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If you have been following me, you probably know that I am a firm believer in the incredible potential of AI and the transformative impact it can have on our society. We have already built frameworks of fairly sophisticated algorithms that can derive patterns, make predictions, spot anomalies, find recommendations, and a lot more. The field has grown so much in the last few years that you might have heard the common saying that data is the new oil.

While all that is thrilling and useful, I am interested in whether we can obtain originality in an artificial system. This is a really complex issue, not because it would be very hard to implement, but because we don’t know if there is such a possibility in the first place. Instead of catching patterns, would it be possible for systems to create patterns? How about creating original art? There have been some papers that have used neural networks to replicate the style of famous painters — but really can we classify that as original if it’s replication in its crudest form? Actually, the question we need to ask ourselves is what is originality in the first place?

If by originality, we mean that a system must be able to develop content, or let’s just stick to art for simplicity’s sake, without being fed any data or stimulus, we are faced with an even more troubling issue. Humans get an endless stream of information through the real world from their interaction with it through their senses, and arguably it would be impossible for humans to produce original content without external stimulus at all. Ocean blues, orange sunsets, forests and trees, houses and horses, just about every painting is in some sense developed through aspects of reality. Even abstract paintings are based on real concepts like shapes and colors. So really — we ourselves are just pattern-finding systems that produce only through what we consume. In that sense, it would be unfair to expect an artificial system to produce original art without any data.

To attempt to answer that, let’s look at a different art form: music! While it is still inevitable that music derives from real sounds, and qualities of real objects, the exact sequence in which we produce them can create an original tune. Really then, originality is a child of randomness? If what we seek is for something to be original alone, should it suffice to come up with truly random sequence of sounds? And what if I take someone else’s composition and slip in an additional note to differentiate it? Is that original? Now, to fully address this issue, it would require assessment of the nature of art and aesthetics, the concept of meaning, debate on the notion of reality itself, and the similarity problem from Thesius’ ship — and while they are all entertaining discussions, let’s stick to the issue at hand. Instead of undermining music as pure randomness, what if we say that it requires experimentation. It requires us to go through a process of considering various combinations of notes and evaluate them through personal judgement until we come up with something unique and catchy.

Fair enough. Let’s take another art form to explore this even further: comedy. Humor has always been a particularly interesting phenomenon for philosophers. Again, in actuality it is nothing but patterns — be it puns or metaphors or sarcasm, humor is just finding patterns that people find peculiar. However, an important insight here is that art often involves cross-referencing. We take something from one domain and reference it to something from another, and voila — if the reference is peculiar enough, we have something funny! Let’s consider a dad joke I found on the internet:

What time did the man go to the dentist? Tooth hurt-y.

From one domain (dentist and teeth) to another domain (time), we established a reference by finding patterns (in this case, similar sounding words).

From our exploration so far, we can come up with a rudimentary list of sources of originality:

It can involve a novel abstraction of real world objects. It could result through experimentation, evaluation and improvisation with not-exactly-random sequences of primitive structures. It often involves cross-referencing between knowledge domains for peculiar patterns.

Now of course, this doesn’t get us very far because we still haven’t addressed where we get such evaluation metrics from (think about an objective metric for art), or how we have an artificial system identify a pattern as peculiar, or how to come up with an abstraction from reality. However, I would argue that we already have systems that can satisfy these criteria! For example, a neural network when trained on a simple classification problem, will set weights to optimize its prediction accuracy. These weights are a higher level of abstraction from the real qualities of real objects. Likewise, through reinforcement learning techniques in intelligent systems like chess playing algorithms, we have already found a way to have an algorithm run experiments, evaluate them, and learn from them to come up with a good sequence of moves. We also have algorithms that can detect fraud by finding peculiar patterns in a variety of indicators or domains.

In some way then, we have algorithms that develop original results. Neural networks develop an original abstraction from problems, chess playing algorithms develop an original sequence of winning moves, and fraud detection system detect original peculiar patterns. In some sense then, these are all artsy. I realize that this has a lot of hand-waving and skipping important discussions (the devil is in the details!), but I think we have a reasonable framework for creating original content through artificial systems.

At a philosophical level, not the implementational level, originality can be achieved by the three virtues we came up with. If we were to apply these to art, one reasonable way to go about it could be having an algorithm analyze a lot of music to develop a higher level of abstraction, then run experiments and evaluate them in some way, and then cross-reference interesting results from the experiments to produce original patterns! The quest for originality, then, doesn’t seem as impossible as it seems, while there are still a lot of specifics yet to be figured out…