just last month, AI-generated art arrived on the world auction stage under the auspices of Christie’s, proving that artificial intelligence can not only be creative but also produce world class works of art—another profound AI milestone blurring the line between human and machine.

Naturally, the news sparked debates about whether the work produced by Paris-based art collective Obvious could really be called art at all. Popular opinion among creatives is that art is a process by which human beings express some idea or emotion, filter it through personal experience and set it against a broader cultural context—suggesting then that what AI generates at the behest of computer scientists is definitely not art, or at all creative.

The story raised additional questions about ownership. In this circumstance, who can really be named as author? The algorithm itself or the team behind it? Given that AI is taught and programmed by humans, has the human creative process really been identically replicated or are we still the ultimate masters?

AI VERSUS HUMAN

At GumGum, an AI company that focuses on computer vision, we wanted to explore the intersection of AI and art by devising a Turing Test of our own in association with Rutgers University’s Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Cloudpainter, an artificially intelligent painting robot. We were keen to see whether AI can, in fact, replicate the intent and imagination of traditional artists, and we wanted to explore the potential impact of AI on the creative sector.

To do this, we enlisted a broad collection of diverse artists from “traditional” paint-on-canvas artists to 3-D rendering and modeling artists alongside Pindar Van Arman—a classically trained artist who has been coding art robots for 15 years. Van Arman was tasked with using his Cloudpainter machine to create pieces of art based on the same data set as the more traditional artists. This data set was a collection of art by 20th century American Abstract Expressionists. Then, we asked them to document the process, showing us their preferred tools and telling us how they came to their final work.

Intriguingly, while at face value the AI artwork was indistinguishable from that of the more traditional artists, the test highlighted that the creative spark and ultimate agency behind creating a work of art is still very much human. Even though the Cloudpainter machine has evolved over time to become a highly intelligent system capable of making creative decisions of its own accord, the final piece of work could only be described as a collaboration between human and machine. Van Arman served as more of an “art director” for the painting. Although Cloudpainter made all of the aesthetic decisions independently, the machine was given parameters to meet and was programed to refine its results in order to deliver the desired outcome. This was not too dissimilar to the process used by Obvious and their GAN AI tool.

Moreover, until AI can be programed to absorb inspiration, crave communication and want to express something in a creative way, the work it creates on its own simply cannot be considered art without the intention of its human masters. Creatives working with AI find the process to be more about negotiation than experimentation. It’s clear that even in the creative field, sophisticated technologies can be used to enhance our capabilities—but crucially they still require human intelligence to define the overarching rules and steer the way.

THERE’S AN ACTIVE ROLE BETWEEN ART AND VIEWER

How traditional art purveyors react to AI art on the world stage is yet to be seen, but in the words of Leandro Castelao—one of the artists we enlisted for the study—“there’s an active role between the piece of art and the viewer. In the end, the viewer is the co-creator, transforming, re-creating and changing.” This is a crucial point; when it’s difficult to tell AI art apart from human art, the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder rings particularly true.

Source: Can AI Create True Art? – Scientific American Blog Network

When Robbie Barrat trained an AI to study and reproduce classical nude paintings, he expected something at least recognizable. What the AI produced instead was unfamiliar and unsettling, but still intriguing. The “paintings” look like flesh-like ice cream, spilling into pools that only vaguely recall a woman’s body. Barrat told Gizmodo these meaty blobs, disturbing and unintentional as they are, may impact both art and AI.

“Before, you would be feeding the computer a set of rules it would execute perfectly, with no room for interpretation by the computer,” Barrat said via email. “Now with AI, it’s all about the machine’s interpretation of the dataset you feed it—in this case how it (strangely) interprets the nude portraits I fed it.”

AI’s influence is certainly more pronounced in this project than in most computer generated art, but while that wasn’t what Barrat intended, he says the results were much better this way.

“Would I want the results to be more realistic? Absolutely not,” he said. “I want to get AI to generate new types of art we haven’t seen before; not force some human perspective on it.”

Barrat explained the process of training the AI to produce imagery of a curving body from some surreal parallel universe:

“I used a dataset of thousands of nude portraits I scraped, along with techniques from a new paper that recently came out called ‘Progressive Growing of GANs’ to generate the images,” he said. “The generator tries to generate paintings that fool the discriminator, and the discriminator tries to learn how to tell the difference between ‘fake’ paintings that the generator feeds it, and real paintings from the dataset of nude portraits.”

The Francis Bacon-esque paintings were purely serendipitous.

“What happened with the nude portraits is that the generator figured it could just feed the discriminator blobs of flesh, and the discriminator wasn’t able to tell the difference between strange blobs of flesh and humans, so since the generator could consistently fool the discriminator by painting these strange forms of flesh instead of realistic nude portraits; both components stopped learning and getting better at painting.”

As Barrat pointed out on Twitter, this method of working with a computer program has some art history precedent. Having an AI execute the artist’s specific directions is reminiscent of instructional art—a conceptual art technique, best exampled by Sol LeWitt, where artists provide specific instructions for others to create the artwork. (For example: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing, Boston Museum: “On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty point at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.”)

 Giving the AI limited autonomy to create art may be more than just a novelty, it may eventually lead to a truly new form of generating art with entirely new subjectivities.

“I want to use AI to make its own new and original artworks, not just get AI to mimic things that people were making in the 1600’s.”

Source: AI Imagines Nude Paintings as Terrifying Pools of Melting Flesh

you choose a sculpture and a painting and the Artificial Intelligence shows you how they are related through other art works. Invisible inspiration!

Great article about AI being used to create musical art, with links. The music sounds good too!

Source: Top of the bots: This AI isn’t a cold, cruel killing machine – it’s a pop music hit machine