Chapter Nine
ARTIFICIAL IMAGINATION?
Can machines imagine? The way we normally think about computers is that they take instructions we give them, calculate, and produce a result. We don’t think of computers as having imagination as we have defined it: getting surprised, developing counterfactual models, and exploring the new possibilities. Yet Blaise Agüera y Arcas, distinguished scientist at Google AI, has pushed the boundaries of computation, creating algorithms that do surprisingly imaginative things. (See figure 9-1.)
Agüera y Arcas and his team trained an algorithm to recognize birds and then prompted it to create new pictures based on its understanding of birds. When we interviewed him, we asked how this relates to imagination. As ...
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