I'm sorry for the confusion I caused with my inexact terminology. What I mean
about "ground truth" in the context of this conversation is the images that GANs
are trained to reproduce. Supervision doesn't need to come in the form of
labels. GANs are weakly supervised but they are given examples of exactly what
they need to model. They are trained to reproduce those examples and like you
say, they can't be expected to learn to do anything else.
This is a general rule about neural networks, as we have them today: they learn
to reproduce their training set. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Humans, now, don't need to see examples of a thing before we can make one. If
that were the case, we would never have created all the technology we have, of
which there was no previous example. For instance, at some point in our history
someone figured out how to carve a hand axe for the first time, ever. That
person didn't have any examples to go by. There were no such objects in nature,
before that time. Certainly that person had some idea of concepts such as
"sharp" or "pointy" or who knows what else, but they had no blueprint for a hand
axe. This is what I mean by "innovation".
"Inventing and learning to draw in a new style" is absolutely something that
comes spontaneously to humans! That's the entire history of human art: people
inventing new ways to express themselves through various art forms. Art would be
way too dull if nobody could come up with new things.
But I certainly agree that it's unfair to expect the same kind of innovation
from GANs or from other neural nets. However, I think that's the case because
neural nets are nothing like humans. But if I understand correctly, you're
claiming that how the human mind works and how neural networks, work, is very
similar, so I'm confused a bit because in that case you should expect them to
have the same abilities as humans do. Sorry if I misunderstand you, but could
you clarify? If human creativity is statistical modelling and GANs do
statistical modelling (they kiiind of do) then we should expect GANs to be able
to do everything that humans can do, no?
This is a general rule about neural networks, as we have them today: they learn to reproduce their training set. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Humans, now, don't need to see examples of a thing before we can make one. If that were the case, we would never have created all the technology we have, of which there was no previous example. For instance, at some point in our history someone figured out how to carve a hand axe for the first time, ever. That person didn't have any examples to go by. There were no such objects in nature, before that time. Certainly that person had some idea of concepts such as "sharp" or "pointy" or who knows what else, but they had no blueprint for a hand axe. This is what I mean by "innovation".
"Inventing and learning to draw in a new style" is absolutely something that comes spontaneously to humans! That's the entire history of human art: people inventing new ways to express themselves through various art forms. Art would be way too dull if nobody could come up with new things.
But I certainly agree that it's unfair to expect the same kind of innovation from GANs or from other neural nets. However, I think that's the case because neural nets are nothing like humans. But if I understand correctly, you're claiming that how the human mind works and how neural networks, work, is very similar, so I'm confused a bit because in that case you should expect them to have the same abilities as humans do. Sorry if I misunderstand you, but could you clarify? If human creativity is statistical modelling and GANs do statistical modelling (they kiiind of do) then we should expect GANs to be able to do everything that humans can do, no?