An eternal braid — DNA, Generative AI, Poetry
How do 46 chromosomes of DNA or <20,000 gene pairs encode all the information needed to create a human being?
How does a machine, executing code one line at a time, lead to beautiful artwork from a simple text prompt?
How does a poet manage to memorise 15,693 lines of the Iliad?
All of these feats seem to need entities of two specific kinds -
1. A ridiculously amazing “Generator”
The entity which does the creation, given some starting instructions. This can be the human body (in the case of babies), a computer (in case of GenAI), or the human brain (in case of feats like poem recitation).
2. A Starter “Essence”
The genesis seed to get the generation process going, whether it be the human chromosome, a text prompt, or a coarse-memory of the overall rhythm & theme of the poem. This “essence” does not have enough information to fully define the end-creation but rather encapsulates just enough to start the generation process. The rest is left to interpretation.
This is obvious in the case of reproduction, as each child of the same parents looks different from their siblings. Generative AI also leads to different creations in every run, based on different initialisations. Even poems change with every recitation, as no poet remembers a ballad verbatim. They instead invent the poem anew with every recitation, endeavoring only to preserve the core essence of the original poem from memory.
The generative process seems to possess certain fundamental characteristics -
- Diffusion — Start with the essence and keep adding more detail progressively. A human starts with one cell, which divides into multiple, which then form organs and organ systems, eventually the full human. Generative AI starts with white noise and keeps adding detail progressively until a high-definition image comes out. A poet starts with the opening line, and keeps generating new lines to continue the theme & rhythm of the poem,
- Randomness / Non-determinism — No two runs of the generative process are the same. The generative process is constrained just enough to be able to take i) what’s been produced so far and ii) the core essence, to determine what next step to take. At each stage, there is some level of randomness.
Are these similarities of any significance, or just complicated pseudo-patterns being observed by my overactive mind? Or are these emergent behaviours of certain types of systems?
Come to think of it, the laws of physics themselves describe such a system. You can define a starting state of the system, and the laws of physics will determine how the situation will unfold. Modern quantum physics even states that we can’t describe the what happens next perfectly. It is probabilistic and we can only define a set of probabilities on how it should unfold.
