: When we think about AI, it generally is with some amount of wariness. We’ve all seen too many science-fiction movies where sentient robots take over the world, but we’re mostly certain that the creativity needed for these sentient beings to overtake us doesn’t exist. Artists, musicians, and creatives especially have historically been comfortable with the knowledge that their livelihoods were not in danger of being replaced by AI because of the inherent creativity necessary in those industries… until now.
Wednesday, November 03, 2021
Can Computers Be Creative? A Look at AI Use in Music Composition
AMT Lab @ CMU
: When we think about AI, it generally is with some amount of wariness. We’ve all seen too many science-fiction movies where sentient robots take over the world, but we’re mostly certain that the creativity needed for these sentient beings to overtake us doesn’t exist. Artists, musicians, and creatives especially have historically been comfortable with the knowledge that their livelihoods were not in danger of being replaced by AI because of the inherent creativity necessary in those industries… until now.
: When we think about AI, it generally is with some amount of wariness. We’ve all seen too many science-fiction movies where sentient robots take over the world, but we’re mostly certain that the creativity needed for these sentient beings to overtake us doesn’t exist. Artists, musicians, and creatives especially have historically been comfortable with the knowledge that their livelihoods were not in danger of being replaced by AI because of the inherent creativity necessary in those industries… until now.
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As an artist I spend a substantial amount of time pondering the meaning of the word creativity. How can we be original but grasp inspiration from something, and how do we go about the process of self-expression in a way that is appealing to the minds of others? What I have learned is that this struggle is part of my process. This is why the question of the creativity of AI programs is so interesting to me. What does expression look like without the emotions and drive that comes from internal struggles with one’s own self. Can we still connect with the art of an artificial being that lacks our own emotional capacity? If so, what does that mean about expression, can there be a sort of algorithm and set of standardized guidelines? What does that say about our capabilities to connect with the idea of something rather than the feeling of it.
I’m reading this article at a really interesting time; I remember watching a TikTok just a few hours ago that showed a (stupidly entertaining) clip of someone coding bots to write their own horror story, so the portion of the article where the author explains how artificial intelligence has been used to attempt to replicate the creative style of deceased musicians, such as Kurt Cobain, was particularly interesting to me. It’s an odd but somewhat innovative way to both advance musical and computer technology and honor the memory and continuation of the legacy of late musicians. I will say that personally, the idea of computers developing creativity (a distinctly human trait) is mildly unsettling, but it just goes to show how advanced technology has been able to get in today’s time with such a personal and unique kind of thinking and process being able to be imitated by artificial intelligence.
Early on in the school year I ended up being shown some continuous livestreams on youtube by a friend that were simply AI generated tracks of specific music genres, most of the ones then were types of rock or metal, and reminder that these were continuous music rather than individualized tracks but this was simply on youtube to find. They certainly were not perfect, and I’m not super familiar with those genres but in terms of background music it made sense.The other thing that I wanted to touch on while reading this article is this idea of this outside source being able to quantifiably pick apart a designers work and see patterns in them, patterns are something I can sometimes see in my own work but often it is more me booking at it and seeing a vibe or an impression where it makes sense that this is my work, but not concrete things that I can point to.
Damn. We are diving into philosophical discussions now? As I read this article, my head spun in circles. What distinguishes us from artificial intelligence? Many, as the article points out, consider “creativity” to be the main differentiating factor. It seems to be, however, that that might no longer be the case. At least that’s what the article is claiming. And while I understand the point being made, I cannot help but disagree. Creativity, for me, extends far beyond the creation of “art” - visual, tactical, auditory, etc. In short, creativity, from my perspective, extends from emotions and can thus be roughly defined as an expression of emotions. So, here’s where the question of “philosophical discussions” comes into play. Although the article’s title explicitly asks “can computers be creative?” which is seemingly an easy answer: Yes. They can create. I think a better question is asking: can computers express emotions through what we call “creativity”?
I don't know if AI as we currently understand it can be considered "creative" but procedural generation and machine learning are getting better and better every day. I think that AI can create something akin to creativity and the best can fool a human or the inattentive.
But I think that as AI develops further there is the very real possibility that the answer to this question will be yes.
This is literally just me pulling this comment out of thin air to satisfy the weekly requirement so I'm not giving it much more thought than what you see here but bear with me.
Obviously nothing is created in a vacuum. And I think that what makes art with a lowercase a art with an uppercase A is intentionality. Even a painting that is just a person flinging paint at a canvas is art because there was intention in HOW it was flung even if it was mindless, the movements made were informed by everything that person has experienced.
Meanwhile a machine told to be random is just that, random.
And even if you have it act based off of it's past randomness it can still decide to forget all that and just be random again. It's as simple as a checkbox for it. We don't have that luxury. We can pretend to act randomly but we will always have a shadow of our intentionality in everything we do.
I mean I the question of whether or not a computer can be creative is largely subjective depending on your definition of creativity and originality. It also depends on how much you view the computer or AI system as actually autonomous or tied to whomever created and coded it. If creativity is solely based upon originality, then none of us can really be that creative either, since pretty much everything that we make is already based on things that exist. We are not so much more autonomous than bots in that aspect. If creativity has to do with emotion, then it depends on whether or not you tie it to the creative entity’s expression of emotion, or the audience’s emotional reaction. I’ve seen on TikTok that there was someone that had a bot coded to create visuals based off a word of phrase it was fed, and sometimes the results, albeit abstract, would really resonate with people. I don’t think the idea that computers can be creative is that that far off.
I've seen lots of articles that predict that AI will pretty much be capable of doing just about anything that humans can do by 2050. That's only thirty years away, and honestly, I believe it. A lot of people seem convinced that computers aren't capable of real creativity, but I think that's a little naive. It's getting into philosophy a little bit, but as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing that really sets us apart from computers inherently, we've just got a couple million years of evolution, and computers have a couple decades of design. Our choices are made up of a combination of thousands of deterministic and random factors that combine in a process very similar to modern AI's neural nets to result in specific decisions. Early AI neural nets were relatively simple, but they are increasingly growing in complexity, able to relate more inputs in more complex ways to generate output. I'm certainly not an AI researcher, but I think most of the difference between us and computers is scale. We have more neurons and slightly more complex relationship between them than we can currently simulate as a neural net. As AI technology continues to improve in the next few decades, I have no doubt that genuinely creative output will become not just possible, but easy. This is pretty good evidence for that. Yeah, currently AI tools don't have quite the same level of polish that human creativity can provide, but they're getting close, and they're getting close pretty damn fast.
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