1 - human experience ends up informing human ingenuity. A sketch of Wile E. Coyote comes from someone’s (Chuck Jones?) experience of dogs and seeing coyotes, plus innumerable experience with things that are funny, constraints from experience of certain features that do or don’t work well on animation cels etc. Perhaps a stray tweak in his ears come from a Rembrandt seen as a child or from a glance at a sketch in progress by the person sitting at the next easel in a drawing class long ago.
In todays’s jargon our experiences are all parts of our training set (though today’s massive RNN models are infinitesimal by comparison).
And I think of my tools the same: a ton of inputs stirred together is fine by me.
2 - a difference is that fb’s model is made from public posts: posts offered for anyone to see. In the human case even my private experiences are part of my “training set.”
I don't think any argument in favor of these models that includes reasoning about how humans learn is any good. That's a completely separate process that has very little to do with how these systems work. The issue here is Facebook is creating a commercial system based on data their users have uploaded to their system. If artists had known their work would be used this way, I think they'd rethink using this platform. Facebook's monopoly power over internet content also makes it impractical for you not to have a social media presence if you're trying to make a living as an artist. So you either submit to bullshit like this or damn yourself to obscurity. The fact that it's only training on public content is irrelevant.
