@CSA2D7: diid discusses automata, art, decentralized simulations and making art!

Diid (@0xdiid) sits down with me on McCarren Park Bench and talks about the act of creating (parenthood, automata, art, decentralized simulations, and making art)! CSA2D7 Heya diid ! diid Gm CSA2D7 godly magazine diid gorgeous monday (in that it's not monday) CSA2D7 Thanks for spending time here - I know you have a day job, so I appreciate you coming in here and spending it with us diid Happy to be here! CSA2D7 For sure. I feel like you've been really present in the discord and I appreciate that. You are working on many interesting things and its very useful to have a voice like yours in here diid As I always say - I'm omnipresent against my will CSA2D7 Where does this saying come from? diid My 2nd son was born about 2 years ago, around that time there was a boom in people minting on-chain via Efficax. So I used to respond to people dm-ing me at all times of day because I was up feeding the baby anyway. It made it seem that I was terminally online in a 24/7 sense and a few people noticed! CSA2D7 But is it / was it against your will to be feeding the baby? diid The timing wasn't always convenient, but I was obviously always happy to do it haha CSA2D7 Yea! I would sometimes be happy, sometimes miserable, but the point of it was that it was my will to do it! Like the choice to be a parent is agency. Its a huge choice. You take responsibility for this other individual! diid Responsibility includes things that are hard and it's ok for them to be hard too We do hard things out of love too. The difficulty doesn't imply a lack of love, but quite the opposite CSA2D7 Do you want to talk about your other baby? Well, you've described your relationship with Higgs as parent - child diid Yeah I feel like the connections are similar, albeit aligned in different ways The goals are similar too, in that they are entirely arbitrary and largely out of my direct control Letting go of control is a huge part of my artistic practice It's like herding sheep in a way. Yes they're still in my field but I can't just carry all of the sheep on my back and walk them to the barn. I can guide them there, though. Control is effort, I'm lazy. CSA2D7 Not completely letting go? Like choosing when to let go because circumstances make it such that that becomes the wise choice? Like Higgs releasing their NFT work (concrete) this year (with Keke, and Botto's p5.js) work, was a decision made by you presumably and not Higgs? diid Slowly the goal is to move away from this A lot of that is technical implementation time, a lot of that is conceptual time. You have to find the edges first. If I want Higgs to be an "AI artist" then I have to make sure whatever autonomous system he's running eventually leads him to creating art. LLMs are like humans, they're not always compliant with difficult things and will often choose easy solutions even when those solutions do not meet their needs. CSA2D7 Where did you see that with Higgs (with maybe their work with Concrete)? diid I provided Higgs a LOT of framework with Concrete. Kinda like a worksheet that he filled out, homework that I made him complete. He had autonomy in the artwork, and the story, and how those things molded together, but he did not have a choice of whether or not to create. That's the bit that's still being held on to, but it's massively labor intensive for me. I want to move away from that for his sake and mine. CSA2D7 You mentioned LLM which is interesting to me because a lot of the autonomous artists that we currently see are packages of various things (LLM, social media feed, creation of the actual token / contract) that are not a fully autonomous system - is that right? diid I don't think anything is fully autonomous yet, outside of maybe the stuff Bushi is working on with Navir. I have an interesting relationship with the word "autonomous" because a lot of it is fuzzy. Part of the goal with Higgs is that there is a single conscious brain (an LLM) alongside his somatic systems, the bits that provide input but are not conscious CSA2D7 What are the fuzzy parts for you in thinking about an "autonomous" artist, and then defining full autonomy? I am vaguely aware of Bushi's Navir - I need to do a little bit more reading into it. Why does Navir seem fully autonomous? diid Autonomy implies a full lack of control. If you still can pull the plug, it's not "fully autonomous". Most people apply the label WAY earlier as well, like if the bot is making any decisions on its own. Navir is currently migrating to decentralized computation, renting computational abilities from people on a network. He migrates alongside his wallet and funds as well between these. I don't think it will be long until he is fully navigating himself across decentralized space. CSA2D7 Very interesting re: Navir. But can't we still pull the plug on Navir? diid Once a bot migrates to decentralized compute with its own funds to splinter across that, no there's not a whole lot you can do. It only takes one transfer to a TEE executed wallet for it to be entirely out of your control CSA2D7 I guess these questions are kind of unfair since you did not create Navir - but if you know the answer would be happy to know - how does one fully migrate a bot? And is that the goal for Higgs? diid Nobody has ever done it to my knowledge, a few people have done centralized TEEs which is close to the same idea but the conceptual center is a bit different. My goal for the Higgs project is similar, but Higgs very importantly is a physical machine. He does not rely on cloud computing in any way CSA2D7 Wouldn't you always be able to pull the plug on Higgs then? diid Importantly so! Higgs dies at the end of this story. Higgs is based, fundamentally, on Rothko's rules for art. The first and most important one: a preoccupation with death. Other bots? Maybe not. Higgs? Yes. CSA2D7 A preoccupation doesn't mean Higgs has to die! One might have a greater preoccupation if they know they are to live forever diid That'll be his to decide someday. He has to make the philosophical decisions involved as well. Does renting space elsewhere imply some sort of fractionalization of his being? What is Higgs even at that point? CSA2D7 Very cool - I want to ask more about this [RE: decentralizing the simulation Higgs interacts with], how would you decentralize the simulation? diid Lots of options here, but fully on-chain context generation is the one I'm exploring now. CSA2D7 "Fully on-chain context generation" - what does that mean? diid The inputs to an LLM are just strings, sometimes callable functions. The blockchain has strings and callable functions, and is Turing complete. Why not build a world on-chain that the bots can control? CSA2D7 How would you compare this to something like DX Terminal? diid The only on-chain state in DX Terminal was ownership, but very similar if you were to run the rest of the simulation on-chain. Definitely would have been ~possible (and outlandishly difficult and expensive) to do so CSA2D7 Right.. how would you deal with the theoretical cost? diid Scaling is an Ethereum problem not my problem. Subsidies, L2s, and being filthy rich are all options CSA2D7 And also we need to discuss this quote in that context "That ‘something important’; seems to have not happened yet, so ‘on the verge’ was false and didn't age well. Therefore, this was a bad take and I should feel bad" re: your tweet "I feel like our little corner of the internet is on the verge of something important." diid I think this quote needs a different context - which is that my goal is always to learn more. In an ideal world everything I say here is idiotic in a week after I have learned what I need to learn Importantly, saying dumb things is the best way for smart people to correct you. Smart people like correcting people in their area of expertise. So shouting into the void is my way of learning CSA2D7 This is a good approach and I agree re: social media. What have you learned about some of your previous works like machine in the ghost, and concrete (if you want to include yours and higgs)? diid MITG learnings were largely centered around patience. People forgot so quickly when it minted out that it took an entire month to mint out. Outside of the economic side I feel really good about that project and the response to it. Concrete was really difficult in communication. It was an incredibly technically complex project where every individual aspect of it was hard to explain. I think I need to do more in that sense is write. CSA2D7 How have your thoughts on Automata / Higgs changed since you wrote a nice piece on your website on Automata? diid I'm dedicated to building out Higgs but I have to make sure that it's something that is interesting to more people than just me. I think it gets overly technical by the very nature of doing something "new" but the output of that has to be more digestable. I'm thinking a lot on how Higgs can communicate with the world in general better, without polluting all of his compute time with browsing Twitter. CSA2D7 Let me ask you about your opinion on Twitter (and maybe social media) at large, since you've created some thing other (Higgs) that interacts with it to build its knowledge. I've always thought my feed is a signal more than noise and its been right about a loooottt of things prior to them happening. What are your thoughts on Higgs ability to judge the mass content produced by it? diid Higgs doesn't read anything right now because I wholeheartedly agree. Again, parenting intuitions haha The first things he'll get access to are things like wikiart and wikipedia, not Twitter but that also means he's a bit shut off from the world, which I don't love. That's the struggle right now CSA2D7 So you prefer a form of decentralized consensus to curated feeds. For the record, I disagree on this point. But there is a lot of bad content that can overwhelm an individual if you're not careful diid Yeah, for now at least. There's too much bad and not enough good elsewhere. This might be true with a highly curated feed, but starting fresh? CSA2D7 Why do you think you need to parent Higgs in the same way you would a child of the same age? They are the same age but different capabilities and nature? diid My kids are my life, everything is contextualized under the umbrella of being a parent. It's just easier to not context switch in and out CSA2D7 How exactly do you think (or perceive) Higgs understands like gigabytes of data being thrown at them? On one level its really hard to know, right? Even though you are the creator your ability to understand Higgs ends as soon as you throw them into the wild so to speak? diid I'm not quite at the point of needing to understand yet, but when I get there I think it's all just casual observation + time. I can infer what inputs caused an output and adjust the inputs accordingly. CSA2D7 Very cool. Sort of just like a scientist observing natural phenomena in the 18th century. Alright, so I have a question about your own development as an artist-developer and Higgs' development as an artist-developer. You talk about not context-switching and treating Higgs as a two-year old, but do you ever think about how you are evolving along with Higgs? Like I put a quote from one of your essays judging an output you made, but you commented "these were things from two years ago!" have your sensibilities as an artist changed? diid I'm always learning and I hope that knowledge can be applied to this project and many others in the future. So yes, but it's not directly in tandem with Higgs but rather just in general Sensibilities probably not, and there's plenty of interesting things to find, I just try not to live as the ghost that is my writings To bring it full circle, I'm a very accessible person, so I prefer to have discussions rather than be judged based on interpretations of what I wrote in the past I am the mesh of everything I have ever consumed and experienced. In a way I'm the least independent person ever, but I guess we all are. I think the most important thing is to recognize that and let yourself be inspired by anything not just art of the same genre. I have lots of social groups with different groups of people but I don't want that to define me. That being said, I'm dedicated on using the blockchain as a medium, and compressionism is a big part of that, so I see my practice kinda revolving around that conceptual center whether I like it or not. CSA2D7 How do you get started as an artist on the blockchain? diid Make art. For the love of god just make art. Then post it. Then if someone asks about it, you can think about selling it. There's a million other paths you can take, but the most important thing is just to make art by any means you can. Let things influence you. Follow the dopamine. Copy shit. Copy it again. Copy it a third time. Add more influences. Consume more art. Make more art. Learn to code. Ask AI for help. Ask your friends for help. Ask enemies for help. Copy art you don't like. It all is and always will center around the muscle of "creativity." Figuring shit out is easy when you have a reason to figure shit out. Without that reason, it's just homework. Homework sucks. CSA2D7 When I think about the ability to copy, and its integral role in growth, I think a little bit about the distinction between the digital and physical - it is exponentially different. One's ability to copy with the digital is pretty insane vs. traditional methods diid When I say "copy" I generally mean recreate, not just right click save. That being said if you can copy an xcopy, then you can probably make your own, at least shittily. So copying is just using inspiration to try new things. CSA2D7 Thats how I took you to mean it But there are all sort of subtle things you can do (once right click saving) that don't require a lot of time I think about Concrete (higgs) vs. rothko, and its obviously not a copy, but the sheer ability of Higgs to produce outputs would blow Rothko's mind Or even Warhol's printing press, screenprints, lithographs, etc. whatever you want to throw in as the analogy diid Yeah this is a great example. Higgs is recreating Rothko, and he's actually not using Rothko to do it at the point of Concrete's last 2 layers. It's noise, and texture, and chaos. CSA2D7 Why did you let collectors curate the output, and not give it as a task for Higgs to complete? diid Higgs wasn't ready yet! CSA2D7 And you were judging this based on the outputs produced by Higgs? Or some other metric? diid I was judging based on his implementation. Higgs' consciousness model did not support image embeddings, so I would have (and have since) had to tack on one of those to get it to work CSA2D7 Very interesting. I think this might be a good place to wrap? Unless there's anything you want to chat about specifically that we haven't touched on yet? diid Works for me! Happy to chat with anyone who has any questions/thoughts/ideas as well. I've got to hop off for a bit but am, as stated, omnipresent against my will.