Do you have any idea how your vocabulary is totally contradictory? If you want to be a scientist, you have to use precise words with precise meanings. If you say you are “training” a machine, it implicitly and most certainly means that that machine is cognitive, has the capabilities to learn and thus to develop itself without little or no human interaction afterwards! How else could you “train” it? Such a thing is impossible, and by using a certain type of vocabulary you make it seem possible (at least to the general public).
This implicit contradiction and wrong vocabulary is exactly why I reacted to your article, because by using this vocabulary you are humanising machines. If you state that you “try to recreate the repeated patterns of certain human mental process”, you are using the wrong vocabulary again. We cannot recreate anything of any human mental process within the logical circuits of a machine. Why not? Because a machine needs to be logical, its very essence is logic. Human beings are not logical, certainly not when it comes to art, beauty, aesthetics, and the like. We are basically the very opposite of machines. And I surely hope we stay that way.
Of course you’re making a tool, of course I understood that you’re not trying to replace human beings by machines. But then, I think, you should definitely change your very vocabulary. And how far will you go with creating more, and more “sophisticated” (mind you, I consciously didn’t write the word “smarter”!) tools? Do you have any idea what effect these sophisticated tools have on human intelligence in general? We have less and less control over our “tools” — any tool in any situation of our daily lives, in the context of our jobs, family life, free time, study, etc! Our tools are gradually overpowering us. And these tools are now almost all computer-driven. Computers need programming. Programming computers means that certain people have to write code. Who is coding what and for what purposes? Nobody knows the answer to that question anymore, except the ones who have huge financial profits by expanding this system of “sophisticated tools”.
I will tell you what one of the effects is of this evolution. We are getting dumber and dumber. We are getting less and less critical. We are relying more and more on invisible, programmed electronic gadgets to “help” us live our lives. As an artist, I don’t want this evolution to go any further. Why not? Because it makes people more stupid, more passive, and less human. As a scientist, I warn for this evolution. Why? Because there are many examples in the history of mankind where other tools were used by those who knew how to create them, sell them, and thus manipulate the masses in order to steer them in a certain direction. I’m referring to the machinery of political and military propaganda. I’m referring to the perverted power of commercial advertising everywhere I go, sit, take public transport, or surf on the Internet. The marketing puppeteers of this business know all about “push technology” and how to use human psychology to sell unnecessary goods and make the world into one big, commercial machine. Thanks, but no thanks. We don’t need “trained machines”, we don’t need programmes to tell us what we like and dislike. If we fail to be able to do this ourselves, then we have failed as human beings.
In conclusion, it’s not me who misunderstood your article. It’s you who is blind for the implications and consequences — on a very large scale — of what you advertise here. And it’s you who tries to fool people by making them believe that a “trained” machine can replace the flexibility, the speed, and the very necessary ‘imperfection’ of the human mind regarding choices relating to photographic art and aesthetics. Basically, all you are trying to do, is reducing the power of the human mind in this field to a big bunch of numbers, statistics, parameters and variables, and pour it into a programmed tool. That is not “training” anything, that is making deductions and inductions based on an inadequate and surely incomplete analysis of certain processes going on in the human mind, and coding them into a computer programme. Nothing less nothing more.
Perhaps, yes, this will be a helpful tool for some. But only for those interested in increasing quantity, not quality, in the field of photography.
Final question which just came to my mind: Are you planning to make anything like this for painters or sculptors?
