Merriam-Webster Dictionary: the ability to make new things or think of new ideas
What is the potential of machine art, and can it truly be described as creative or imaginative?
- "The Painting Fool"
- Google Brain's AI Neural Networks
- AARON and Harold Cohen
"The Painting Fool" is a computer program that was created by Simon Colton, a professor of computational creativity at Goldsmiths College in London. He built the program based on his belief that artificial intelligences can be considered artists if they are able to behave in ways that are "skillful", "appreciative", and "imaginative". Currently, "The Painting Fool" has made good progress in these three areas and has had work exhibited in real and online galleries.
Similar to how a human artist would bring his or her emotions into a painting, "The Painting Fool" creates work that is responsive to emotions. As an example, it scanned a Guardian newspaper article about the Afghanistan War and picked out keywords like "NATO", "troops", and "British". The Fool then found pictures that were associated with these keywords and combined them all together into a mosaic/collage. The resulting image reflected the somber content and mood of the newspaper article.
The artificial neural net is a software that emulates the way layers of neurons in the brain process information. The software is trained, through analyzing millions of examples, to recognize objects in photos such as a dog or a dragon. After training, the neural net is provided with an image of blotches and spots and is asked to tweak the image to bring out any faint resemblance it detects in the noise to objects that the software has been trained to recognize. In this way, the blotches and spots can crystallize into a tangle of ants or a starfish. This technique can also be applied to photos; the neural networks will take a normal landscape image and hallucinate patterns and objects on top of them, sometimes reworking the images with stylized strokes like that of a painter's brush. (Basically, the neural networks are pulling from existing photographs of landscapes, just like a human painter may look at a sunset over a lake and be inspired by it). This type of painting, inceptionism, can be classified as a variant of Surrealism in art history. Famous Surrealist painters René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst also created works almost like hallucinations, such as paintings of skies filled with musical instruments or baguettes instead of clouds.
Both "The Painting Fool' and AARON have run into criticisms that their works are really the creations of their human collaborators and programmers. In response, Cohen notes that we wouldn't give credit for a human painter's work to that artist's teacher. As a counterargument, Gayford notes that it really depends on how closely the pupil was following the teacher's instructions. In 17th-century Antwerp, Rubens had a small factory of highly trained assistants who painted most of his large-scale works. The procedure was that the master produced a small sketch that was then blown up, under his supervision, to the size of a ceiling or an altarpiece. But in the case of Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (c. 1475), we recognize the achievement of workshop member Leonardo da Vinci, because the parts he painted- an angel and some landscape- are visibly different from the master's work. Art historians therefore classify the picture as a joint effort. Both "The Painting Fool" and AARON may have been programmed by Colton and Cohen respectively, but the former puts its collection of images together without oversight from Colton and the latter can generate unlimited numbers of images "with no further input from me [Cohen]...it's a much better colorist that I ever was myself, and it typically does it all while I'm tucked up in bed."
Can a machine ever be as creative as Rubens or DaVinci? As a Rembrandt or Picasso? Cohen argues that to do that, a robot would have to develop a sense of self. If it doesn’t, it “means that machines will never be creative in the same sense that humans are creative.” The processes of such an artist involve an interplay between social, emotional, historical, psychological, and physiological factors that are incredible difficult to analyze, let alone replicate. This is what can give an image made by such an artist a deep level of meaning to the human eye.
One day, Cohen suggests, a machine might develop an equivalent sensibility, but even if that never comes to pass, “it doesn’t mean that machines have no part to play with respect to creativity.” As his own experience shows, artificial intelligence offers the artist something beyond an assistant or pupil: a new creative collaborator.
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Do you think that robot artists are truly creative/imaginative? Can they be considered artists in their own right, and what do you think their potential is in the future as technology becomes more and more advanced?
~burn bright~
Jess