Machine learning creates professional level photographs

[Norma Desmond]

So what the hell are you arguing about? It's that you're trying to justify calling Joe Schmo down the street who's painting a canvas an artist and not calling an AI machine whose art may be way more significant to humankind an artist. Be my guest.

[Supriyo]

I want to point out the synergy aspect of art. Art is what's left after taking inventory of the physical ingredients of an artifact. We make special meaning out of a collection of dots and lines, but outside our realm of consciousness, it's still a collection of dots and lines, the sum of its ingredients. I have no doubt, AI machines can make some very exquisite artistic artifacts and I am very curious to see them and know what a machine can find that I may have missed. However, ... here is my however, I think human beings are still needed to give those artifacts that special meaning, the synergy of ingredients, at which point, art is born, IMO. By born, I don't mean physical creation, the artifact very well could have existed before, but thinking of it with a conscious mind to be something more than the sum of its ingredients is the magic that brings art out of its cocoon (IMO of course). In that sense, AI produced art has to be a collaboration between man and machine, and no single entity can take full credit of it.

[Mark Z]

Here's an article on machine art, with some examples:

 

Can this computer-generated art pass the Turing test?

[Supriyo]

It's what Walker Evans essentially aimed to do. To be objective and distant. To only let the camera speak. Evans' realized though that his aim was no less a style.

 

I am just thinking, machines can do it more effortlessly.

 

Yes. I'm not arguing that you can't make art with a machine. I'm arguing that a machine can't make art.

 

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.

 

When I read Phil's and Fred's comments, apparently, the point of conflict is in the semantics, but in the context of further comments, the conflict seems to be deeper extending to the pride or superiority of humans. I do believe Phil is objectively thinking and not trying to glorify the superiority of man over machines. At the same time, I believe when Fred is saying machines make art, he is actually implying humans are using machines to make art. He is not giving machines any undue credit.

 

My own take is this, the very concept of art is intricately linked to human psyche, so art will evolve as our collective psychology evolves over time. There will continue to be new ways of looking at things, free of historic biases and morality. Check out this link: >Barter and Art- Can a new movement shake up London’s commercial art world

 

, so there is huge potential for AI guided art in future. Machines can show us new ways to see and think, the same way scientific models and computations lead to predictions that are counter intuitive or prohibitively complex. There is no question of inferiority or superiority here. Its what machines are expected to do, make things that humans can't with their bare hands or minds. At the same time, it would be the human imperative to connect with that art. In my opinion, art is also intricately linked to making connections with memories, thoughts, lives, history. The AI machine can judge certain artistic merits based on aesthetic rules or patterns, and some advanced versions of it may detect even more complex merits based on emotions and humor, but the machine stops there. We explore on.

[Norma Desmond]

Supriyo, when a writer uses a typewriter to type his novel, a human is using a machine as an aid in making art. I'm not talking about humans using machines to make art. This seems so simple to me. I'm honestly not sure where the misunderstanding is coming in. I'm saying an AI machine will make art. Really I am!

[Sandy Vongries]

Ah, but will it appreciate the result!

[Supriyo]

Fred, I don't presume to tell what you mean in your statements, so, sorry about that. I saw your example of machine making belt buckles and doing general calculations and comparing that to art making. So I thought, you meant humans are using the AI machine to make art, because those examples really are of humans using machines, even when people use the term 'machine made'.

 

i think I understand your point of not diminishing the role of the AI machine to simply an aid or a tool in art making, and I agree with that. I am more open to thinking AI based art as a collaboration between machine and human, rather than thinking one or the other made it. On one hand, the machine is doing the heavy lifting, on the other hand, humans designed the machine, pushed the button and selected the results. So, they both seem to have stake in the final outcome.

 

It is argumentative, if humans design and build a machine and that machine creates something, whether it's the machine which made it, or the human, and I will rest with that thought.

[Norma Desmond]

I saw your example of machine making belt buckles and doing general calculations and comparing that to art making. So I thought, you meant humans are using the AI machine to make art, because those examples really are of humans using machines, even when people use the term 'machine made'.

And yet I think most people think there's a fairly important difference between owning something that's "man-made" vs. something that's "machine-made." We think of man-made items as being more unique, more crafted, less conveyor belt oriented. That's because we understand the DIFFERENCE IN KIND between the role of humans in making something themselves vs.the role of humans in making something with a machine.

 

With AI, I'm suggesting there's an even greater difference between the role of the human in programming the machine that makes art vs.actually making the art first-hand or directly. There's a distance between the programmer and the eventual result or product of the AI system whereby, though the programmer initiates a process, the process then really becomes so beyond the capability of humans. Even though we program a machine to do them, we couldn't possibly do some computer calculations as fast as machines. I think it's perfectly reasonable, then, to distinguish between calculations that humans make and calculations that machines make.

 

Now, getting back to man-made belt buckles being more unique and often more valued than machine-made buckles. I think AI-made art has a unique kind of value because of that distance between programmer and end product I mentioned. I get why some people are stuck and put-off thinking an AI-made work of art would be soulless. But I'm saying it's precisely that soullessness that becomes special here. I think the AI-made art forces a shift in thinking not unlike the shift caused by the readymade put on display by Duchamp. In a way, readymades forced us to find art in something that, up to then, would have been thought of as soulless. I think there's more of a distance between the human touch of a painting and the human touch of a urinal placed in a museum. Yet, we came to experience the significance of accepting that object-urinal as art. Now, machines are able to take us to the next level of that, a more extremely "distant connection" which I find exciting because of its almost oxymoronic nature.

[Julie H]

art is also intricately linked to making connections with memories, thoughts, lives, history.

 

 

Yes, aka the soul. And what art is.

 

"As Spinoza contended, there is something deeply soulful in the manner in which the material world unfolds in its many modalities. A face has the potential to become a landscape. Life fills with memories in a glimpse of an eye. Things are what they are. But how can we ever be sure, as Spinoza asked, that we have fully grasped the potential of their being? This is not so much a doubt as a declaration of love for the depth of what touches you in life." —

Jan Verwoert

[Norma Desmond]

soul

I think this obsession with the soul is an anachronistic and mindless dependency. To me, chalking art up to soul is just plain lazy. It's just substituting one word you can't put your finger on for another word you can't put your finger on and thinking you've discovered some sort of secret or have found the essence of art because "soul" is such an essential term. All it's doing is punting.

 

I think "soul" is a particularly unseemly concept when it's used as a false idol. The mountains and rivers don't have a soul, so man has dominion over them. Machines don't have souls, so they can't possibly make art. Spare me the anthropocentrism.

[Norman 202]

The question of the soul is what the whole of human history is based on throughout religion, science, art, the telling and retelling of myths and stories

with the exception of, maybe, religon i don't think that statement has been true for a couple of hundred years, in western culture, at least. since when our science and art has experienced vastly increased diversity

[Norma Desmond]

Now you seem to be placing the art made by machines from the context of conceptual art."

OMG!

 

From the beginning, I have been willing to accept things made by AI as art, in and of themselves and on its face. It is YOU, and others, who've insisted on bringing various concepts into this, such as the concept of the maker, the concept of soul, telling us that "even if you can't tell the difference [between man-made and AI-generated art] and both are identical on the suface, one has soul and the other doesn't."

 

I responded to your statements and the statements of others conceptually because you approached this conceptually from the beginning. Art produced by an AI system doesn't need the Duchamp conceptualization to be art. That's simply an explanatory aid to get you to understand why AI art's supposed "soullessness" (a conceptual drawback you've invented) is not a problem for me.

 

For the very same reasons a Monet painting can be art, an AI-produced sculpture can be art. That AI art would have some elements of conceptual art because of how it's made and can be thought about doesn't, for me, change the fact that it can also be accepted as art in the very traditional sense as well.

[Norma Desmond]

Using a description like 'soul' is helpful in this regard because people know what's meant by it.

Funny, I'd say using "soul" occurs more often when people have NO IDEA what they mean or want to say.

[leo_papandreou1]

On one hand, the machine is doing the heavy lifting, on the other hand, humans designed the machine, pushed the button and selected the results.

 

Sounds like photography.

[leo_papandreou1]

With AI, I'm suggesting there's an even greater difference between the role of the human in programming the machine that makes art vs.actually making the art first-hand or directly. There's a distance between the programmer and the eventual result or product of the AI system whereby, though the programmer initiates a process, the process then really becomes so beyond the capability of humans.

 

Sure, and every year various AI competitions are held, including some for the arts. The question remains, though, who or what is the winning artist? It can't be the computer because the very same computer, if I have anything to do with it, can only draw a stick figure doing jumping jacks. It can't be the code either because the code didn't write itself and how the heck is it going to spend the $10,000 prize?

 

PS That quote is good description of your camera firmware.

Edited July 27, 2017 by leo_papandreou|1

[Norma Desmond]

Leo . . .

 

Who are what is the artist of Fountain? Is it Duchamp? Is it the guy who made the urinal? Is it the viewer who sees it as art?

 

If Beethoven is the artist who composed the violin concerto and Guarneri is the artist who made the violin and Heifetz is the artist who performed the concerto on the violin and Bernstein is the artist who conducts it all, who or what is the artist who created what I heard last night at Symphony Hall?

 

Who cares?

 

I started out saying that an AI machine can produce art. If you need to figure out the artist in that picture in order to determine that there's art, be my guest.

[Norman 202]

Phil, don't you think the soul is an antiquated notion, borne out of repression? Personally, I'd put all our artistic achievements down to the brain and central nervous system.

[leo_papandreou1]

OK I"ll give it a shot: code is a medium and programmers are artists.

[Norma Desmond]

Leo, I want also to dare to anticipate your next question (based on past experience) which might be why I didn't include the machine known as the violin as one of the makers of art. Well, in one sense, it is. But in another sense, as I've said the last 17 times you've asked, a violin is a different sort of machine IN KIND from an AI machine system.

 

We may have control over our cars, but when they slide on the ice we often say, and really mean, that we lost control of our cars. The same can happen with a computer. We may regain control over our cars and even have them pounded into a non-operational block of steel, showing our virile superiority! And we can do the same with a computer. But to the guy who gets killed in the car crash, the combination of the power of the machine he was driving and the slipperiness of the ice kind of took control over his body's--if not his soul's--fate.

[leo_papandreou1]

"a violin is a different sort of machine IN KIND from an AI machine system."

 

I agree, one of them is programmable.

[Norma Desmond]

Yes, and the programmability gives it possibilities well beyond the specific control over the programmer, even though the programmer can add or take away or drastically change the program. The driver can drive slow or fast, can be careful or not, but he sometimes loses control, even though he has ultimate control, over the car, which can slide on the ice and kill him even though he didn't mean for it to do so. The AI machine is actually programmed to do what the human is not capable of doing, even though the human gets the machine to do it. That part of it that is out of the human's specific control at the time can do amazing calculations at amazing speeds and can make art.

[leo_papandreou1]

Btw I'm talking up the creative aspects of art, but this doesn't mean I don't care the art objects in themselves. I don't think art inheres in any object, and if I prefer a piece of driftwood to a sculpture, for example, then that's what I prefer and it doesn't matter to me who "made" either.

[Norma Desmond]

Makes sense. And preferring a piece of driftwood doesn't make it art. The sculpture isn't art because it's better than or preferred to a piece of driftwood.

 

I don't see art as a superlative.

[Mark Z]

I see a parallel between art made by AI, and the monkey-selfie being discussed in Casual Photo Conversations. At what point will someone claim that the human artist or programmer does not own the copyright? Will the AI art be public domain?

[leo_papandreou1]

"Yes, and the programmability gives it possibilities well beyond the specific control over the programmer,"

 

Well, a program's output need not be predictable, but (assuming no hardware errors) any non-deterministic behavior is explicitly programmed (by sampling the outside world, for example), every source of noise and each degree of freedom is accounted for. Programmers must control chaos, traditional artists surrender to it (if they're any good). The thing is, there's an author here. There's no driftcode.

Edited July 27, 2017 by leo_papandreou|1