AMT Lab @ CMU: Artificial Intelligence (AI), or intelligence exhibited by machines that can mimic human cognitive functions, has become a common phrase in the tech world. AI has allowed computers to complete advanced tasks that were not possible before, and the applications of AI continues to increase and diversify. In fact, AI has even found a place in the arts. Technology professionals and arts managers are exploring a broad range of possibilities for AI within areas of the arts world.
10 comments:
This is scary. I am all for innovation and technology advancement, but it is terrifying that a robot can create a full song with intensions to draw out emotions. I think so many of us are drawn to arts because it is a form of human expression and to take away the humanity of it, would ruin in, but how would we know? This idea of AI creating music is not new, its been explored in movies and tv shows, and books, but to have it so practical is scary. I'm not worried that it would stop people from continuing to create work, but for people, myself, to like AI art more. Thinking further ahead, it would be interesting to see if it becomes normal for museums to have an exhibit AI created art, just as now it is normal to have digital design works. When digital design first came about, I want to know if their was resistance for the same reason I don't want to see robots creating art.
I think Annie's opinion is totally valid -- it is questionable whether art can still be art if the creator is not even human. To me, having AI as "artists" means a huge expansion for the boundary of art. It puts our current definition of art into question, and it makes me wonder what it means for humans to be creative if we are letting AI to do the creative work. Maybe, the human creativity can lie in the algorithm behind the robots? For example, when people make twitter bots nowadays, the twitter bots do the actual work, but the people who coded the bots still dictate the content that the bots make. However, twitter bots are different from AI. The key part of AI is "intelligence," which means that this particular type of bot has its own brain and own creativity. If that is the case, how are we going to separate the human creativity with the machine creativity? This is a very interesting realm in the intersection of technology and art. I am curious where this will go.
I'm mixed about this. The technology side of me thinks its really cool that we've gotten AI far enough to make original art, and it's amazing to me who knows nothing about computers how we've been able to design them this complex. But on the other hand, I would hardly call this art. Art is defined by its expression and emotion, and while an AI can represent art, in my opinion it's not really art, because the AI did not think about the meaning behind the art. I'm no AI, but as far as I know they cannot yet think for themselves, therefore somewhere deep in the lines of code that art has been programmed, and thus I don't consider it art. I'm fine with AI making art like this as an interesting experiment, but I hope it does not become considered actual art, put up against real human artists.
While it would be very hard to argue that this project is very cool and new, and that it certainly displays prominently the advancements that man kind has made, it to me presents some pretty scary scenarios. One such scenario (and I do realize that this is at this point in time a pretty far fetched situation) is that machines become so capable at creating art that it puts human artists out of a job. I don’t believe that we’ll ever reach a point as a society where we don’t have a demand for art created by people, there’s something about the human factor that I think is inseparable from what we currently know as art, but there very well may come a time where it just isn’t profitable for art to be left to people. Art is hard, and most people are super unreliable when it comes to being artistically creative on a tight schedule.
Another situation is that, because art is one of the biggest indications of an advanced culture (because it’s the dedication of resources to something that is largely non-utilitarian), a distinct machine like culture may start to grow either integrated in with human culture, or in a more wild scenario, machines develop their own culture that outgrows and out shadows that of human culture.
It may be because I live with a bunch of computer science majors and go to Carnegie Mellon University, but the way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before we cross a boundary not even imagined by those who lived before the age of computers.
I'm not quite sure how to feel about art and AI blending together. In terms of concept, I think it makes sense to want to blend the two worlds together, however I do worry about corporations getting involved in the creation of these new artistic ventures. It seems a bit out of character for companies like Microsoft and Google, however I will say I'm not really privy to what private ventures and investments they've taken on in the past, and could very easily have been involved in the art world for a long time. It certainly makes sense in terms of research and funding, because companies of their scale can very easily take on a project like Magenta and make it happen with their resources, however, it does just make me think about their motivations. It feels a little bit like indie artists who truly have to start from the ground up won't necessarily have access to their tools, however, I do recognize that we're light years away from having consumer grade AI tools available and made for artists in the first place.n
I think that this combination of artificial intelligence and the arts is creating some amazing things already and has so much potential for its future. I am not sure if I listened to the UCCA version of the art that was turned into melodies but I have listened to something like it and I though that it was absolutely beautiful. I think that this combination can help us access several different methods and dimensions art can occupy that we have never been able to explore in the past. It is a little scary (but at the same time amazing) that machines have the ability to identify in paintings what humans subconsciously identify that helps us to have and emotional reaction. I am interested to learn more about the goal these companies believe they want to achieve by combining these aspects, but until then I am happy to hear the discoveries that are making already.
Once I read this article title I immediately thought about those bright and erratic graphics that were generated by the windows music player back in the day, but this proves to be so much more. To actually interpret human emotional connections to music and images into code that will generate appropriate reaction images and art pieces is beyond anything I have ever conceptualized. And they can do it in reverse, too! It must take so much source material and millions of relations in order to produce accurate works of art and digital music interpretations from existing works of art. Also, the fact that multiple companies all over the world are investing teams and making progress in this field, it must be a pretty important and honestly the future of technology. It could also maybe influence the musical scores that accompany theatrical productions by having a camera capture the different looks on stage between the scenery, costumes, and lighting and connect those images to musical tones that the audience could relate to.
Having recently studied the Turing Test for Cake Everyday, I have to wonder if there is a way to put music produced by Baidu AI through the test alongside music produced by a human composer. Would it pass because, AI or not, the music sounds like music? Or would there be a distinction? What stuck out to me in the article was that although Baidu AI does have some impressively complex methods for breaking down visual and musical elements and producing something based off of countless different resources, all it's really doing is calculating and cutting and pasting and imitating. The music produced is more of a collage of the machine's knowledge of calculable emotion than an emotional response. I have no doubt that the music made sound good or even amazing, but I feel the sense that this music would read as more cobbled than created. Maybe I'm wrong and no human would be able to distinguish Baidu's tune from that of a human composer, but I'm skeptical enough to not be satisfied. There is still work to be done here.
This is so exciting! I love the potential for AI in the arts, and I think that the murkiness of the discipline is what compels me toward it. For example, can it really be called art if it wasn't created by a person? Does this redefine the way we think of art or artists themselves? I think it's an interesting argument to say that, especially in the first case mentioned by the article, the computer was really just the mode of artistic expression for whoever programmed it. But then does it change the situation if the computer is actually a fully functioning AI machine capable of making its own decisions instead of drawing from an algorithm? I think the more interesting cases are the ones like DeepDream, because they show how computers process what we think of as fully organic, artistic information. Whatever the argumentation is behind these methods and programs, I think artificial intelligence as a method to create art is a thrilling and daunting idea that will probably take many more years to fully realize.
One of the things that drew me to the Design and Production programs at Carnegie Mellon was the ability that I would have to possibly collaborate with pioneers in the field of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Having seen the possibilities that theatrical collaboration with these seemingly futuristic mediums could provide to the world of performing arts, I decided that that field is something I seek to pursue in the future.
That being said, this article provided a very interesting update as to both progress within the world of AI and progress within the arts world, and the current status of the developing discipline between the two. In particular, I found the segment of the article dedicated to Google and Microsoft's own AI art collections (with examples) to be fascinating and beautiful. In addition to the purely visual art, also mentioned was the Google composing bot, recently unveiled to the public. Seeing the products of this relatively recent cross-disciplinary collaboration was very exciting, and I look forward to seeing and participating in creations to come.
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