AI Challenges The Only Unique Area that Only Humans Can Do, ‘Art’ (feat. AI Art, Imagine AI)
Now the future is almost here. Art is one of the fields created by AI (Artificial Intelligence) robots Is art creation something that only humans can do? The concept of AI, introduced in 1955, is going to go beyond the ‘technical determinism’ and challenge the essential areas of humans. “Art is another way to share thoughts and connects the knowledge and insights of the world,” said Bran Ferren who is an intellectual in various fields. However, now AI has been getting into the art field and the boundary among experts and non-professionals, creators, and enjoyers might be fallen apart. In addition, AI might lead to the “democratization of creation,” and ease the hard parts of art creation.
Interesting questions and imaginations make the heart beat. We’re curious about the upcoming art scenes that genius AI would bring to us since AI can quickly learn a number of images that a person cannot see even if it takes a lifetime.
[AI musicians seeking new sounds and styles]
The root of AI art is neural network-based ‘evolution generating art’. Artificial Neural Networks were first developed for music composition analysis in the 1970s, and since then Kulitta has been used for automatic music composition, which probably creates new musical structures and melodies.
IBM’s ‘Watson Beat’ is an AI artificial neural network that learns the difference between rhythm, melody, instrumentation, and genre to create new music, and composes new music in a similar form to the music which human composers prefer based on what it’s learned. Melomics in Spain is an AI music system that is composed based on an algorithm that mimics the process of ecosystem evolution and requires no human intervention. In addition, the AI program for music, Iamus, composes music of its own style and released an album that the AI London Symphony Orchestra participated in. Google’s ‘Magenta project’ is an open-source project based on ‘Tensorflow’ for art and music AI development. In 2017, it developed ‘NSynth’ which creates a new sound by combining different musical instrument tones. In addition, Microsoft’s automatic accompaniment generation program “Songsmith” analyzes the audio signal to find the matching codes and applies the accompaniment to the selected music style, so it shows the highly complete quality.
[AI artist selling artworks]
AI art has branched out not only to painters who imitate, reproduce, or abstract certain techniques but also to craft fields that pottery. Especially, an AI that is designed to evaluate artworks has emerged and is intervening in price formation. Google’s AI painter platform “Deep Dream” was able to create high-quality artworks by interacting with the AI drawing artworks and the AI evaluating the quality of them. As a result, a total of 29 artworks that simulated Vincent Van Gogh were sold for $ 97,000.
Even more surprisingly, at the Christie’s New York, the portrait of AI artist ‘Obvious’, ‘Edmond de Bellamy’, was sold for $ 43,2500, 40 times higher than expected. As you can see, AI art is now trading at a high price in the art market, overtaking human art. Recently, Art Together in Korea drew the attention by getting funded 20,000 USD for ‘Commune with…’, a collaboration between human painter ‘Domin’ and Pulse 9’s ‘Imagine AI’. In addition, the intuitive AI painter, Sara Salevati, is conducting research that utilizes information about human emotions collected through AI-based chatbots to automatically simulate artworks in a traditional painting style.
[AI robot dancing with humans]
Now, the dance field shows the human-technology collaboration performed by human dancers and humanoid robots. The Japanese-style playwright and director, Hirota Orizawa, and a robot famous scientist, Hiroshi Ishiguro, created a 20-year-old female AI, “Genocide F,” an Android-type robot capable of 65 facial expressions. A gymnast-type robot ‘Atlas’ and a girl-shaped robot ‘Eva’ that can perform Korean musical storytelling, acting, and humor are all human-like shapes, so it feels much less strange. In 2018, Zurich University in Switzerland developed the dancing robot ‘ANYmal’. it has a rectangular body with 4 legs, equipped with AI software that analyzes the beat per minute (BPM), creates a movement that matches the speed, and then checks if the movement speed matches the music speed. The robot shows us how it feels music and dance to it like humans without relying on the programmed motion system.
On the other hand, it is also showing innovative ideas that humans and AI collaborate to destroy existing artistic concepts. Yamaha from Japan, famous for its musical instruments, mounted a number of sensors on the body of a dancer of Kaji Moriyama, identified movements, and showed an inverse performance of an AI piano with auto-accompaniment that automatically plays the melody.
AI already has the ability to imitate the paintings of genius painters such as Picasso or Rembrandt, and could even produce music that comes close to Mozart. Not only is it difficult to distinguish between AI artists and human artists, but rather, AI works are preferred, and the competition between AI and humans in the art market is becoming a reality. AI has advanced into the art field, which was the only for human beings; the emotional area. Is AI a human helper or vice-versa?
AI art will be difficult to approach from a traditional art history point of view, as stated in Arthur C. Danto’s “Art Apocalyptic”, which talks about the end of a great narrative that has dominated art history so far. However, by discussing and sharing emotions between humans and AI in the era of superhumans, arts can be enhanced, imagination can be strengthened, and the world can be made much less confusing. ‘Creative things’ and ‘Artistic things’ may not be the only unique areas that only humans can do, but the relationship between humans and technology will unfold and discover creativity and aesthetics.
Original article: https://weekly.donga.com/3/all/11/2039976/1
