Machine learning creates professional level photographs

Allen, while I still think that your emphasise on man's lowest points is a cliché, Fred's Art is not a sermon on the mount is even more so a cliché. I'd say that's exactly what Art is, something to do with human morality (and what an A.I. can't possibly grasp). Fred used Warhol's art as a counter example. Never mind that Warhol happened be an artist who considered himself to be very religious.

Art and Religion seem cosmologically intertwined in terms of their symbology. For a psychological reading on the Bible, Jordan Peterson's lectures on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories are a great resource. Any comprehensive view of art wouldn't be one that views art as being unconnected to all of this.

 

Creativity is in looking for art where one would not expect to find any. Creativity is in unleashing the AI machine on canvas and thinking differently about the results it would generate. Creativity is in questioning the very notion of art itself.

The combination of extreme diligence with which the AI machine explores the material space, and its clinical indifference to human bias and emotions may well generate results that a human would not have conceived. It may produce results that a human will find creative. I do agree with Fred on this. It's simply a possibility, since no one have had the opportunity to test any of the hypothesis. But .... considering possibilities, sometimes even counterintuitively leads to creativity.

The machine's role is in producing the art. Man's role is in finding the essence.

 

Supriyo I don't see how anything of what you're describing is new. Machines based on algorithms have already helped to make art that humans couldn't conceive of. Has been done since the 70's (an abstract expressionist painter can also make art that he or she couldn't conceive of because so much of what you're talking about has simply to do with chance, whether a human hand and mind is involved or not). That machines will get better (much of what an A.I. can do today is based on what humans have already conceived of in terms of artistic styles and genres, and as such the A.I. is getting better at emulating existing art) doesn't change the broader question of art. I'm not disagreeing with the statement that an artist can make art with the use of a machine or that what a machine has made can be art.

 

Phil, you threw the question, can AI be creative. I tried to answer your question by suggesting what creativity can mean in the context of AI art.

It's true, AI is designed to recognize things based on training data, but it is not taught bias, or emotions. It may compose or select subject matters differently than humans. Also, machines that are designed to emulate certain styles (as you pointed out) can behave unpredictably, when placed in unfamiliar scenarios. These aspects can potentially produce results that may very well be perceived as creativity.

what is the broader question of art that you were referring to? Is it that art has to be always connected to human morality?

 

Art being an expression of the human condition is what I mean with the broader question of art. The human condition necessarily involves questions of morality among other things. Art cannot not be connected with it, even if it seeks to negate it.

Your explanation of creativity concerning the question can an A.I. be creative seems to be one that doesn't at all leave the human aspect out of it.

 

I don't think AI art would seek to negate connections with human conditions or emotions, it would be neutral to them. Neutrality is different than negation, right?

The role of humans in AI art would be mostly curation, and on a metaphysical level, reflecting and making connections. If that's the human aspect, that's true, as it is with any other art. But AI art doesn't seem as much an expression as it would be, if it was a lower level tool in human hand.

 

I was actually thinking more about human artists negating this or that. I think the stance of neutrality from a human perspective isn't any less a position one takes. From an A.I. perspective it would be the same to how we can describe our cameras as being 'neutral' unless you say the A.I. chooses to be neutral which is inferring a motive to it. If it's neutral like a camera than it's not any different in it being a human tool, though a potentially much more complex tool.

 

But AI's neutrality is different than that of the camera's in the sense that, camera doesn't analyze scene content and compose or pull the shutter by itself. The AI machine does all that without showing any selective bias based on human feelings. That neutrality is a consequence of it being a machine, not intentionally programmed into it. Hence the neutrality is not a motive by itself, although it may appear so to a human observer. You can call it a tool in the sense that it was built by a human, although you probably realize that once built, it's pretty much autonomous contrary to common tools where there is a cause effect relationship of human inputs being translated into machine actions.

Another thought, AI algorithms are not perfect. Most algorithms behave strangely or unpredictedly under certain conditions. It is this eccentricity that can result in bizarre, or in some cases interesting results.

 

It seems what you're talking about is the recognition of serendipitous chance in something that was created by pure neutral randomness. I agree that chance plays an important role in the making of art and especially so in photography. Take the picture by Yasuhiro Ishimoto that I recently linked to in the Small Things thread (LINK). You can't possibly imagine drawing or painting something like that. It was a moment that simply happened and Ishomoto responded to it. I bet though that he didn't saw or anticipated how the added randomness of the two people sitting in the background and ending up there in the image would echo the flying newspapers (white newspapers/black shadow, white upper body/black legs). That is he didn't anticipated it until he saw the final image, and then he knew.

Below is an image that's based on a self-portrait and that was made entirely on random algorithms using the program Filter Forge. You can create endless variations of filters on images with it and create your own algorithms. It's a great tool. I made the image just now in the last hour or so and picked it out from a selection of other variants (which I'm posting in the Stranger thread because it also relates to that subject). Why did I pick out this image from all of the other random digital renderings? I don't know. Something clicked. Something in it reminded me of THIS and THIS Spilliaert self portrait, maybe something of Francis Bacon too). The point is that randomness or cold neutrality by itself doesn't add up to much in art unless you can see all kinds of connections and meanings through it and which depend on an ongoing dialogue.

 

"Art and Religion seem cosmologically intertwined in terms of their symbology. For a psychological reading on the Bible, Jordan Peterson's lectures on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories are a great resource. Any comprehensive view of art wouldn't be one that views art as being unconnected to all of this". Phil.

They are entwined to a degree as religion was our only understanding ; but they are not Siamese twins locked together. The basis of modern day mathematics the zero is enshrined in Hindu religion. Humanity is evolving both spiritually and intellectually, and question what was before. Science constantly challenges understandings that are put before before us as does Art.

LINK

‘You are everywhere!’ Human consciousness exists BEFORE birth, quantum theory says | Science | News | Express.co.uk

The conscious mind, or self awareness are not necessary given to humanity, as a special .... unique superiority of the one species only blessed by God.

"God of Worlds" I have read in one of the books.

A1 intelligence/intellect is today just a simple tool, tomorrow perhaps a conscious self aware entity....many creative minds working at the cutting edge of science/technology think this will be only a matter of time.

Phil, I will read your links.

 

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... and/or, we each get to decide. Throughout this thread, it's been humans claiming that machine products are or are not art. For machine products to be art, some human must decide that they are or are not art, at which point, they're not machine art, they're our art (our decision, our metric, our needs, our values). We decided. The machines didn't.

Of course, if they did decide, we'd have to argue about whether they really decided. Some of us would decide that they couldn't decide and others would decide that they could, but at that point the decision would be ours and therefore we would have decided, not the machines. Of course the machines could then (seem to?) decide that they had decided ...

 

That machine products can be art is self-evident to me. That machines can therefore be artists - which seems to be the conclusion some want to make here by anthropomorphizing the machine rather than the art it makes - isn't.

 

The Next Rembrandt

What always comes back is the input of data, a computer analyzing lots and lots of data so that it can replicate rather than create.

 

Have you ever watched a video of people trying to make one of Sol Lewitt's pieces? They follow his written instructions and they get it 'wrong" more than once. But they correct themselves and hew to his given direction. Whose art is it? Who 'made' it?

 

Many high profile artists today and in the past work with an army of assistants who do the actual making of the art. Still, it's the artist who is considered the creator of the work. Same as how an architect gets his name on the building and not the thousands of workers and machines that made it.

Similarly, would it be correct to state that Rembrandt created the painting that the machine replicated based on Rembrandt's style?

 

... and you can see a qualitative difference between these workers and machines, and a musician interpreting a piece by a great composer or an actor performing Hamlet?

 

The musician performs the composition. The composition on paper is a latent creation. It would make a difference if a computer would be performing it I'd think (different musicians and conductors will result in different performances of the same composition), even or perhaps especially if you couldn't distinguish one from the other.

 

So ancient potters who didn't think of themselves as artists weren't artists because they didn't decide? They're only artists because future generations see their work as art? And so we're not allowed, according to Julie's TERMS OF USE of the term "art" and "artist", to call it their art, it can only be ours. How ever-lovin' self-centered!