Tools for Stored Interactive Multimedia

Thesis submitted for the PhD degree

Exploring Perspectives on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creativity of Knowledge Work: Beyond Mechanised Plagiarism and Stochastic Parrots

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular generative models, are transformative tools for knowledge work. They problematise notions of creativity, originality, plagiarism, the attribution of credit, and copyright ownership. Critics of generative models emphasise the reliance on large amounts of training data, and view the output of these models as no more than randomised plagiarism, remix, or collage of the source data. On these grounds, many have argued for stronger regulations on the deployment, use, and attribution of the output of these models. However, these issues are not new or unique to artificial intelligence. In this position paper, using examples from literary criticism, the history of art, and copyright law, I show how creativity and originality resist definition as a notatable or information-theoretic property of an object, and instead can be seen as the property of a process, an author, or a viewer. Further alternative views hold that all creative work is essentially reuse (mostly without attribution), or that randomness itself can be creative. I suggest that creativity is ultimately defined by communities of creators and receivers, and the deemed sources of creativity in a workflow often depend on which parts of the workflow can be automated. Using examples from recent studies of AI in creative knowledge work, I suggest that AI shifts knowledge work from material production to critical integration. This position paper aims to begin a conversation around a more nuanced approach to the problems of creativity and credit assignment for generative models, one which more fully recognises the importance of the creative and curatorial voice of the users of these models and moves away from simpler notational or information-theoretic views.Comment: Advait Sarkar. 2023. Exploring Perspectives on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creativity of Knowledge Work Beyond Mechanised Plagiarism and Stochastic Parrots. In Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work 2023 (CHIWORK 2023), June 13-16, 2023, Oldenburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 page

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Modeling Narrative Discourse

This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers the conversational networks to be found in literary fiction as a key aspect of discourse coherence; by isolating and analyzing these networks, we are able to comment on longstanding literary theories. The second approach proposes a new set of discourse relations that are specific to narrative. By focusing on certain key aspects, such as agentive characters, goals, plans, beliefs, and time, these relations represent a theory-of-mind interpretation of a text. We show that these discourse relations are expressive, formal, robust, and through the use of a software system, amenable to corpus collection projects through the use of trained annotators. We have procured and released a collection of over 100 encodings, covering a set of fables as well as longer texts including literary fiction and epic poetry. We are able to inferentially find similarities and analogies between encoded stories based on the proposed relations, and an evaluation of this technique shows that human raters prefer such a measure of similarity to a more traditional one based on the semantic distances between story propositions

Music in selected play productions of Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan

Despite the existence of a robust scholarly attention on African plays and performance practices, not enough attention has been given to music, a unique art form, as a performance element in African theatre. This study investigates the use of music in African drama in selected play productions of Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan’s plays. Data for this study were gathered from primary and secondary sources. The primary sources included the use of structured interviews and non-participant observation methods. The playwrights whose plays are case studies, namely Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan, were interviewed. The researcher was on ground at the rehearsals of the selected plays and noted the methods of teaching the songs and the importance attached to the music of the plays during the rehearsals. The texts of the plays were critically studied in relation to the lyrics of the songs. Significant primary data arose from informal interactions with the cast and crew of the selected performances. Recordings of the performances were critically evaluated. The secondary source of data collection consisted of a robust library search and review of related literature. Comparative and descriptive analysis served as analytical tools for the discourse. The results show that music is used to reflect the subjective underpinnings and compositions important for the essence, character and statements in Soyinka and Osofisan’s plays. As a method of preserving their culture, histories, and identity, Soyinka and Osofisan exploit the oral performance traditions from their Yoruba culture, combining music and dance to achieve total theatre dramaturgy. The study opens new vistas of academic investigations into cultural studies. The study also contributes to scholarship of music in the theatre through the transcription and orchestration of some of the pieces, transcribed for indigenous instruments and Western symphonic orchestra. It was discovered from the study that as components of traditional African theatre, music is an artistic cultural index that Soyinka and Osofisan utilise predominantly in their plays. This study concludes that music is not, and should not be treated as an ordinary complimentary piece or a mere aesthetic embellishment. African theatre is incomplete without music, they both collaborate in the dramatic narrative process. Music in Soyinka and Osofisan’s plays (both in the form of literary drama and in realisation as performance), functions as a narrative device. Both Soyinka and Osofisan draw their music from Yoruba culture. (Culture both in its popular and pristine forms). Their use of music certainly goes beyond the bounds of embellishment. The various songs used in their works take some steps further into the metaphysical and spiritual consciousness of their people. It is through the concerted determination of theatre artistes in Nigeria and other African countries that traditional African theatre can take its rightful place amongst the theatres of the world. It also concludes that Africans should construct expressions that could suitably describe their music and give profound meaning

Artificial intelligence as writing: knowledge-based hypertext systems as a medium for communication

This thesis is an exploration of a new metaphor for artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, the computer within AI has been viewed as an agent, one with which the user engages in a conversation. More recently certain researchers have proposed the notion that artificial intelligence (and indeed computing in general) can be more appropriately seen as a form of writing. Initially this thesis reviews the literature in this area, and aspects of AI which support the approach. Features of writing are then described which show parallels with AI. This then allows us to take lessons from the history and development of both traditional writing and the new computer-based writing systems to inform the design of a new type of artificial intelligence system. A design based on these features, called Running Texts is presented through a number of small examples. Issues that arise from these and possible future developments, based on the implementation are then discussed. A rationale for users choosing to learn a system such as Running Texts is proposed, as benefits from the psychological and social implications of writing can be applied to AI systems, when they are seen as writing. The same parallels point out potential problems, and suggest new ways to see the relation between AI and thought