Welcome to the 21st century where robots transplant organs, dating is never offline, Internet Of Things and cognitive technologies are the new norms, Babel fish-earbuds can get you the real-time translation of literally any language(you didn’t know this before, did you?)and you can already receive your unborn child’s genetic scorecard(hmm…interested?). The new addition to this list of Technology That Will Transform Your World is nothing but the first brushstroke on a canvas yet to be painted. Art by AI is still fresh in the air.
Art, for many, makes life endurable. It seems as though AI too is now facing stress issues(server breakup? maybe) these days and is now turning to art for some relief. We may not believe it to be true but that’s what happens in the new technological era.
AI’s baby steps in the artistic arena were neither aesthetically nor conceptually rich enough to hold the attention of the art world for too long.But we had underestimated its hidden prowess.Then came, Google’s pattern finding software named Deep Dream and this new model called GAN, which got the heads turning.
Let’s take a peek at what happens behind the screens. The GAN(Generated Adversarial Network) works by pairing two AI neural networks. Firstly, a generator which does the job that its name prescribes-generating images. The discriminator, on the other hand, judges the painting based on its previous built-in knowledge, learned by analyzing over 81,500 plus paintings. simply put, the generator creating images and the discriminator criticizing it, thus the engaging conversation leading to a work of art.
However, AI had a notorious entry into the artistic arena. It started out by first teaching itself to understand and mimic the human art. this technique called Style Transfer, helped it to replicate, recreate and blend different styles of artwork, later on..This was considered safe enough by artists because AI hadn’t threatened their job,yet.Style transfer, these days, is being used in every possible domain from photography to music composition. the process is easy, feed in whatever that you want to replicate and the algorithm does the work as you sip your coffee.
This intrusion of AI into our personal space can be quite unsettling and debatable. Their entry calls for a radical shift in what we perceive as art and that can never be easy!. If art was our way of expressing the inexpressible how do we accept some algorithmic functions as “art”? Who is the artist here? the programmer or the machine? From now are we going to buy some random machine outputs to decorate our living room?(Oh my good lord!can you imagine that?)Will this change our culture? Or is this creating one of its own? Well, that would be food for thought.
However, AI advocates have more arguments than one to stop your instincts to shun the technology away. Throughout the history, there have been numerous art movements that captured the interest of the people and could also well mirror the then society. Medieval art, Renaissance art, Neoclassical art,,Romanticism are a few popular milestones in the art history timeline. Now we live in the era of modern art which has been quite well described by Jared Erickson, as Modern Art=I Could Do That+Yeah, But You Didn’t. (Couldn’t agree more!)
These art movements basically call for the need to change our perception of art with the ever-evolving world.AI is the biggest innovation of our century and can probably exceed humans in every aspect by 2030, says Elon Musk. So, the point is if computers are the new artists you better buy their work and hang it wherever you want to.
As the greatest physicist of our times said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun”. If artificial intelligence is going to have some fun are you sure you will enjoy the show?
