Computational Creativity - Dylan Beattie - NDC Oslo 2021

It wasn't all that long ago that "computers" weren't machines - they were people; humans working with pencils and slide rules to calculate taxes, artillery tables, even the mathematics that landed human beings on the moon. The advent of the microprocessor consigned these human computers to a footnote in history, and in the intervening decades, digital technology has revolutionised countless fields that were once considered too complex for automation - from mathematics and finance to music and movies. Now, as machine learning ushers in a new era of automation, we find ourselves confronting some deep questions about creativity, credit - and culpability. It's all too easy to get sidetracked into hypothetical discussions about self-driving cars being programmed to choose which pedestrians they should kill - but there are real scenarios already happening all around us that raise exactly these kinds of questions.
When Hollywood uses digital technology to create digital characters that look uncannily like real actors, who gets the royalties? If a programmer creates an algorithm that uses Markov chains to generate song lyrics, who actually wrote the song? In a world where algorithms tell us what to watch, what to read and who to hire, can social networks still claim that they're just platforms - or should they be treated as publishers?
Join Dylan Beattie - developer, musician, and creator of the Rockstar programming language - for a fascinating journey along the border between human innovation and digital automation, from mathematics to music and beyond.
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[@alexclark6777]

"I am the project manager of the joke" or as we say at my company, the project manager.

[@frankhaugen]

3.5 million views for a presentation on esoteric programming languages is insane! But I've seen and shown it to others about 15 times so it has rewatchability 🤔

[@kibels894]

Luddites are really unfairly remembered. They weren't against progress, they were against factory owners eliminating their jobs and destroyed capital in protest.

[@RupertReynolds1962]

They wanted job security. Way ahead of their time, now I think about it :-)

[@iidoyila]

also unfairly remembered : the cute cats from the movie

[@wpyoga]

If Luddites had their way, large scale automated manufacturing wouldn't have took off. Luddites would have job security, factory owners would not get filthy rich, and we won't get cheap everyday goods. Most of us wouldn't even be born, because our ancestors wouldn't have been able to afford having more kids.

[@edinalewis4704]

That’s what progress means…

[@kaiserruhsam]

@@edinalewis4704 we could have technological progress where the increases in productivity benefit workers rather than owners. Keynes thought we'd have 5 hour work weeks by now. Or for something closer to your reading level, look at how cartoonists imagined George Jetson's job, work hours, and quality of life.

[@umgefahren818]

The previous talk was played for us at an event for people who were good in a nationwide computer science competition and I rewatched it many times since then

[@JTCF]

Alright, so Dylan Beattie goes to my collection of yt things I got recommended and got really hooked up on, just like my mechanics, who was also shown in this video.

[@sandaluadhasooriya1898]

Thought-Provoking lecture...I watched the Art of code as well.

[@darnokx9277]

Realism as a paint style is very much still alive - not wiped out at all.

[@lorenzogiovannibotti]

All of the paint styles are still alive, they're just not the dominating current

[@sfdntk]

"Sid Meier's Memoir" is a brilliant title for that book, haha. The phrase "Sid Meier's [blank]" is indelibly etched into the mind of anyone who's ever played one of his games, so good.

[@Erikulum]

"I hate the way historian do that. Cause the first century's the one that start at 0 not at 100" ...dude XD

[@yondaime500]

"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors." - Leon Bambrick

[@micknamens8659]

Yeah, programmers would prefer a zero based index here as well. 😀

[@JasminUwU]

I would've appreciated better audio mixing

[@simonmultiverse6349]

Yes. Audience questions at the end were very muffled.

[@ekki1993]

The luddites weren't "against progress". They were against capital owners replacing them with automation to increase their margins. One would think progress means better livelihoods for most people, not just capital owners.

[@alexduffy8723]

"The Art of Code" Like all your presentations was informing engaging and fun. Great work Dylan. I love your content.

[@sangomasmith]

The problem is that the luddites weren't against progress, they were specifically against the sort of progress that made their own lives (and those of their children) worse. Go look at a Victorian-era factory and tell me that you'd choose that over being an artisanal weaver. It should also be mentioned that no health and safety whatsoever, the 14-hour day, six days a week and child labour were entirely legal. Breaking weaving frames or factory machines, on the other hand, got the army called in and the perpetrators shot or hanged before being vilified for all eternity. Finally, we should be aware that their dilemma is our dilemma. There is a possible world out there, at the end of automation, where nobody works and everyone lives lives of plenty and security. Except the only people alive are the children and grandchildren of the 0.1% - the ones who ended up controlling the farms, mines, computer networks and automated factories. "You will own nothing, and you will be happy" may just be the prelude to slow elimination, once the final link between labour and value is severed.

[@Ubeogesh]

38:15 he actually made a pie chart out of the earth, well played 😂

[@akirachisaka9997]

Unrelated, but I did realize English spelling was a useful skill now. As in, when I finally started actually learning how to do stuff with computers. I suddenly realized... command line interfaces don't have spell checkers... And even fancy spellcheckers for programing IDEs don't work that well. You can't believe how surprising it was to me that I suddenly need to learn how to type words correctly. I'm a 90s kid who grew up with Word and stuff. So it always felt like as long as you can tell the computer what the word you want is, spelling isn't important...

[@iCarus_A]

Alternatively, try programming in China where some words get spelt wrong by someone more senior than you and now you have to make sure you spell it INCORRECTLY THE CORRECT WAY

[@gbeziuk]

Imagine this: I am listening to these brilliant presentation in the background, while playing good old Civilization 3 in the foreground.

[@alastermyst]

38:00 Just to correct, it is because America is 70+% white. The majority of photographs of people in China, India, etc. I would assume follow the same trend, that they are generally representative of the population.

[@notexactlysiev]

Great talk. Big fan of this guy

[@noealves8400]

Absolutely love the reference from Spaceballs at the very end.

[@rpocc]

And by the way, I would love seeing more talks by Dylan Beattie since we have very common field of interest, mainly music, culture and creative programming.

[@JohnDlugosz]

15:20 "TRON was controversial" I remember it was used to sell paper towels. It's common now for movies to do branding tie-ins with other things being advertised. But this high-tech movie was not selling Happy Meals or toys or anything "tech" related at all, but the humble kitchen roll. The campaign was "Scot Tron" I'm not sure if the brand name was Scot or Scott.

[@opalpersonal]

i understand that a programmer talking about art history probably didn't have much time to research nuance, and i understand that speakers don't like being corrected about their speeches, but i just have to point out that photography didn't "wipe out" realism as an art form, painting realism is still alive and well, because people enjoy painting all sorts of different things, and mediums of expression in art aren't just a means to an end. photography just made "realism" accessible to more people. in case anyone's wondering, i'm not just being devil's advocate either. programming is his expertise, and art is mine, i've been a professional artist for about a decade and have a deep interest in art history! :]

[@ari_archer]

NDC talks by Dylan Beattie are THE BEST lol

[@tharfagreinir]

It's interesting to watch the last bit about generative AI two years later. GPT was garnering interest back then but it took the accessibility of ChatGPT to really get it into the mainstream.

[@GG-uz8us]

This video is recommended to me by KZbin lol. Love CEverthingF’s talks. Knight capitol provides more value to programming industry than stock market.

[@SkarmoryThePG]

proud to be at least a few dozen of those three milion

[@DamienSawyer]

Ok. Great talk, up to 28:00 where you convinced me to turn off KZbin to go and mow the lawn.

[@agnishom]

Hello from 2023. We are now in the era where everyone now knows about gpt3. 49:50

[@szabolcstiger2290]

but its refreshing to see a video about the topic wich is not filled with marketing speak.

[@petergerdes1094]

It's important to be aware of the risks of bias in AI but I fear that most of our concern about it is making things worse. Instead of making things better we are making sure that anyone who worries about this kind of thing doesn't get involved in making these programs (eg instead of Amazon selling face rec to law enforcement It gets sold by Clearview who largely ignored the concerns and has shown little care in keeping their product out of the hands of oppressive regimes). Worse. we seem to be ignoring the fact that often these programs just reveal underlying patterns in our human choices or in our society. Maybe Amazon hiring was biased, or maybe it's an unfortunate fact about our society that those seemingly irrelevant features really did correlate with factors that are considered reasons for hiring (maybe ppl with ca interest are less interested in going to women's colleges). Either way the last thing we want to do is incentivize companies not to create such programs. That's just a way of keeping our eyes closed.

[@JohnDlugosz]

12:30 It was the advent of early spell checkers that taught me how to spell! It was Borland's Sprint word processor. It would check in real-time rather than a separate pass, and bleep softly immediately after a misspelled word was typed. Often the word's spelling is not a complete mystery -- it is something like -able vs -ible, or is that first consonant an a or an e. I would backspace and re-type the word correctly, thus training my muscle memory to type it correctly next time. Today, with the red wavies, I don't learn more correct words in the same way. I just finish typing and "replace all".

[@mellertid]

I want someone to bleep at me, softly.

[@VAXHeadroom]

Heavy Skies: but does it compile in RockStar? ;)

[@zombie_pigdragon]

I wonder how the ending would play in with AI performance and recording. It doesn't even need to be an AI human-like voice- what if I used an AI to write music, another to generate the backing, and fed it into Vocaloid, who could own that? In that case probably me, if I curate it, but what if I rent a VPS, run everything from there, and have it automatically publish a single to KZbin once a week? Fascinating stuff.

[@riesigerriese666]

52:55 and onwards: will that compile in Rockstar?

[@rpocc]

Tron has an interesting story behind but it’s good to know that the first movie utilizing computer generated graphics was the Westworld directed by Michael Crichton (hopefully I spelled his name correctly). I agree with the concept given during the answering the first question from the auditory. Current AI-generated creations are comparable with stuff made by mediocre artists, so it even can be a kind of a measure fir complexity of a given genre. If you can’t tell if a creation was made by a human or generated by AI, probably it’s not taking so much effort, experience, education and inventfulness to make and this level of creativity can be substituted by a computer as well as call operators trained to act as if they already were an algorithms, talking by scripts and not being any helpful in at least a little complicated cases not described in scripts. And I afraid that a gold half of popular music (in wide meaning, including rock and its derivatives) has the same level of complexity. There is a realtime KZbin stream generating decent djent tracks.

[@00oKMo00]

my mechanics is good on youtube but I like the super fast versions they post on tiktok

[@philrod1]

We see you like Mike and the Mechanics. Here's a video by My Mechanics. They're pretty similar, right? 😂👍

[@mcmaddie]

5:38 does this guy start indexing from 1 or 0?

[@lukesshorttutorials1504]

Last question was top😂😂😂

[@sinnahsaint7869]

Is Miku Hatsune a "computer generated star"? or just a video mask?

[@lemon2125]

At the end you mentioned simulated celebrity's, are you familiar with Vocaloids they are anime singers that use phonemes and math I don't understand to make new songs.

[@MrDebranjandutta]

No Midjourney or DallE reference?

[@eth3792]

This talk was held several months before both DALL-E 2 (the popular one) and Midjourney were released. I imagine the final 10 minutes or so would be quite different if this were redone today lol

[@JosephRawsonWorks]

The last starfighter used a Cray for cgi scenes.

[@erutrottti]

Still waiting for a brain interface so I can create the music that I'd like or edit existing one on the fly.

[@4lpha0ne]

27:35 I don't know if YT engineers or managers watched this talk or implemented this before, but in my case YT (Premium) is actually stopping after a while, suggesting a break, or even that it's time to sleep. 🤔😉

[@jbird4478]

That's a new thing. It's not as benign as you seem to think. What it really does is make sure you are actually watching and not doing something else. I'm a bit surprised Premium does that as well because I thought it was just because the advertisers want to know.

[@micknamens8659]

That's because they want you to keep your job. yt wants that you have the money to buy the products in their ads. Then they can charge more for the time you consume the ads.

[@4lpha0ne]

@@micknamens8659 Hmm, but I don't know, what kind of garbage I should buy if I don't see any ads. Instead I decided to pay a monthly fee and don't waste my precious time and mental capacity seeing ads, having to click them away, or simply being disturbed by them.

[@micknamens8659]

@@4lpha0ne If you don't see ads then why would yt be interested that you watch more videos - incurring costs, w/o increasing the ad valu/price/income/profit?

[@4lpha0ne]

@@micknamens8659 Maybe you should reconsider how business works. ;^) They earn enough money with me already. We made a trade-off. I don't need to care about the costs for YT premium.

[@ehjones]

Hang on, wait a minute - a programmer hates the way a historian calls the 18 hundreds 'the 19th century', but is presumably perfectly comfortable with the first item in an array having the label 0? 😉

[@lior_haddad]

That's the problem! Those darn historians are starting their century counting with 1 instead of 0.

[@SirLightfire]

So, The first cave paintings were fursonas. Awesome

[@thecurator2045]

GPT 4 is atm taking over. 2 years and we have ai fights between multibillion dollar companies. Everything has changed in an incredibly short time.

[@thecurator2045]

And everything here can be done right now better faster and stronger with current technology

[@diablominero]

Hotel California is supposed to be nonsensical.

[@f.d.3289]

38:12 If society really wants to get rid of its societal biases, I can only recommend listening to autists about their perception of the world. Autists are essentially UNABLE to appropriately learn social conventions, even if they'd like to (which most do). Of course, that's an overgeneralization, there as many different kinds of autists as there are autists -- but I just wanted to point out that people could learn a LOT from autists if they'd only really listen to them. (Disclaimer: I identify myself as an autist, although I still don't have any formal diagnosis.)

one can also still fall back to use drugs, in order to produce lyrics, that are not language, strictly speaking as in its doubtful if they ever where defined to mean anything in particular... which of cause didn't stop the listeners, often to the present day, to keep on speculating, for instance why and how 'that lady' bought that particular stairway, even so it seems over dimensioned and how did she transport that thing and who does she think she is, to need such pompous escalation element?

[@nescius2]

Ned Lud, like Robin Hood, or most other folk heroes, also isn't real.. probably

[@rapidsnailshellzz]

Dylan I've been watching so many of your conferences... I've lived all of them... But today this one let me down... Jimmy Hendrix? OVERRATED? L.

[@KeinNiemand]

Yyou could have at least use somthing sligtly more advanced then a markov chain for your lyric generater like GPT-2 or GPT-NeoX 20B

[@otesunki]

markov chains are way easier to explain in one talk

[@firstlast-tf3fq]

When you're watching this in 2023 and deepfaking is here...

[@openroomxyz]

Nice talk but I did know all this things already.

[@albertmashy8590]

You must be cool at parties

[@ekki1993]

Imagine this comment but while reading a children's book

[@isi1044]

First

[@joeedh]

I hate upper middle class supremecism.