AI and the Intersect of Art and Science
At the crux of art and science is humanity. Humans create art and seek the truth through scientific discovery. Man created technology and is shaping its capabilities in his own image. What happens when the technology is capable of not only sensing and learning, but also creating and thinking?
Throughout history, art has been humankind’s interpretation of the world, translated through applied creativity to produce architecture, painting, drawing, dance, music, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, tapestry, ceramics, lithography, wood carving, graphics, performance, theater, design, illustration, video, sculpture, photography and writing.
Scientists are explorers of the truth through applying the systematic rigor of the scientific method. Scientists deliver a greater understanding of chemistry, biology, astronomy, archaeology, psychology, social sciences, computing technology, earth sciences, medicine, and physics.
Both artistic creativity and scientific discovery are uniquely in the domain of man, not machine. Or is it? Some would argue that computers are capable of producing both art and science today. Artificial intelligence (AI) has written short-films, composed music, 3D printed sculptures and other visual artistic creations.
2016 was a breakthrough year for AI in the arts. The first Sci-fi short film Sunspring, starring Silcon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch, was released in 2016 by Ars Technica. Sunspring was created by a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN) AI bot named Benjamin. Benjamin was trained to write screenplays by Ross Goodwin (NYU) and filmmaker Oscar Sharp. Also in 2016, IBM released the first movie trailer created by artificial intelligence (AI) that was used for the 20th Century Fox sci-fi movie Morgan. Sony Computer Science laboratory (CSL) created the first AI pop song, “Daddy’s Car” in 2016.
Currently, Google’s Deep Dream software has the ability to create original new images using a convolutional neural network. Google’s Project Magenta is a research initiative to explore the deployment of machine learning in creativity, art, music, video and visual media.
In the scientific realm, AI is assisting scientists in a wide number of areas. Below are just a few examples of how AI is being used in scientific research.
- Star-galaxy classification using deep convolutional neural networks (University of Illinois)
- AI in molecular chemistry and drug discovery (IBM Research — Ireland)
- Mapping human health symptoms to disease diagnosis (The Human Diagnosis Project)
- Predicting drug reactions with biomarkers (Atomwise)
- AI in oncology, analyzing the biophysics of cancer (Tufts University)
Today humankind is at the kernel of creativity, art and science, with AI as an accelerant. Will there be a time in history when the art and science produced through artificial intelligence, sensors, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing and robotics become indistinguishable from humans?
“The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Copyright © 2017 Cami Rosso All rights reserved.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on February 23, 2017.
