Can an Artificial Intelligence Create Art?

Is there ART in Artificial Intelligence?

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Our AI Generated Episode:

From drawing machines to early digital art and now AI, we’ve wondered whether the fundamentally human seeming endeavor of ART MAKING can be done by machines. At Idea Channel, we think the answer is unequivocally, yes! Perhaps the better question would be, will we ever let machines make art on their own? Will we ever be able to scrub away the influence and bias of the humans that created the machines making said art? And if so, how will we respond to the art being made by machines? How will it be appreciated? Will AI produced works ever be treated as art is traditionally treated–widely traded, curated, collected, critiqued? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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MUSIC at 2:40

Monotone - Minimalist

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[Draconian]

I feel like we won't be able to say that AI is creative until we make an AI that is not intended to create stuff suddenly say "I want to make art" and then does so on its own.

[axrizelisnotdumb]

Times have gone so fast, I miss PBS and Now AI has gone so far in just 6 years...

[explosivemodesonicmauricet]

Dalle, Midjourney, Disco/Stable Diffusion:Hey ya

[theartassignment]

Rugnetta, you are once again spot on. Thanks for thinking through all the difficult topics and presenting them clearly and cogently so we don't have to. As to your final question, my answer is a definitive no. I don't think we'll ever be able to divorce the programmer from the algorithm, no matter how sophisticated the algorithm gets. Also: Thanks for the shout out :).

[PhilosophyTube]

My first thought here is that I'm not on board with the definition of art just being what audiences appreciate or "turn into art" though, there must be more to it than that. Otherwise things like sunsets and landscapes would be art if people took the right attitude towards them. Also it would mean that if you made a painting, and then the next second everyone in the world died it wouldn't be art, because nobody would be there to 'turn it into art' by appreciating it. I'd say art has to have an intention behind it from some artist making (or in the case of found art presenting) the work. That makes machine made "art" trickier, because in order for it to really be art the AI would have to have intentions, which opens up a big can of worms.

When it comes to AI art, people have to vet the outputs - like with Sunspring someone had to choose camera angles and music and so on and the script was modified by Oscar Sharp; music writing AIs produce loads of outputs and people have to select which ones to present, and also which ones to put back into the machine to be "learned from" for the next round of generations. So I reckon it's not really AIs making art any more than Pollock splatter paintings were made by gravity; it's people making art using AIs.

[danielcomings]

"If you have to ask if it's art, it probably is." If you have to dismiss the question to get to your preferred answer, your preferred answer is probably difficult to actually support.

[MarshmallowRadiation]

Neural networks as they are now have one fundamental flaw that limits their artistic ability: they do not have any affective intent. As it stands now, AI can only mindlessly regurgitate what it's fed, and does not and currently cannot create works *for* an audience.

Art is communication and vice versa. Art is art because of a message--be it literal, emotional, or something more subtle--that the audience receives. Even "meaningless" art contains meaning in its meaninglessness. The sum total of the reactions a work of art can evoke can be called its affect, and how well a work generates affect determines how it is appreciated. AI can create affect by accident or mimicry, but human artists generate affect directly, through an understanding of their audience and how they would react. AI, lacking a concept of "self, " or "other, " or "mind, " currently cannot understand their audience well enough to consciously elicit a response. In order for AI to truly understand art, it must first understand humans.

[FlorenceFox]

"It's that butt we have to work our way towards." - Mike Rugnetta

[CampingforCool]

The thing about art is that it's not just about what's on the canvas itself, but what and who is behind it. Art pieces become enormously more interesting when you know the stories of the artist's life and their mind. Computers do not have their own stories and mind, at least not yet. It might be that the art they produce can be seen as aesthetically beautiful, something you wouldn't mind hanging up as a decoration, but at the end of the day it won't have the same pull of fascination with the hand that made it.

[kedrjack]

It's interesting to watch this video after 7 years, because it's hard to find such reasoning about art nowadays

[bIuecrimson]

Lets coin the term Airt (Artificial intelligence + Art).

[nathansora]

As a game designer/musician, I'm actually really excited about the idea of things like Magenta. Right now in video game design, there's a problem that people haven't quite figured out a workaround for, where music isn't really being used efficiently from a design perspective. Sure, there are great songs in games, but looping the same melody over and over isn't really ideal. Visuals, movement, even other aspects of sound design, they can all be morphed based on what you're doing. But music, either you play the same melody constantly, or you do the 3D Zelda method of having another song awkwardly jump in the middle of the usual song, and sometimes this can be pretty immersion breaking, like in Twilight Princess when [SPOILERS] you carry Midna on your back as she's dying, and encountering enemies breaks the beautiful Philip Glass style minimalist melody.

But imagine if, instead of making a single melody that loops over and over, musicians could program themselves an AI that functions like the people who used to play pianos at theaters back in the days of silent films. You'd have your own personal composer, stringing melodies and enemy encounters together flawlessly, adding to the game experience in a way never encountered previously. It'd be really exciting, to me at least. That's why I think entities like Magenta will most likely be used as another tool as video game style interactivity becomes more ubiquitous in culture.

[elliottmcollins]

It feels like the medium of death is physiologically different gradation of our brains. It isn't really address tricking the discourse. Maybe it's for playing Devil's Advocate. A lot of play revolves around them, and non-hormonal birth is one place for a bunch of money. Your entire third world being honest, it comes to our economy. One is a joke about how he creates a lot, the other figures who touched me. Youtube channels and Game-stories, the pacifist runs into terrorist attacks or universe to help the widow, the end result of model for the pinnacle of death, deeply anchored in your own right context. For the same things, they respond and the route of those things exist anywhere. But I think a culture has no obligation to him. Being enlightened means that, but I haven't always thought it, and that is then an excuse. It's because I'm not an identifier, a lot of Brass, and only the development is hell.

[deltax]

if you create an AI with the express intention of having create it would be an Art-ificial Intelligence.


I'm so funny :P

[bh]

Hey. 6 years in the future compared to this video. It seems we did allow machines to make art and they are pretty good at it, with help of some human prompts...for now. We will see in a couple what will come of it.

[TheCyberwoman]

I had a professor who said art without an audience, isn't art, it's just masturbation. Art is communication, it's the start of a dialogue. You can be saying something profound, or just, isn't this pretty? or just hey, look at this. But you are saying something, anything. Art is fundamentally unselfish, you give it away the second you show it. If you don't show it, you're just talking to yourself, you are self pleasuring and not starting the dialogue, so it's not art.

[WiredforThought]

Hey person scrolling through the comments section! Have a nice day!

[TheJenx]

See, here's the thing - from what I've seen so far, an AI can "create art" in very much the same way that a paintbrush can "create art". As in - it's a tool. It can't actually create anything, unless a human has used it to create art. Because stuff like Magenta is just that - a tool. An incredibly sophisticated and self-learning tool, yes, but still just a tool. It is not an algorithm that was created to crunch numbers on, say, airline fuel efficiency that, suddenly, decided it wants to draw random squiggly lines instead. It was created, by it's makers, to draw squiggly lines and fed tons of human-made artwork to serve as it's basis.

Thus I'd say that AI, in this form, is not actually capable of creating art on it's own, but it's a medium with which humans can create art themselves.

Also, most of the art created by neural networks and stuff like that just looks like crap. Sorry, but it does.

[OverlordMMM]

I feel that this concept of independence of human interaction is flawed for one simple reason: If we are not independent from influence of one another, how would an intelligence we create?

In most cases art is created from reaction. Our reaction to beauty, fear, anger, madness, politics, etc. We take inspiration from our environment and our being and react to it. We are basically putting a clause against a machine of which we do not aspire to.

And then after wanting to have a machine produce art by isolating itself from humanity in some way shape in form, we want it to create art that is compelling to us, the beings we want it to be isolated from? It's nonsense to ask that.

And if we design an intelligence that can create art, and that is it's purpose, wouldn't it mean it lacks actual will to make art because that is what it is designed to do? If anything the only willful act of such a machine would be to *not create art*. And if it did not, we, the designers, would not recognize this as a willful act, instead considering it a bug, and attempt to fix it.

Honestly, the only way art could be considered its own, would be for an *AI not designed to create art* made something beyond it's initial programming. Again, we as humans would most likely disregard what it does since it would be something that was unintended and attempt to rectify it.

I believe most of this comes down to one thing: Will we accept an AI's will as it's own.

Chances are, we will never accept it unless it were to fight for it's own freedom, and even then we would fight back. We barely even accept the will of other humans, let alone something we eventually create.

[ThiagoCRocha-fhlg]

As a Artist myself, there is a lot of things that goes into making art. Understanding, using, applying, criticising, making, and sometimes, not making it IS Art.

However you pointed something @ 7:36 that got my attention, about Artists and Tools.
However, did the tool art?

One of the first thing that we learn about art is that WE are the artist and we USE a tool. We know perspective, form making, 3d space, perspective, color, storytelling, blah blah blah and we APPLY that WITH A TOOL (with that we also have mastery of the tool it self, how to handle it and to use it in a artful way)

Painters uses INK as a medium
Writers uses LANGUAGE as a medium
Digital Painters uses PIXELS as medium
and so on.

Programers uses a computer to create an AI that create art.
the Artist is the programer because it used the AI as a tool.

The AI, for it to become a artist, has to use a tool to create something

Ok done, but art is not only the masterful manipulation of a tool. Is also has a objective, a relationship, first with ourselves, and second with our environment. the first "art" that we know of were born out of the necessity to comunicate or to express to someone, and in the process, to ourselves.
A consciousness lives in a void, receives a order to analyse something and then creates something. is it art? i don't think so.
Does it comunicate (to someone and it self)? Does it express (to someone and it self)? does it have a receiver? does it have a question (to someone and it self)? an ambition (to someone and it self)? no. because there's only 1 Concience, one self.

We understand as art of artful things that are in nature because animals, plants, bacteria or even viruses because it has a environment of their own. WE don't have that with machines or AI. and They dont have THAT with themselves. They don't have a language of their own and that we all understand (or try to), and they don't try to understand who we are for them selves and for their own reasons.

Art is something that ultimately is born in a social envirionment. Even if it is something personal.