Marcus has used chess several times in his articles about AI on stderr and in comments on Pharyngula and it got me thinking about whether there is something valuable we can learn from how the ascend of AI of sorts has impacted chess. And I think there is. First about the state of affairs as far as AI in the chess world goes.

The good:

The chess-playing AI’s are getting better and more accessible very quickly. What once needed a supercomputer the size of a wardrobe that probably used enough power to heat a household, can now be easily done by a pocket computer running on a battery. This accessibility of high-quality game analysis to anyone with a smartphone has led to a relative chess boom. Today’s young generation has unprecedented access to learning about chess games. Websites like chess.com and Lichess.org are thriving. As a result, new chess masters and grandmasters are getting younger and younger. AI has contributed to humans getting better at the game and has led to more people enjoying said game.

The bad:

Wide and easy access to AI that can easily beat even the best chess player of all time has its dark side too. Cheating both in online and OTB tournament chess is at an unprecedented level. I am not a bad chess player and not an excellent one either. But I am good enough to occasionally be paired with really good players online. And also with cheaters who like to pretend they are good. I do not know the exact number, but I have reported probably over a dozen people for suspiciously good play. One report was rejected at the time but said player was confirmed to be a cheater about a month later. One report was a mistake on my part. All the rest were confirmed to be cheaters, sometimes after a short delay, sometimes nearly immediately. And every year there is a talk about cheating in high-ranking OTB chess tournaments, occasionally even with physical proof  – a few years ago a chess grandmaster lost his title after being caught analyzing his current game with a phone hidden in the restrooms.

The ugly:

The rampant cheating online and some prominent cheating scandals OTB foster a culture of paranoia. Former world champion Vladimir Kramnik embodied this paranoia last year, when he publicly hinted that GM Hikaru Nakamura is cheating, without outright saying so. The only proof that Kramnik provided for his allegations proved only that a high understanding of the game of chess does not automatically translate to a high understanding of maths and statistics and how proofs work. But Kramnik is not alone. Allegedly the talk about cheating is behind the scenes all the time at the highest echelons of chess and suspicions are not uncommon. Rarely names are dropped and proofs are provided, but the suspicions are there all the time. I observed this paranoia in myself after losing a game egregiously and my high ratio of correct to false reporting of foul play is because I do my best to analyze the games afterward and look at some data before reporting someone. I also know that I have been myself probably twice reported for foul play (at least my opponents told me they were reporting me). Both of those reports would of course be mistaken. Funnily enough both of those instances I did not play particularly well and subsequent analysis found really sub-par gameplay on my part.

So, what to do with it, is there something to learn about how to deal with AI overtaking the arts? I think there is.

If anything, chess teaches us that the ascend of highly capable AI into a field does not automatically mean the death of said field. Chess tournaments still exist, and amateur chess players still enjoy the game of skill. People do not want to just see and admire good chess games, they want to see and admire good chessgames played by other people. And I think the same applies to art. Using AI as I tried (and failed) to do is equivalent to a chess player using AI to learn a new strategy or analyze their games. If done properly, it could help a lot of people to learn new skills faster and better than before and unleash an unprecedented boom of art. But people still want to see other people’s creations, not just slop churned out by algorithms.

However, chess avoided destruction by implementing and enforcing strict regulations. That is more difficult to achieve in arts than in chess because there is no overarching authority like FIDE and I do not know how to implement this in the real world. But an effort should be made. If someone uses AI to create a picture and then passes it off as their own creation, they should be dealt with the same way as if someone is caught cheating at chess. No galleries should display art by said artist, no auction houses should sell it and their reputation should be forever tarnished and the community should shun them and ridicule them (the last one appears to be happening, at least). They might not be plagiarizing in the sense the word is understood right now, but they definitively are not creating in any sense of the word.

I do not understand why some people cheat in a game of skill even when there is nothing tangible of value to be gained. But people still do it, my understanding, or lack thereof is inconsequential. Apparently, they do get the dopamine hit after a won game, even though they did not, as a matter of fact, win the game – a machine did that on their behalf. And there are people to be found online who consider themselves to be artists because they write elaborate prompts to stable diffusion. But they are no more artist than a teenager who uses Stockfish is a chess grandmaster.

In my opinion, just as it is not morally (and in a sense legally as far as online chess sites and FIDE go) OK to “commission” your game of chess to an AI and then pretend that you are the one who won, it is not OK to commission an art piece and then pretend you were the one who created it.

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Addendum: One interesting thing about AI in chess is that whilst the AI does play better than humans, it is generally lousy at mimicking human play. I have won games in a lost position because my opponent resigned – the position was winning for them, but the winning move was so obscure and difficult to find that they could not find it in time. I also lost winning games because I lost my nerves. AI cannot (so far) mimick the time distribution of moves that people have etc. So far even AIs that are deliberately dumbed down to have a lower level corresponding to human players of some strength for the purpose of training or entertainment feel a bit “off” and there are signs that show that they are not human.

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Addendum 2: AI is to art what ultra-processed fast food is to nutrition. And if unchecked, it will have the same consequences on our societal mental health as fast food had and continues to have on our physical health.