Thread by @GalaxyKate

Was thinking about this again, and it's important to recognize:

WE CONFLATE THING BEING DIFFICULT FOR HUMANS
WITH THINGS BEING DIFFICULT FOR COMPUTERS

and this colors everything we do in AI.

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On reflection, maybe it's "things smart people enjoy stuggling with". Chess, modernist music/art/poetry, Go.

"My AI is smart so it should have smart people hobbies"

But those hobbies are...not representative of challenges for machines.

For example, modernist music is difficult because it requires composers to think outside the patterns they have been trained on. For a small child, this is easy, for very-trained composer Brian Eno, he had to make a deck of cards o help him do this.

lifehacker.com/brian-enos-obl…

... While an AI system, without human-level training or pattern recognition, says: "look, I can put together notes that do not follow tradition patterns. I am as smart as Brian Eno!"

But there's also *lots* of classist stuff. Modernist poetry/dance/music/art is the purview of rich trained intellectuals (because rejecting training is only impressive if you know enough about the patterns its rejecting)...

Remember when I said that AIs are programs with a human face?

This is AI designers giving their bots a fictional *rich classically-educated intellectual* face. This is *fiction*, its *theater*, the bot is not your Harvard classmate.

but we give it more "smart points" anyway.

This hit the industry real hard when it tried to do conversation.

"How hard can taking an order be?
Poor people working at *McDonalds* do it!"

Hahah, it turns out conversation is hard and humans spend 5-15 years learning it and have special circuitry designed for that and its even harder for machines because actual conversation is "words + pauses + tone + inflection"

So there are contests for modernist novels and AIs that get into modern poetry collections and AIs that paint like an academy-trained human artist that rejected their training would paint.
..

..Less coverage/interest in: folk art bots, greeting card poetry bots, railroad tragedy song bots.

Cuz those are hard *and* not socially elevated.

TLDR, your classicism is why your million-dollar pizza-ordering bot failed even if you beat a chessmaster at go or whatever.

Also:
if writing about AI, notice if you are making the logical jump:
This activity is done by smart humans
My bot does it
My bot is a smart human

Smart humans enjoy proving their smartness by memorizing the digits of Pi. Machines got different challenges.