The Future of Creators in the AI Era l Bob Mankoff

Intro

00:00I'm really conflicted in a way I can see that AI is right now It's very helpful in generating many different ideas on anything you've seen that I both like it and hate it at the same time Sort of like how I feel about the phone Everything is like this Wouldn't I be a lot better without the phone?

00:18And I am a fan of AI But I would not cede to it the ultimate judgment What you think is funny or a good song or a good novel Remember it is being trained on averageness But I'm not average Each one of us has our own sensibility and really it depends on whether what your abilities are Creator has to understand they as a human are the ultimate arbiter If all of a sudden we cede to algorithms completely Then I do think we lose a certain kind of agency in our lives You can find a way to be great in your own way

From 2 years of Rejections to New Yorker Editor

01:12I'm Bob Mankoff I'm the former cartoon editor of The New Yorker I was a cartoonist there for 40 years I'm a researcher in AI and humor I like ping pong I'm pretty good at it I've got a very good jump shot I'm a person who is perpetually unhappy and dissatisfied and makes the best of it through humor I think partly I became a cartoonist because I was pretty terrible at everything else, and I was pretty good at that I was always funny and I always drew Did a lot of different things in the 1960s and I eventually became an experimental psychologist

01:58But in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be a cartoonist And at the age of 30 short of my PhD I decided I would give it a try and I ended up submitting about 2000 cartoons to the New Yorker magazine before finally getting in I ended up doing almost a thousand cartoons for The New Yorker And I was cartoon editor from 1997 to 2017 I was interested in computers I bought the first Macintoshes, I started to scan them and in there so In the early 1990s, I created this company called the Cartoon Bank And the cartoon Bank was consists of all the cartoons The New Yorker Rejected

02:39Because I knew that there were many very good cartoons in that Storing cartoons on hard drives And then when people would fax or call in, I would access those cartoons and send them to the clients and they would pay for them And the business that I now have is Cartoonstock.com is half of the revenue goes to the cartoonist As a cartoonist, my goal was to come up with a new idea

Advice for Young Creators

03:09So maybe if you are just saying what other people are saying, what is the point of your post? If you're just saying exactly what someone else is saying? Can you have a new thought on this? What I wanna say in a way is that I'm a pretty ordinary person I'm not a genius, okay?

03:29I was able to make some jokes I hardly went to class during those years from 1962 to 1966 What I'm saying to everyone is you can find a way to be great in your own way I didn't even start being a cartoonist till I was 30 Use your youth to experiment and do everything possible The job at the office is always gonna be there Okay?

03:55don't go there first

How AI Entered My Cartoonist World

04:01The Caping contest on the back page of the magazine or towards the end of the magazine now in online, And every one of these images is in and of itself funny in some way, but it's not funny like a joke It still needs a caption to resolve it to make the humor So for many years, I and my assistants just looked over these thousands of captions But in 2015, I partnered from researchers at the University of Wisconsin to crowdsource all this information And so now there's an extensive data set in which you have all the captions ranked and I've done a lot of AI research

04:42Other people have done AI research on this towards the end of "Can computers first of all distinguish" "Can they be fine tuned on this to discriminate funny from un funny captions?" And can we use this data then to generalize the ultimate aim is to be able to give AI a sense of humor And that was a noble effort, but that failed because AI at that time did not use large language models it really failed on the very first hurdle It could not look at the image and understand what was in it.

05:21Here's a mechanic talking to a clown, and the hood of the car is open and underneath the hood are many other clowns is also a businessman So it couldn't understand images like that It still has difficulty understanding images like that So I think it failed on that score but it did stimulate other research that I continue to do I still think It's not a long way from creating mediocre humor It's a long way from creating deep, meaningful human humor Vincent Vanhoucke Now he heads Waymo, He emailed me saying, it's great that we can win at Go,

06:00But we would really feel that we have achieved AGI, artificial general intelligence If we could win the caption contest And another way to look at it is this

Will AI Ever Replace Human Artists?

06:11In the seventies there was a genre of art which was called photorealism It took a photo and it looked exactly like a photo but it was a painting And you'd be amazed by you would go up to that painting And look at every detail because somehow a human being had created something like that you wouldn't look at that photo If you look two years ago people were saying, "oh, it's DALL·E 3" "Artists are gonna be replaced" I don't see artists being replaced You know what I mean?

06:44AI is a tool and I can see it used in a lot of interesting ways

Will You Be Average or Extraordinary?

06:50But I would not cede to it the ultimate judgment of what you think is funny or a good song or a good novel Even the AI or the AGI that people imagine that is robust and safe and all of that also might not be a very good thing for humanity Somehow that makes us happy, Somehow now, what are we doing?

07:16Remember it is being trained on averageness but I'm not average Each one of us has our own sensibility If all of a sudden we cede to algorithms completely what it is that we should like, then I do think We lose a certain kind of agency in our lives A human sense of humor is not about Making a joke or getting it It's rooted in our vulnerability

The One Question AI Will Never Be Able to Answer

07:51It gives answers to anything we can ask and I think it's very I find it very useful for anything that's factual I mean the questions I wanna ask it would be the questions I would wanna ask my therapist, which is, for instance How do I deal at 80 with the diminishing capabilities, the physical deterioration, the understanding that death is real, and how do we deal with this ultimate unintelligibility of being human?

08:28But if I talk to a therapist who's my age, and we had a conversation about it There wouldn't be any answers Because there is no answer, and And AI doesn't know how to tell you there is no answer In fact, it's gonna give you a lot of advice You know, you should exercise more Even though you're gonna die, everyone's gonna die You wanna live your absolutely best life you can until you die We don't actually want answers for anything We want understanding And it's only human beings who can understand Understand that.

09:06It's like, I'm married and I have a child daughter and I had a stepson and a stepson died tragically There's nothing a computer can tell me There's nothing an AI can tell me or my wife about that, that we want to hear We don't even want to hear from other people We wanna hear from other people who've had a similar experience who have endured that.

09:42So there, I think we get to the existential questions that AI is useless for but people are very useful for AGI is not gonna have a solution for that So that's what I'm thinking most about Mark Twain said, The essence of humor is not based on joy, but sorrow and hurt and wrong One of the functions of humor is for it to deal with our ultimate sorrow So one of the main functions of humor is coping And frankly, AI has nothing to cope with It's like saying, can AI master humor?

10:26I do think you can work collaboratively with it To augment human humor But to completely, let me put it another way AI is superhuman at that game over there of chess It doesn't even make sense to have superhuman humor. We're the judges of humor I'm a big fan of it Anyway I hope not, Or if it does, I hope it does after I die