Machine learning creates professional level photographs

[Norma Desmond]

Once again we've arrived at everything is really it's opposite. In other words, the end is always to simply stop making sense.

 

"A non-human centric idea of art is Fountain . . ."

 

Then be sure immediately to contradict that by saying

 

"Art will always be human-centric."

 

So the question remains, what would machines add that hasn't been done already?

Is that the standard? An entity has to add something that hasn't been done already? Can you answer what a human will add in the future that hasn't been done already? I can't. That's why I probably won't be the next Picasso or Beethoven, but I suspect someone or something will add something that hasn't been done already.

[leo_papandreou1]

It's not the first AI euphoria, and it won't be the last, but DL so far has only incrementally improved already existing computer applications, including complex acts of "creation" of images, sound, and text. If you weren't alarmed or elated at the prospect of computer art 25 years ago, then you shouldn't be alarmed or elated for its prospects today. DL is mostly old algorithms for statistical analysis, modern processing power combined with large data sets, and hype. Lots and lots of hype.

[Supriyo]

One way machine art could be different than human made art is by showing indifference to human emotions, biases and morality, so that when we see it, our reaction would be: what in the freaking world is that! Just like some people felt seeing Duchamp's fountain. It's possible, our biases or morality are actually acting as barriers from seeing expanded possibilities, just as they enable us with a special vision of the world.

 

However, IMO there is a difference between art, and objects with art potential. Machines can make pictures with art potential, but humans have a key role to play to imbue those pictures with their consciousness, to make sense of them. Making sense is tied to consciousness, which at this point distinguishes machines from humans. It's possible, in future machines may acquire consciousness, but then they will be more human like, and as Phil said, this discussion will be obsolete, if not moot.

[AlanKlein]

A machine making art wouldn't mean humans couldn't continue making art and continue fulfilling our need as well. Your making art doesn't take away from my making art. Why would a machine's doing so affect me negatively? Are humans that insecure and fragile?

 

Alan, this is what we're discussing, whether a machine without feelings and heart can make art. It's not reasonable to answer by defining art as something that needs human feeling and heart. That eliminates machines by definition, not by rational argument. If you want to eliminate machines from making art, just declare that art can only be made by humans. But you will not have made any kind of case for it? The question is not simply whether human heart and feeling is necessary to make art. It's WHY human heart and feeling should be necessary, especially if a machine can come up with something that inspires us and that, without knowing it was made by a machine, we might well think of as art. You haven't answered that...

 

Fred I said in my post that if we see art from computer generated program, than the program that created the art is art as it came from programmers, humans. So computer art in that sense is human art. It;'s not different if I applied one of those presets to make a pencil looking photo from a regular photograph using Photoshop presets. The guy who programed that preset is the artist. But as we have seen, few people even use presets anymore like that a month after buying PS. But whatever preset a programmer comes up with will be his limited view of art.

 

So yes, I state unequivocally that art needs human feeling, heart and soul. Whether he's taking the photo shot himself or writing a program that becomes the final product. His heart and feelings go into it.

[AlanKlein]

A friend and I acquired automatic exposure cameras in the '70s, and when auto focus cameras came along, we extrapolated and joked about cameras eventually having auto composition - you'd point the camera, and it would tell you to move to the left a bit, or aim higher or lower, or whatever would make a better shot. We thought our imagined auto composition feature was pretty funny.

 

Now it seems inevitable. And it's exciting to think that such cameras will not be simply programmed to make photos similar to those that humans make, but they will be able to learn from experience and develop interesting ways of seeing things. It will be as if humans had been trying to fly by copying flapping, feathered bird wings, and then a machine brain came along and suggested making rigid wings out of riveted sheet metal. It might be challenging at first to accept artificial intelligence as artist, but I think that art will benefit from AI's contributions.

What you're describing is why many people since the camera was invented have thought photography isn't really art. It may be a craft, but not art.

[leo_papandreou1]

"Now, machine art is leading a probably otherwise rational guy to visions of dog poop being moved around the sidewalk."

 

I'm not that creative. The point was to ridicule the idea that you can go from disembodied bytes to robots that think and act, i.e., artists. I think first of all we're going to have to solve the more basic problem of machines that can seek out the basic materials and energy they need to sustain themselves. Because if you can't even do that, then you're just a tool for things that can.

[AlanKlein]

I think part of the problem is that people don't really understand what a computer is. They think it's some form of high intellect that somehow we guide for results. As someone who worked for Univac repairing third generation computers 50 years ago that operated with discrete components back than, let me tell you they are nothing but idiots. High speed morons that can only add 0's and 1's. That's it. The only difference today is that they're smaller and quicker. But still adding 0's and 1's.

 

Everything they do has to be programmed in error free code by humans. As we all have seen, one little error in code and they bomb out. So any artistic bent comes from a human programmer and his limited human ability to conceive art. It's no different than a camera sitting on the shelf. Until a human picks it up, moves it around and aims it, and starts snapping the shutter, no art it made. Nothing will happen. The computer is no different.

[Norma Desmond]

Why underestimate the human in favor of the machine?

I'm not. I'm just considering that machines will be capable of making art. Any underestimation of humans is your defensiveness of humans, thinking they somehow are underestimated if someone suggests a machine can also make art. You're the one making humans into over-sensitive, insecure beings who feel underestimated because a machine might someday accomplish what they've been accomplishing for centuries.

[AlanKlein]

Wouter, I would be the first to claim the sentience of all animals. It's why I don't eat them. I still think that humans have a deeper and more complex capacity and sense towards their own mortality. Art is tied to this.

 

Man, not animals, make moral judgments of right and wrong. How does this relate to art?

 

As an aside, why does man need to do and see art? How does that relate to computer generated art?

[Norma Desmond]

Leo, Alan, and Phil,

 

You don't seem to quarrel with someone saying that machines make belt buckles, even though we all know a human programmed them to make buckles. You don't seem to quarrel with saying a machine calculates even though we all know a machine has been programmed to calculate. You're giving art a mythologized and romanticized status by reading those of us who say machines can make art as trying to make human beings out of them or giving them thinking capacities that are the same as humans. You've simply arbitrarily selected the combination of art and machines to have to be spoken about differently from the way we would commonly speak about belt buckles, buttons, and calculations and machines.

 

The kinds of calculations and the speeds at which machines can do them, even though it began with a human programmer, is far different from the capacity a human has to calculate himself.

 

The kind of art and the way in which they may make it, even though it began with a human programmer, may very well be far different from the capacity a human has to make art or the kind of art eventually made.

[AlanKlein]

My argument is based on logic not on emotions. Art is a concept tied to the human condition. That therefore art can't be made by a machine (art can be made with the use of machines) has nothing to do with making humans insecure or over-sensitive towards machines. It's just common sense.

Makes sense. After all a camera is a machine as is an artist's paint brush or a potter's wheel. All require the spark of humanity to give it a soul. The art comes from man, not the machine. And that's all a computer is. A machine.

[leo_papandreou1]

I love computers. I love ML -- linear algebra and statistics, my God, how can anyone not love that? My objections to AI, if you can call them that (I believe in AI!), are really objections to the way some AI evangelists, historically, at least since Turing, have drawn a sharp distinction between the physical and intellectual. To make an artificial artist you first have to make an artificial life, is what I'm saying (because I love biology too. I love everything. I'm all about love.)

[Wouter Willemse]

Won't it be interesting when machines not only produce art, but become art critics as well.

"That's a very nice rendering, Dave. I think you've improved a great deal." -- HAL 9000

 

Now that would sure do this site a world of good - at least there would be critiques again on photos. Better than the silence we enjoy today :-)

[leo_papandreou1]

"The kind of art and the way in which they may make it, even though it began with a human programmer, may very well be far different from the capacity a human has to make art or the kind of art eventually made."

 

Computers have been making art since the 80s. Novels, music, paintings, name it. It's just that they need human input and direction and lack plasticity. They need human input and direction because they are bereft of curiosity and intention and because an adequate sensory capacity is really, really hard, possibly AI-complete. They're rigid because they can't program themselves, or anyway not well. They may never be able to program themselves well. Not for metaphysical reasons but because of the astronomical lower bound on the resources that may be needed (assuming a Turing model of computation.)

 

The lack of intention is really killer IMO. There is a strong sense in which the programmer is the artist here and the computer is serving the equally mindless function of film, except it's a digital system instead of an analogue one. I'm always more impressed with the engineers in these stories than the computer generated art. I mean lots of devices can potentially generate art. Any moving gadget if you tape a loaded brush to it.

Edited July 26, 2017 by leo_papandreou|1

[Norman 202]

The lack of intention is really killer IMO.

Did AlphaGo want to beat Lee Sepold or, more recently, Ke Jie. Did it want to learn?

[Norman 202]

The biggest obstacle to AI and machine creativity are the stiffs at NASA sitting on all that alien technology.

[Norma Desmond]

I love computers. I love ML -- linear algebra and statistics, my God, how can anyone not love that? My objections to AI, if you can call them that (I believe in AI!), are really objections to the way some AI evangelists, historically, at least since Turing, have drawn a sharp distinction between the physical and intellectual. To make an artificial artist you first have to make an artificial life, is what I'm saying (because I love biology too. I love everything. I'm all about love.)

Leo, let me start by saying I've never been much of an advocate for AI, so it would probably serve our conversation well if you discussed it with me as if you weren't responding to AI evangelists. Not being an advocate or evangelist doesn't mean I can't recognize some of AI's more interesting possibilities.

 

I don't draw a distinction between the physical and intellectual. The intellectual IS physical, as is the emotional and consciousness.

 

One of the things I love about art is its artificiality, which does not require that something living be given the credit for making it.

Computers have been making art since the 80s. Novels, music, paintings, name it. It's just that they need human input and direction and lack plasticity

I hope you know this is not what we're talking about. There's a difference between someone using a machine to materialize art they've created or are creating, like typing a novel that's been handwritten or typing one as you're creating it, and someone programming a machine so that it can generate calculations far beyond what that human might even be able to imagine, thereby creating art of its own. This also addresses your statement that there's a strong sense that the programmer is artist. For example, only because someone makes a violin can Joshua Bell play the violin and usually because someone else composed music can Joshua Bell perform it (he occasionally improvises), and yet even though Bell is not the starting point, I consider him an artist. The fact that the composer is also an artist and many might consider some of the great violin makers to be artists (let's not go back to the craftsman/artist debate) doesn't mean Bell is not an artist as well.

 

Much art takes collaboration to be made, from theater to dance to string quartets. When we refer to Joshua Bell as an artist, however, we usually don't feel the need to qualify it by saying, "but Beethoven and Stradivarius are the initiating artists behind Bell."

 

The lack of intention is really killer IMO.

It's only killer if you already pre-assign to art the need for intention. Up to a point in history, all art had intention. Now, because of AI, it doesn't have to be the product of an intentional being. Again, that's what's exciting about it. I would imagine that, during the Renaissance, people would have said that declaring a found object like a toilet to be art wouldn't make it or the declaration of it art (I think there are still some today who would say that, just as some would say a Rothko isn't art for whatever restrictive reason they might choose to give . . . that people disagree on this or that thing being art is nothing new, especially when this or that new kind of art is introduced) and they would have given reasons based on history.

 

It's the lack of intentionality by the machine, which goes well beyond the imagination of the programmer on its own once the programmer has programmed it, that would be one of the fascinating and challenging aspects of art produced by an AI system. In particular cases, and perhaps even many, I would have no problem also calling the programmers artists because, as I said above, much art often requires more than one artist. I love the idea of art as collaboration, so multiple artists being responsible for something appeals to me greatly.

Edited July 26, 2017 by Norma Desmond

[leo_papandreou1]

Come to think of it, film is a computer. A different kind of programmer, called a chemist, made film, and the images it generated certainly differed from those made by people, in fact changed people's visual understanding. Also, there's the same amount of learning going on in film as there is in machine learning.

[Norma Desmond]

Come to think of it, film is a computer.

Except it's not. Cute, though. ;-)

[leo_papandreou1]

"It's only killer if you already pre-assign to art the need for intention."

 

I think I do, yeah. In this case the intentional agent would be the computer scientist. What if, say, a computer generated original works to rival those of Shakespeare? Well I would change my mind then. But we're going to need a radically different kind of computer before that happens. Seriously.

[leo_papandreou1]

"Except it's not."

 

Semantics. It's an analog computer/device/whathaveyou. By receiving light (information) from an object, it provides a measurable response that's analogous, or correlated, to the object.

[Norma Desmond]

There are few Shakespeares, so I don't make him my standard for art. I like many artists who make local names for themselves working in small studios in bad neighborhoods in the city I live in, though rents are starting to force them out. I doubt these artists will make history books, but they make art and have impact. Whether an AI computer will ever rival Shakespeare is an open question, and a different question from whether it can make art.

[leo_papandreou1]

Art is just a proxy word for me in this discussion. When I say (half-seriously) only artists will have jobs in the future, I don't mean designated artists, TBH I mean the easiest things we do are going to be the hardest to mechanize. As in you don't need any special knowledge to be an artist, like you do to become a doctor or accountant say. Edited July 26, 2017 by leo_papandreou|1

[Norma Desmond]

I think AI machines are qualitatively different enough from other machines we know. I don't know or care whether we will call what they do "conceiving." What I do care about is that what they do will be very different from what machines have traditionally done. The last paragraph of questions to me is just theoretical mind-numbing naval gazing which I don't need to get mired in in order to see as art what an AI machine might produce.

[Norma Desmond]

Artists make art and viewers see it. I don't think anyone has questioned that. But I'm glad you are able to point out the importance of seeing.

 

All art requires seeing, or hearing, or thinking, or something, to be experienced. It doesn't require that to be made. I know that because, now, AI computers will make art that they don't see but viewers do.