Is Art Generated by Artificial Intelligence Really Art?
Kaboom! It’s 2020 and although there still aren’t flying cars roaming around in the sky like we thought 2020 would look like back in the ’90s, we now have much more bizarre issues to deal with. More specifically, as Machine Intelligence is shaking the ground under your feet with its new wonderful outcomes every single day that makes you want to scream “Amazeballs!” out loud, we now have serious questions related to AI that we need answers to.
- Is art generated by Artificial Intelligence really art?
- Is AI-generated art blurring the definition of Artists?
It’s pretty mind-boggling already that we have come to a state where we are now witnessing the auction of artwork generated by Artificial Intelligence.
“Edmond de Belamy” is a portrait painting produced by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in 2018 by Paris-based arts-collective “Obvious”. It became a pervading hot topic when Christie’s promulgated its decision to auction the artwork as the first artwork created using AI to be featured in a Christie’s auction. It surpassed pre-auction estimates and sold the artwork for $432,500. This big sale was labelled as historic by many publications within the broader timeline of art produced using AI.
We all know how artists sign their artwork with their initials or surnames, right? In case of the “Edmond de Belamy”- the artwork generated by AI, it is signed at the bottom right with a part of the algorithm code that produced it.
So naturally, this news ignited debates about whether art generated by AI could really be called art or not. As creatives popularly say that art is a product of the human mind which is an expression of emotions and ideas while showcasing human skillfulness in a breathtakingly mesmerizing way and hence suggesting that what AI generates under the directive of computer scientists is not art or at all creative.
To answer whether AI art is really art or not, let’s have an idea of how AI Art is created. Most AI artwork that has come to light over the past couple of years have used a class of algorithms called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These algorithms are called “adversarial” because there are two sides to them: One generates random images while the other has been taught, through the input, how to judge these images and deem which best align with the input.
For instance, someone who is an artist or a computer scientist could supply drawings from the past three hundred years into a generative AI algorithm. Then the algorithm produces a wide variety of output images by trying to mimic these inputs. The person is then required to screen the output images to choose the one he or she wants to use. Across this entire process, the artist or the computer scientist actively plays a very important role in feeding the algorithm and may also modify the algorithm from time to time to get his or her preferred outputs. The fun part about AI art is that generative algorithms can produce images that may surprise even the artist himself!
Now let’s look at this issue with bigger eyes that is, in a broader spectrum. We humans oftentimes consider nature to be a work of art when in fact the nature isn’t really a product of the human mind. If nature is a work of art, what resulted in the creation of nature should be considered art too. So science is art. If science is art, algorithms that enable you to see the art of problem-solving should be considered art too which leads us back to the people who come up with the algorithms in the first place. As mentioned earlier, the artist or computer scientist actively plays a role in feeding the algorithm that generates the final art and so, even though the final artwork might have surprised the artists or the computer scientists, the outputs didn’t just magically appear out of the blue. There was a very active process behind the creation of the final product and not to mention, the involvement of the human mind to produce the algorithm was always there. Hence in a broader spectrum even though it is debatable, AI art can really be considered art but can’t really replace actual artists nor can it end up blurring the definition of artists. AI isn’t a competitor to humans but rather a kind of assistance to humans to establish revolutionary changes with a view to making life easier.
Lastly, let’s not forget the saying, “Big or small, there is always a difference only you can make” to remind us all how none of us is truly replaceable as each and every one of us has something to give to this world and hence, simply labeling AI generated art as art isn’t going to take away the x-factor that artists have in them, nor is it going to create a replacement for artists.
Reference:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/ai-is-blurring-the-definition-of-artist
