AI the new “artist”?
Orion Schmok
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AI the new “artist”?
The rise of artificial intelligence has definitely become a new prospect for the art community. Some people say that it “enhances our creativity”. AI can also be used as a tool that can be productive and smart which can also help contribute to our society. One thing is certain, it gives us a lot of interesting and different perspectives. There are several ways that AI has liberated the art field and also improved different aspects of various workplaces.
AI and creativity
Art is defined as the “expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” by the Oxford dictionary. AI may not tick the box for being “art” by this description. However in another explanation of the 4 that they have, art is also defined as “the various branches of creative activity”. Does AI branch into various creative activities? I believe that it certainly does!
One advantage of using AI to create art is that it is able to produce art without any biases of a person. What I mean by this is that you are able to create a piece without any unwanted biases. For example, the GAN modeled images that I have created using ‘Runway’ below, was structured purely from old paintings. I collected around 200 photos of old portrait paintings and trained them using ‘Runway’. I used 1000 training steps which took me around an hour to generate these images. These were 2 of my favorite outcomes. You can really see the details in the top image around the facial features and the shadows. The generated photos seem to also have grasped a pretty good concept of depth and lighting. The bottom portrait uses vivid colors a lot like some of the portraits I used for my dataset. I personally think that the coolest part about these portraits is that they were generated only through the old paintings that I had included in my database, which had no modern perceptions. Meaning that these portraits have no modern influences in its creation process. This astonishes me. This means that we are able to input some historical figures’ thoughts or illustrations and create an accurate variation of a potential creation that they could have made. This in my opinion is going beyond the creativity of a person, because an AI is able to generate several creative variations of an art piece in such a short time.
Despite how amazing that these images may look, AI still has a lot of flaws and may not be able to tell what is appealing to the human eye.
This was a test that I ran using a “Face Depixelizer’’ that we did during class. Although in the original photo it is obvious that I am not completely white, don’t have straight hair, and am smiling. The result was a green eyed, middle-aged white male, with straight hair and no smile. This is likely due to the database having a large amount of white males, therefore it tried to create an image of me as a white middle aged male. This is most likely due to a lack of diversity in its database. The process is still similar to the GAN created images that I have generated in “Runway” in the way that it produced images that were heavily based off of the databases given to the AI. This shows a very obvious flaw that us humans are able to detect for AI.
AI and society
Artificial intelligence can be used for everyone to have a better life. There are several different ways that AI is being used right now to help better our society. For example the dumpster diving robot that separates landfill and recyclable waste also known as “Max-AI”. This giant machine uses photo recognition to simulate human intelligence to sort out recyclable garbage from landfill waste. This is an extremely useful machine that is helping solve a portion of a massive and endless problem of pollution. The design is fairly simple. It has a treadmill which runs a whole bunch of garbage. Then the camera detects what can be recycled from PET bottles to electronic items. Then the massive arm separates them and puts them into the correct category of waste. This is super useful to society because until this machine, this was a tedious process that could only be done by humans.
Youtube video here: https://youtu.be/Q7tE_vNYzzU
As discussed above AI is a very strong tool that can help enhance our creativity. It also has other benefits such as being an unbiased “artist” which is able to gibe us variations of creativity from the past. I believe that it is a strong tool that is going to help with more diverse problems in the art field but also for our society.
Sources
“ART: Definition of Art by Oxford Dictionary on LEXICO.COM Also Meaning of Art.” Lexico Dictionaries | English, Lexico Dictionaries, www.lexico.com/definition/art.
“Dumpster Diving Robots: Using Ai for Smart Recycling.” GE News, www.ge.com/news/reports/dumpster-diving-robots-using-ai-smart-recycling.
