Artificial creativity was mentioned in the third session, and that really interested me. I have seen some examples of this in passing, like machines making poetry or classical music, but I wanted to dig deeper. When talking about artificial creativity, it mostly refers to art, as things that are creative can be at least on some level thought of as art. Of course, the key difference here is that machines only create because humans ask them to, not because they feel a need for it like humans do. So, AI created art is more a cooperation between the AI, the person making it and also the artists whose art is shown to the AI. Nevertheless, I think artificial art could even be a new, interesting sector of art. So, what have different technologies accomplished so far in different sectors of creative, artistic endeavour?
As I stated earlier, AI art is a cooperation between the AI, artist and the art chosen to be shown to the AI. This makes the question ‘who is the artist’ hard to answer. Is the AI who makes the artwork, the artist who chooses to have AI make art and chooses what art is show to the AI, or the artists who’s works are shown to the AI? This complex relationship is showcased well in the work of AI artist Robbie Barrat and painter Ronan Barrot in their collaboration called ‘Infinite skulls’, where an AI makes one of a kind, one-time skulls artworks based on skulls Barrot has painted. In this case, perhaps there is no one artist, but just the collaboration between two people and an AI.
The role of the artist whose art is shown to the AI can also be completely left out, as is in the case of AICAN (artificial intelligence creative adversarial network) where the network was fed 80,000 images from western art – almost like giving the AI a course in art history that human artists might take. This means the AI doesn’t have a singular ‘inspiration’ and the result is less controlled by the artist. In this case, the question is ‘is the artist the AI, the artist, or is it a collaboration?’ Another interesting point about AI art is that people cannot often tell the difference between AI and human made art – and they genuinely enjoy AI art.
AIs aren’t making just paintings though. Poem Portraits by Es Devlin is a project where anyone can ‘give’ a word and get a uniquely generated poem.
A poem made by Poem Portraits by the word ‘pumpkin’ I gave .
AI aren’t just making paintings or poems. An AI called AIVA is venturing into music, making soundtrack music that could be both commercially used or made just for individuals.
‘Memories by Passersby I’ is a video installation by Mario Klingemann focuses not on the art by itself, but on the process. The installation consists of two screens, showing an endless stream of AI made human portraits that morph seamlessly into each other, each unique. In this case, the art is more of a video, or even a performance piece by the AI, since the AI is continuously performing by forming the portraits.
Ai.Da on the other hand, is taking AI made art into another direction, being an AI artist with and actual, physical, humanoid robot body. This makes question about artist identity even harder to answer, with a physical, very human-like body as a mediator between the AI and the audience.
AI art and artificial creativity are interesting, novel directions of art, computing and thought. What is creativity and what does it mean and take to be creative? No clear answer can be given right now, but the experiments in the field of AI creativity are definitely interesting.