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Can AIs Create True Art? (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader shares an analysis: Last month, AI-generated art arrived on the world auction stage under the auspices of Christie's, proving that artificial intelligence can not only be creative but also produce world class works of art -- another profound AI milestone blurring the line between human and machine. Naturally, the news sparked debates about whether the work produced by Paris-based art collective Obvious could really be called art at all. Popular opinion among creatives is that art is a process by which human beings express some idea or emotion, filter it through personal experience and set it against a broader cultural context -- suggesting then that what AI generates at the behest of computer scientists is definitely not art, or at all creative.
The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it? Given that AI is taught and programmed by humans, has the human creative process really been identically replicated or are we still the ultimate masters? At GumGum, an AI company that focuses on computer vision, we wanted to explore the intersection of AI and art by devising a Turing Test of our own in association with Rutgers University's Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Cloudpainter, an artificially intelligent painting robot. We were keen to see whether AI can, in fact, replicate the intent and imagination of traditional artists, and we wanted to explore the potential impact of AI on the creative sector.
[...] Intriguingly, while at face value the AI artwork was indistinguishable from that of the more traditional artists, the test highlighted that the creative spark and ultimate agency behind creating a work of art is still very much human. Even though the Cloudpainter machine has evolved over time to become a highly intelligent system capable of making creative decisions of its own accord, the final piece of work could only be described as a collaboration between human and machine. Van Arman served as more of an "art director" for the painting. Although Cloudpainter made all of the aesthetic decisions independently, the machine was given parameters to meet and was programed to refine its results in order to deliver the desired outcome. This was not too dissimilar to the process used by Obvious and their GAN AI tool.
The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it? Given that AI is taught and programmed by humans, has the human creative process really been identically replicated or are we still the ultimate masters? At GumGum, an AI company that focuses on computer vision, we wanted to explore the intersection of AI and art by devising a Turing Test of our own in association with Rutgers University's Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Cloudpainter, an artificially intelligent painting robot. We were keen to see whether AI can, in fact, replicate the intent and imagination of traditional artists, and we wanted to explore the potential impact of AI on the creative sector.
[...] Intriguingly, while at face value the AI artwork was indistinguishable from that of the more traditional artists, the test highlighted that the creative spark and ultimate agency behind creating a work of art is still very much human. Even though the Cloudpainter machine has evolved over time to become a highly intelligent system capable of making creative decisions of its own accord, the final piece of work could only be described as a collaboration between human and machine. Van Arman served as more of an "art director" for the painting. Although Cloudpainter made all of the aesthetic decisions independently, the machine was given parameters to meet and was programed to refine its results in order to deliver the desired outcome. This was not too dissimilar to the process used by Obvious and their GAN AI tool.
Yes, just like your manager can !
They were truly intelligent.
The DAs of Contana, Alexa, and the like cannot.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
"True art". What does that even mean?
sig: sauer
Art is whatever a society says it is. The Tate Gallery in London have such pieces of art as a pile of bricks. Thus, if a sufficiently large percentage of a society says that something is art, it is art.
Artists are no different from anyone else. If they reject technological advancement, they will lose their ability to make a living.
It's not hard to imagine future artists working with advanced AIs to amplify their work output. Suddenly every individual artist is expected to create multimedia blitz of derivative works in order to monetize their works, aided by an AI who has been trained for years to develop in the style of the artist. Every artist now has to become the Walt Disney company or they don't eat.
The only way these systems work to create something that we would see as a finished product is if it is overfitted. This overfitting is more copying than it is creating.
We should be arguing instead if most pop culuture itself is really art, because its all just copypaste.
Of course, this begs the question of value, meaning, truth, beauty, or anything else that art is supposed to be and speak to in the context of a worldview and philosophy that denies all these things (i.e., postmodernism).
Check your premises.
If some twat with more money than sense can come along, think it looks pretty, or interesting, or they just don't get what it is but think someone else might and then declare it "art" then yeah. If a dirty urinal or dripping tap or whatever else literal rubbish can be art then all bets are off.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
.. so shouldn't the question be posed to another AI?
...debates about whether the work [...] could really be called art at all
This happens all the time with human-created art, especially experimental, avant-garde, and other artistic expressions that are "ahead of their time." Seems to me like the debate is a solid indicator that it actually is art.
AI should be better at art than people.
Dressing like your sister
Living like a tart
They don't know what you're doing
Babe, it must be art
Seriously, what IS art? More and more it seems to me we define as art "whatever we don't get". By that metric, it's pretty certain that AI can create art, because it should be trivial for an AI to produce something we have no idea what it's supposed to "tell" us.
If art is beauty and beauty is art, then of course an AI can do that too. It should be trivial for AI to create a photorealistic sculpture or painting, and that's what many people would consider "beautiful".
If art is something that should make us think and change our point of view, even that should be doable. An installation by an AI that the AI created with the express idea to give us a glimpse into how it sees the world would offer us a view into the "mind" of an AI.
So what is art? The question is is in my opinion rather, what makes something a human creates art?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The people who create the AIs would be the artists in that case.
Twinstiq, game news
Because AI doesn't really exist. What people call "AI" are just parlor tricks and computers running programs.
Do dominoes create art by themselves or does it require someone to start the chain reaction?
If a human starts the AI chain-reaction, then it's not AI creating the art, it's people creating art via just another tool.
AI is a tool; more sophisticated than a paintbrush, but a tool nonetheless. AI art should be attributed to the people who created the AI.
First, "Art" as a concept is silly.
I don't mean the concept of art, I mean Art with a capital A, as if it was some objective and unchanging definition which can be applied to any given activity, person, thing, or event in a way that resolves to an unarguable true or false value.
We know the definition of art is subjective, literally in the eye of the beholder (or failing that, in the eye of the popular consensus of a set of individuals who have self-assigned themselves the title of critic and whom have some level of recognition from their peers in the commercial world of art sales and thus govern the gross movements of the generalized collective subjective definition of art). So, the question is moot, especially given the long shadow cast by the word 'art'.
Of course they can, have, and will, given a specific definition.
A more valuable question is "does the pursuit of answers to this question provide any constructive value," and the answer to that is probably "No."
Which means it is a wonderful example of a stupid question.
A phrase widely attributed to Andy Warhol, but some research reveals it was said by Marshall McLuhan
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/522287-art-is-anything-you-can-get-away-with
This applies especially to "true art" and "world class art".
I don't have any problem with "art" not having any real definition to it, but it comes with consequences of having no standards, and no there there. Some people want the freedom of defining art incredibly openly, but not with the consequences. This I can't agree with.
So all you have to do is convince people the AI produced "true art", and it has. That's "getting away with it". Largely this depends on authority figures telling us if it's good. In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
From what I can tell , a majority of us "the plebe" think that modern art pile-of-brick or semen in bottle, or splurge of colors thrown at a wall is not art.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Can people?
As a consequence either anything can be considered to be art, or nothing qualifies.
The only real-life question that remains is not whether a person would buy the product of an AI, but whether an AI would buy the product of a human.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Some call that smiley face you diddle on your wendys napkin art so if a virus is alive then a chatbot or ai is alive too.
But if the value of the art is in the human experience, is there any value to the human life of some fat conservstive gen x THING that wants its cheetos and to fuel its 5 mpg SUV for 20 cents less because fuck the baby seals and fuck the whales, I want my latex fleshlight replica slave princess lea and I wanna go to dragoncon and I have feelings and even if I camt artociculate my fat manly rippling sumo goopy flesh very well my feelings matter tjan some minority
It may be art, but it's the kind of art that will be sold at Walmart. Anonymous, mass produced, unobjectionable, unremarkable. It might be a good fit for the restroom at Chili's.
By the time AI gets to the point of producing something that rivals Picasso, it will be so ubiquitous that prices will have been driven down to Walmart levels. Sort of like how in 2018, a common smartphone has more computing power than a 1960s mainframe, but the ubiquity of smartphones means that they just aren't that valuable.
Art is a thing created by human beings. By definition, a machine is incapable of art. Capable of producing pretty pictures? Sure, but never art. Art is specifically the product of human creation.
If the AI isn't a legal person, it can't own anything. If the algorithm designers or owners of the AI don't own the art, then it is ownerless, and can be owned by the first person to claim it.
Intelligent sociopaths have no basic emotional instincts. Proved you wrong.
I have the exact opposite view. Art and music are perhaps the only occupations where technology can be rejected indefinitely. In a future so technologically advanced that scarcity is eliminated and nobody has to work if they don't want to, artists and musicians will flourish.
I am quite certain that once a "True Art" specification is drafted AI will be able to meet that specification.
More interesting, though, is what would be in the True Art specification.
Art dealers just failed it...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Because idiots will look at it and figure something out in their heads what the AI was trying to convey when it made the art. Then they'll try to sell it as such; at which point some other idiot comes up and buys it to show all of his other idiot friends how classy he is.
For fuck sakes society... why....
I tend to rant.
The so-called 'AI' in this case is just another tool the artist uses to create their art, not fundamentally different than using a brush, pencil, pen, or computer graphics program.
https://ai.googleblog.com/2015...
The answer is no, and here is why. Art must be created by an artist. An artist is a being which has consciously labeled something as "art". Every beautiful sunset perpetually occurring as the earth rotates is not producing an infinite number of art pieces. However, when a conscious being labels a sunset as art - through photography, painting, or even through some performance art or other means that allows other conscious beings to also consider it in that context - it is then "art".
A formula which plots fractal equations in colors to a grid producing an image is not an artist, thus what it produced is not art. However when a person then takes some instance of that output and declares it is art, then it is art. That formula can produce an infinite number of images, but it has not the consciousness to declare which of those images are art.
Thus, AI, which is set of formulas that can be executed on a Turing complete device, has no consciousness to declare its output as art, thus it cannot produce art. However if a conscious being takes some specific output generated by the AI and declares that it is art, then it is art. Just like an image produced by a fractal algorithm.
And much less seriously, this entire question is just to draw attention to the developers / software that is producing those images.
Better known as 318230.
I say if it "looks cool" or readily triggers emotions, then it's "art". Whether it comes from a human, a bot, or a cat puking paint on a canvas is irrelevant. I've seen random patterns in stone tiles that could be framed to make nice art. Random nature at work. They all can make "art".
Requiring art to be some haughty-taughty endeavor is silly. Those who make art for a living often try to inflate their specialty. There are bullshit trends in IT whose promoters pull similar social games. Buy art because you like it, not because of the maker. I suppose an interesting "maker" may make the art more meaningful to you because there is an (alleged) story behind it; or because it's in style. That's fine, but buyer beware: it may be all show.
Table-ized A.I.
is dead. The problem with the question "Can AIs Create True Art?" is that it attributes 100% material value and essence to the the physical. All art looks the same in an unlit underground room. All individual interprtations of art are differnet and it can be said that this act in itself is an "art", the act of sensing the art itself. Once you realize this you can discard the original question as invalid. You may now move on to the next slashot article. Thanks.
The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it?
When the AI demands the proceeds of the sale of its art, the AI is the owner.
This is where the eternal Slashdot bleating about "it's not real AI!" is going to have serious problems. Whatever test is created to have an AI legally qualify itself as not just sentient but sapient, humans will have to be exempted from it and simply declared sapient by legal fiat. Barring religious pogrom, there will one day be a sapient AI, and you can bet the tests created to try to prevent it becoming a legal individual can not be passed by the least functional humans.
I'll consider AI to truly have arrived when it can generate fresh and unlimited variations of dogs playing poker.
Table-ized A.I.
Can _you_ create real art?
And if not, are you neither human nor intelligent?
"Those considered the most creative are the best at hiding their sources."
I can't remember who said it, and it is really more a paraphrase than a direct quote. Does that make me creative?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Would be as capable of creation as a human. If the AI can't create, neither can the human.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Art is work intended to interact with the aesthetic (non-utilitarian) sense of its audience. The "intended" part means that there has to be someone doing the "intending." As of now, that applies only to humans, so the work of AI becomes art only when some human presents it as such (which can be as simple as a person examining the output of a program and going "hey, look at that!")
it can't enjoy it.
The human brain is just an algorithm.
A very big and complicated algorithm, yes, but still only a Turing Complete algorithm.
Thus, self-awareness and the capacity to declare something art are merely products of sufficiently complex algorithms.
By implication, you cannot argue that humans can do anything a sufficiently advanced AI cannot. The difference isn't in the nature, only in the scale.
You can, at best, argue weak AI cannot create art.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Weak AI is a tool, granted.
Strong AI, by definition, is an individual no different from any other artist.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Troll.
Let's turn a few things on their head and see what spills out:
1. EVERY piece of art is a collaboration between human and machine, unless you're painting with your own waste matter. And if that's what it takes to differentiate your work, you can keep it.
2. If artists are convinced that creating art is a sign of emotional intelligence, then show a piece of AI art to a stranger and ask them whether it's art. Congratulations! You just passed the Turing test.
There's literally nothing that humans can do in which machines will not eventually surpass us. Sorry, your dream of being spared from the Singularity because you can write a haiku is just that: a dream.
It doesn't seem confusing to me. Someone sets out to create an "AI", iterating and tweaking and validating output until it is judged as acceptable to the human who selects somethjng worthy of a submission for others to consider. Seems like the humans are using computers as a tool just as they would any other artistic implement for the craft.
I'd say that if humans were seeing 'art' that they knew was created by AI then it would never be judged to be 'true art'. They would talk about how artificial it was or find some other trivial flaw.
On the other hand, if it was a randomized test in which people needed to distinguish between art created by AI and by human artist then I believe it would be more difficult task.
If you can't accurately predict which piece of art is created by AI and which is created by human artist, then it would pass something like an 'Art-Turing test' and could be called 'art'.
After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Like a mechanical cookie cutter creates a cookie. An AI (speaking of the currently moronic versions of such) can only 'create' what it is directed to. Otherwise, it will sit there forever like a paperweight.
The Hamlet of Tyranny (and countless other DF games). https://dfstories.com/the-hamlet-of-tyranny/
Dwarf Fortress has made me cry while I'm playing. I think that's art.
Define 'strong AI'.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is about the only definition that works
And by that definition the picture is art.
It takes a human to create the level of lucrative hype that 'Paris-based art collective Obvious' have managed to come up with. Back in the day, Slashdot would have covered the more interesting story behind the Christie's auction, which you can read here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
'Obvious' just seem to have grabbed source from an Open Source project, generated a few images, cranked the hype up to 11, and made a killing. The community this comes out of, and especially the programmer who implemented the algorithm, aren't terribly impressed:
https://twitter.com/DrBeef_
If you want a go, the code is on github:
https://github.com/robbiebarra...
This is the best line from "I, Robot.".
Will Smith to the robot: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
The robot responds, "Can you?".
If you somehow manage to put a frame around something, literally or figuratively, and call it "art" it's art. The frame sets it off from the mundane. Whether or not someone observing it calls it art is up to the observer but only applies to them. One person's art is another's trash. AI is still in its infancy but today it is just as much a tool for art creation as a paintbrush, camera, or Photoshop. This question really belongs to a future date when AI's actually have volition and consciousness, after we have figured out what that actually means.
I'm gonna spoil this discussion and article even more.
Art is roughly 95% PR/publicity and 5% ingenuity/talent/quality/etc.
So, yes, AI can create "true" art as long as it's advertised as such.
To me, this discussion is as meaningless as asking whether it's "art" when someone uses a paintbrush instead of one's own hands. Of course it is! Swapping tools doesn't suddenly make something not art, even if that tool is very complex.
Separately, there's a discussion in this about who is the artist, but the answer is once again fairly obvious, given that this "AI" is only as capable of "creating" as its creators made it. While far more complex than a pile of rocks, this sort of "AI" is fundamentally no different than hand-carved rocks that have been painted in various colors, put in a bin, and then released so that they roll across a canvas. In both cases, the artist isn't hands-on during the creation process itself, but there's no doubt that they're still the artist and that the thing(s) actually producing the art are merely tools in the figurative hands of that artist.
Whether we're talking about a fractal generator, a motorized spirograph, a Photoshop filter, rocks on a canvas, or an "AI", there's always someone guiding the creative process, either directly or indirectly. Those people are the artists. The thing that makes the art is just the tool.
We can resume this conversation when and if an honest-to-goodness strong AI ever actually arrives, but I'm not holding my breath.
Intelligence is really just a broad catch all for suite of processing capabilities displayed by the human brain. You can get computers to duplicate many of those capabilities, in fact it already has, and I would argue there is really no set of processing capabilities humans have that could not in principle be duplicated by machine.
I also have no doubt that AI will generate artifacts like music and images that will pass a kind of artistic Turing test; and arguably it already has. Most people wouldn't be able to distinguish between apparent nonsense generated by modern art and apparent nonsense generated by algorithms.
But art is communication. The reason that modern art, be it painting or music, seems like nonsense to you is because it's like you've walked in on the end of a long and very abstruse conversation. You don't have any shared context with the artist and so his work is meaningless to you.
So the issue with AI art isn't whether algorithms can provoke an aesthetic response in an audience. A Mandelbrot set program can do that. The question is whether the AI itself has something to say. Does the AI have qualia -- conscious, subjective experiences -- that it is trying to share with you? If there's nobody home inside the box, there is nobody to be communicating with. The turing test can tell you whether an AI has equivalent capabilities to a human artist, but can it tell you whether the AI has conscious experience?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Which we don't, and likely never will. We do have algorithms that are great at executing instructions, though. At root, what they are doing is in effect no different from a Photoshop filter, it's not 'creating'.
Plus way more went into it than that crap Pollock turned out. Writing an AI "artist" is way more impressive than hanging paint from a string, and Pollock's crap sells for millions. Plus there's room to "express some idea or emotion, filter it through personal experience and set it against a broader cultural context" in millions of lines of code, contrasted with none in an f'ing pain can on an f'ing string.
Turing's definition was that strong AI was that which fell inside the set of all higher intelligence. In other words, a functional definition.
Alternatively, you can use a variant of the definition used by animal behaviourologists - the ability to perform new tasks by deductive reasoning rather than practice, instruction or copying, requiring indirect thinking. So self-awareness and the mirror test requires the capacity to not only connect the image to self but utilize it.
The test the crows managed required making a tool to obtain material to make a tool to perform a novel task unrelated to those familiar to them.
That's basic intelligence. High intelligence requires symbolic thought, the capacity to describe such things and thus a higher level of indirection.
That's when you get into strong AI. Triple indirection.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The turing test can tell you whether an AI has equivalent capabilities to a human artist, but can it tell you whether the AI has conscious experience?
Of course not, so the distinction is of no importance.
When I look at a lot of 'modern' art, I really question myself what people actually call art.. So if a lot of 'modern' art that's created by humans is called art, then an AI can also create true art..