cold and
tall, alienating.
The continuous rush of people and
cars in Manhattan, and the English
language I barely spoke,
all made me feel isolated.
My way after school, led by the
Metropolitan Museum, and I ended
up wandering its galleries daily.
In the silence of these early
afternoons, new worlds opened as
I walked from room to room.
And when I met these two ladies,
I felt I can tell them anything.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Day after day, I was
sitting in front of this painting,
admiring it swirling colors,
the harmonies, while I shared my
innermost secrets with them.
I wasn't alone anymore,
art became my last resort.
This place of deep humanity,
an outlet for thoughts and
emotions.
So you can imagine my disgust when
I hear about this new revolutionary
type of art, generative AI art.
>> [LAUGH].
>> I mean, not this,
don't misunderstand me, I love
technology, but you can't take away
the last stronghold of humanity.
I felt my core values
were attacked, so I turned to
the first solution at hand.
ChatGPT.
>> [LAUGH] >> Can you create
an original piece?
Do you have creativity?
Well, the answer
wasn't really helping.
I decided I need to dig deeper.
I wanted to understand what is
exactly the collaboration between
machine and humans, and where is
the frontline of human creativity.
Instead of scientific articles,
what I found were countless fear in
using click provoking headlines,
talking about doomsday scenarios,
how AI is here to take over our
lives.
It wasn't helpful.
So in my desperation, I turned to
art history and the head to realize
that generative art is nothing new.
It's been around since the 60s.
Generative Art simply means that
the artist uses a predetermined
system.
For example, a computer program and
coding becomes the new
creative medium.
In the sense according script is
nothing else, but
a new type of paint brush,
drawing strokes with lines of code.
Now in today's AI models there
are two revolutionary changes.
First, is the first time that these
models do not work based on a set
of rules set by us.
Instead they are trained on large
data sets, they are shown examples
and results and they come up with
their own patterns their own rules.
Now, as you can imagine,
this is a fastly developing field,
but what most experts believe that
the main difference comes down to
pattern recognition.
Why these models break down
an image and
rebuild it line by line, bit by bit
from bottoms up to bottom up.
What we humans do is something very
different.
We first guess the outline,
the larger picture,
and we assign a meaning, and
then we fill in the details to
match that meaning that we guessed.
Do you see a rabbit or
do you see a duck?
And now you know, what is the root
cause to all of our biases.
The second biggest difference just
comes down to the sheer
amount of data.
The amount of information that
these models aggregate and
build upon is just unprecedented.
To compare traditional art to
generative art in the sense it's
just like to compare photography to
painting.
The human eye cannot capture and
analyze to depth level of detail
that a camera lens can.
And similarly our mind is uncapable
of aggregating this amount of
information and
this is a huge opportunity.
Just imagine, Monet, the great
impressionist painter, instead of
sitting in his own garden,
painting his favorite water lilies,
would have been able to glimpse
across the globe and across time
and see all the different kinds
of water lilies.
And see also the paintings and
sculptures, even music and
literature dedicated to
this flower.
And drew his inspiration from all
of that.
What could have happened?
Would you see different
color palettes and impressionism?
Would you see different shapes?
Would we see water lilies stolen
and floaty like in Botswana, or
represented as tiny rectangles
like in Japan?
What could have happened?
So does this mean that these models
can create such captivating pieces
as we can.
Well, let's think about it for
a second.
When do we call it something
creative?
Something creative is something
unexpected.
It's when we are surprised and
surprise comes when those inner
details do
not match the meaning we assigned.
By definition, there cannot be
surprise in derived knowledge that
builds on a set of rules.
And that is what AI is.
So why all this fear?
And what are we afraid of?
Don't these cycles and narratives
to sound awfully familiar?
200 years ago, photography induced
similar fear-provoking commentary.
And as we know today, photography
did not end the era of painting,
but it did fuel new art movements.
Photography ended up expanding what
we thought creatively was possible,
what painters were able to do,
money on impressionist movement was
born as a direct reaction
to photography.
So, the question was question
remains does this mean these
models will ever create like we do?
Well, replicating a human mind goes
way beyond replicating
pattern recognition.
How human thoughts rise is still
somewhat new to us, but what we
know is that our minds feed on past
experiences as well as thousands of
years of joint learning species.
And some of these experiences
are really difficult to explain.
How would you describe to
tread GPT?
How you know how it feels to ride
a bike, or
how it feels to learn how to swim.
And on the subconscious learning,
studies in epigenetics actually
showed that some of these
experiences program
part of our genes and we pass
these on to the next generation.
What this means
is that what you would think,
how you face a situation,
will be completely different from
the person next to you.
But what all these fields agree on
is that new thoughts, creative
ideas come when we feel safe,
when we feel calm,
when we can make the best sense
of the world around us.
Learning this made me
realize why so many years ago,
those two girls helped me through
the depths of homesickness, and
help me come up with new ideas to
face my situation.
So it's time, it's time to change
the fear narrative, and
start to talk about how
we can use these new tools.
To further stretch the capability
of our creativity.
And who knows,
maybe these tools will also have me
to have a more adult conversations
with my old time friends.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE].
[MUSIC]