A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can't Be an Artist (technologyreview.com)

Sean Dorrance Kelly, a philosophy professor at Harvard, writes for MIT Technology Review: Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to. This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.

[...] My argument is not that the creator's responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine's composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple. Claims like Kurzweil's that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms -- a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.

Comments

what a wanker

[Ionized]

We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright.

ok, but what about the monkey that repeatedly cranks out great plays? when does it stop being an accident?

We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.

who's to say that we all aren't just performing arbitrary acts of algorithmic formalism, based on our past experiences and chemical reactions in our brains? this fundamentally boils down to free will and thinking we have some magical divine spark inside us, instead of us just being unimaginably complex meat computers. the jury's still out on that one.

Art can be anything

[petes_PoV]

All that an objects needs in order to be art is for someone to call it "art". There is no deliberation regarding its merit, form, method of production or relationship with anything else. Just look at any of the abstract stuff - especially the trivial, like Rothko or the semi-random like Pollock.

So if we apply an artistic Turing test and it would be impossible to tell whether something came from a human mind, a random event or a computer's action.

So on that basis, computers - like nature - are capable of producing art.