Artificial Intelligence Art – The new emerging technologies, particularly AI is evolving the nature of creative processes. Machine Learning is playing a significant role in creative fields such as architecture, music, fine arts, and science. We have been looking at AI and ML as a tool to take over repetitive tasks and routine jobs. But now, artists also use AI to create recognized elements of arts.

Computational Creativity helps in building software that exhibits behavior. It enables us to understand human’s quotient of imaginativeness. And even develop programs for further enhancements. The AI software acts as a creative collaborator rather than a mere tool. However, many are still very skeptic about this creative intelligence. As they consider that stimulating Artistic techniques also means simulating human thinking. This is all impossible to do with the help of algorithms.

While we are still catching up with computational creativity, this technology has already started to show maturity. In the near future, companies can use creative software building, the cultural value of artifacts, and decision-making algorithms to solve some general issues.

Artificial Intelligence Art

Computational Art, created using AI technology, has been circulating widely since Google’s pattern finding software – Deep Dream in 2015. The artworks produced via DeepDream were not conceptually rich to hold the attention of the art. A famous auction house declared that it was ready to sell its latest work. The artwork was a mysterious portrait with more mysterious algorithm behind it. Which was cast by the media as the new standard for this growing genre.

AI’s Enrollment in the Art Class

Most of the AI artwork emerged over the past few years. It is all because of a classic algorithm – GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks). The algorithm was developed by a French art collective, Obvious, who created art using GAN. The researcher Ian Goodfellow introduced GAN in 2014. They called algorithms adversarial because there are two sides to them. One is generating random images and the other is full of inputs. GAN grabbed attention, unlike DeepDream. To get the algorithm to develop a classic looking portrait, Obvious had to fill it with more than 15,000 portraits created between 14th and 20th century. They presented the new portrait to generate new images similar to those they filled it with.

Christie’s Auction house selling an AI produced artwork

Artificial Intelligence Art – Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), an uncanny algorithm-created rendering of an aristocratic gentleman, hit the auction block in New York with an estimate of $7,000 to $10,000.

Source: Wikipedia

But the piece’s inclusion has created a high-profile sale. It is creating controversy far ahead of the auction itself. The generated portraits from the generative adversarial network have created deformed faces that are novel, surprising, and bizarre. The work is not interesting. AI artists are trying to sound like they wrote the algorithm that produced the work. But instead, they are running an online enhancer to get the final image with low resolution.

What Obvious has done in deriving the raw algorithm on a data set of an existing portrait might seem less original since anyone can replicate the process and derive similar results. The repetitiveness in the algorithm shows that humans still have an important role to play in shaping how an AI develops creativity. Even though the technology was publicly available shortly after Goodfellow paper was published. But it took early 2017 for artists to really recognize the potential aesthetic and conceptual richness that AI artwork can offer.

More Art

Artificial Intelligence Art – Karthik Kalyanarama, an economist and curator of major gallery show says, “I think it’s just a sign of the fact that this field is in its infancy. They’ve started to think about this stuff beyond the ‘selling point’ of it being art produced by AI, but have also started to think about how conceptually rich can they make it”. AI has captured the attention of artists that are engaged in conceptual depths of technology and integrated with the traditional art market.

Take a look at Trevor Paglen and his recent series, “Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations.

Source: Artnet news

Bottom line

Artificial Intelligence Art – Artists’ ability to imagine has expanded further. Many artists have avoided neural networks. Other artists have created pieces involving chatbots, the branch of AI that powers familiar digital assistants. The rising controversy of AI offers a window into an important lesson in the early phase of AI art. To identify path-breaking work, we should better stop asking where the line lies between the human artists and AI bots. And instead, we should start by asking whether human artists are using AI to develop greater conceptual and aesthetic depths or not.

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