Raphaël Millière

Machine minds can work a paintbrush, but are they really making art? In episode 80 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk with guest Raphaël Millière, scholar and philosophy lecturer at Columbia University, on the aesthetic merits of computer-generated art. They discuss the thorny marriage of art and technology in everything from the early days of photography to YACHT’s AI-assisted pop songs. Why do we expect art to express human emotions? Is prompt-engineering for AI models an art in itself? And, if ‘great artists steal,’ is DALL·E the greatest artist of us all?Works discussedAARONDALL·EDavid Bowie, OutsideR.G. Collingwood, The Principles of ArtRaphaël Millière, AI Art is Challenging the Boundaries of CurationObvious, The Portrait of Edmond de BelamyYACHT, Chain TrippingSupport the showPatreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast Website | overthinkpodcast.comInstagram & Twitter | @overthink_podEmail | dearoverthink@gmail.comYouTube | Overthink podcast

In episode 84 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Raphaël Millière.Professor Millière is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was the 2020 Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, and completed his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he focused on self-consciousness.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (02:20) Prof. Millière’s background* (08:07) AI + philosophy questions and the human side / empiricism* (18:38) Putting aside metaphysical issues* (20:28) Prof. Millière’s work on self-consciousness, does consciousness constitutively involve self-consciousness?* (32:05) Relationship to recent pronouncements about AI sentience* (41:54) Chatbots’ self-presentation as having a “self”* (51:05) Intro to grounding and related concepts* (1:00:06) The different types of grounding* (1:08:48) Lexical representations and things in the world, distributional hypothesis, concepts in LLMs* (1:21:40) Representational content and overcoming the vector grounding problem* (1:32:01) Causal-informational relations and teleology* (1:43:45) Levels of grounding, extralinguistic aspects of meaning* (1:52:12) Future problems and ongoing projects* (2:04:05) OutroLinks:* Professor Millière’s homepage and Twitter* Research* Are There Degrees of Self-Consciousness?* The Varieties of Selflessness* Selfless Memories* The Vector Grounding Problem Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe