Artificial intelligence and creativity: If

robots can make art, what's left for us?

Artificial intelligence is becoming commonplace, from your smartphone
and your Amazon account to the driverless cars that will soon grace public
roads in Australia.

Often, the response to this reality is one of trepidation and concern,

about mass unemployment and the dominance of Big Tech. But that's not
always the case.

"Art is one of the last domains in AI where there is an optimistic view

on how humans and machines can work together," says Dave King, founder
of Move 37, a creative AI company.

He says creativity is not a God-given thing. It's a process, and it takes

practice.

"One of the most interesting aspects of creativity is that ability to

combine ideas or to draw things together," he says.

"If you have an algorithm that is working for you in the way you want it
to it can source and discover lots and lots of different things."

AI is already being used in a range of artistic fields. Algorithms trained

on millions of pages of romance novels have been used to write poems, and
the recent Robot Art Competition showed a range of paintings with
brushwork so sophisticated it could have been done by a human hand.

Jon McCormack is an artist and professor of computer science at

Monash University whose work incorporates algorithms.
 His series Fifty Sisters (2012) featured images of futuristic-looking
plants that were "algorithmically grown" from computer code. In another
work, titled Eden, he created an installation featuring "virtual creatures"
whose movements were influenced by gallery visitors entering the space.

McCormack says when there is concern about AI, it is understandable.

"We're naturally scared of anything where we take away something

from people, particularly something as precious as being creative and art,
which we associate with being the most fundamental human [trait] — that
thing that differentiates us from every other species on the planet," he said.

After all, as AI expert Professor Toby Walsh notes: "We have one of the
most creative brains out there."
"One of the oldest jobs on the planet, being a carpenter or an artisan,
we will value most [in the future] because we will like to see an object carved
or touched by the human hand, not a machine."

Artists have always used tools to create their work: for Van Gogh, it
was a paint brush; for Henri Cartier-Bresson, a Leica camera.

With AI, however, the question becomes one of authorship.

"I see myself as being the artist," McCormack says of his compositions.
"The computer is still very primitive — it doesn't have the same capabilities
as a human creative, but it's capable of doing things that complement our
intelligence.

King says AI currently can only bring a limited perspective to artistic

practice.

"They can only draw on what they've been trained on," he says,
referring to the reams of data used to create artificial intelligence. "Whereas
the human condition is expansive and broad and brings a lot more depth of
perspective to it."
By itself, AI can certainly generate things that look like art, McCormack
says. Whether you could consider it art is a harder question.

"So much of what we think about art is humans communicating to each

other," he says.

"As soon as you bring a computer into the mix, suddenly you've got a
non-human entity trying to fulfil the role that used to be occupied exclusively
by people."

Soon, however, it may be possible to go further; to consider the

machine not just a tool, but a partner or collaborator, with its own ability to
create.

"We always think of Lennon and McCartney as being the great musical
creative partnership," McCormack says.

"Will we eventually see a point in time where we have a human and

computer partnership that we acknowledge as being more than the sum of
its parts?

"If the art was really, really good — if it moved us emotionally in the
way the best art does — then I think we would come to start to accept art
that's made by machines."

Citation: Bonini, Tierney & Donoughue, Paul (2017, August 11) Artificial
intelligence and creativity: If robots can make art, what's left
for us? ABC News. Retrieved March, 15, 2020 from
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-11/artificial-intelligence-can-ai-be-
creative/8793906