Artificial Intelligence Catalyzes A Revolution For 21st Century Human Creativity & Art

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Art is one of the most creative forms of expression known to mankind.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, it is fascinating to discover how it is gradually taking over and replicating human emotions, senses and art forms. Artificial Intelligence has attained an important position in science and scientific discoveries but seldom do we associate it with Art and Human Emotion. Creativity is paramount to Machines and with algorithms, they churn out representations of shapes, images and structures – thus expanding, redefining and reinventing creativity in their own right. They do not act as barriers to human creativity, rather work as an extension of our very minds. This idea has triggered a new subfield in Artificial Intelligence known as Computational Creativity.

The article elucidates how the algorithms of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence when integrated are ready to produce new breakthroughs in the field of Arts.

Introduction

The concept of Art defined and formulated by humans has its roots in a medieval culture that can be traced back many centuries. Art is neither scientific nor empirical, rather it is a sentiment that is emotion-driven. However, it is not practised without technique. An artist is bound to conform to a certain level of shared meaning with the world, adapting geometry, shapes and anatomy in order to create representations that can be made sense of by the recipients of his art – a wider group of audience. The magical aspect of Art is the absence of constraint, checks or universal law describing the extent to which the artist must conform to these frameworks. Thus, unlike in science, math, or logic, one of the realms that makes Art so phenomenal is that it is individualistic – spearheaded by the Artist’s free will. It is certainly the purest and most lucid form of freedom of expression that humankind possesses.

Have you ever wondered – From where does a creative impulse arise in the painter? Rather, What is it that constitutes the brain processing system which develops creative ideas and artistic schemes? Since nothing emerges from the vacuum, we must decipher that every creative instinct is always preceded by a historical-cultural scheme – serving as a fruit of the traditional inheritance and the lived experiences of its formulators. This prevailing theory is well elucidated by Margaret Boden, who has stated in her book Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man (Boden, 1987): “Probably the new thoughts that originate in the mind are not completely new because they have their seeds in representations that already are in the mind. To put it differently, the germ of our culture, all our knowledge and our experience is behind each creative idea.” [1]

Keeping the implications in mind, a widely accepted definition of creativity is: “A creative idea is a novel and valuable combination of known ideas.” [2]This entails that all physical laws, theorems, and musical pieces are derived from a finite set of elements. Creativity is an “advanced domain of problem-solving” that involves mindfulness, analogy, rationale, and memory under constraints, among others, and is, therefore, possible to be replicated by computers. [3]

Back In July 2013, a promising artist put up an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by masses, garnered media coverage, and showcased works produced over a number of decades, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a spectacular International Art Festival. However, the peculiar aspect was that the artist in question was a computer program known as “The Painting Fool.” [4] After much speculation, it was brought to light that even that was not such a novelty. Art made using the mechanics of artificial intelligence has stuck with humans for an astonishingly long time. Since 1973, Harold Cohen – a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the first representative of Britain at the Venice Biennale – has been collaborating with a program called AARON. AARON has been making paintings autonomously for decades. Therefore, even in the late 1980s, Cohen was able to joke around that he would be the one and only artist who would ever be able to put up a posthumous exhibition of new artwork created after his death.

Discussion

The unresolved questions about Artificial Intelligence Art are – first, what its potential is and, second, whether—irrespective of the quality of the artwork produced—if it can truly be described as “creative” or “imaginative’’ when compared against the existing parameters and standards of Art set in our society of human beings. [5] These are problems, rather opportunities, profound and fascinating, that prompts us to delve deep into the mysteries of Artificial Intelligence with the Arts.

Artificial Intelligence is radically transforming the temperament of creativity. Computers are generating music, architecture, fine arts, and science. Indeed, the computer already functions as a canvas, a brush, and a musical instrument. However, we must target better relations between computers and creativity. Initially, the computer was viewed as a mere tool to help human creators. Now, however, it is seen as a creative entity in its own right. This perspective has triggered a new subfield of Artificial Intelligence called Computational Creativity. Creativity in Computational Art has become the discipline of the Information Era and has taken society by storm.

Computational creativity functions on the principles of Machine Learning which refers to the idea of feeding computers with huge masses of data, and equipping them with algorithms to be able to sort, filter through and create representations of the information. Advanced image-recognition software, after being fed with ample pictures, paintings, and pieces of art, is able to churn out its own version of art, using theorems, locating patterns, extracting functions and deriving algorithms. Artificial Intelligence programs use human-supplied tools, frameworks and information to create representations. As they progress over time, the human intervention and influence required to program, maintain, and monitor the robot is predicted to decrease. And one day, the robot will become smart enough to maintain itself. And only a handful of years later, it will program another machine — mayhaps several other machines — to churn out designs as well.[6]

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