Can AI optimize and enhance your life by its creativity?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been controversial for recent years. There are both positive and negative views towards it.
People who support AI-driven society mainly argue that AI would make our life more convenient and release us from simple chores or routine duties, we would get more free time to focus on other things we really want to do then. On the other hand, people who are skeptical may think that once AI becomes superior than human beings, all we would do are just obey the pseudo-recommendation, effectively orders, calculated and optimized by AI, and human beings would no longer make any decision because they will have lost their free will eventually. There is a famous saying, "AI (properly speaking, AGI) will reach Technological Singularity in 2045, " which implies AI would be out of control of human beings.
Well... looking into the way of how AI controls human beings generally and what might motive them to do so is quite interesting; however, in this article, I just want to pick one aspect, creativity, to think about the relationship between AI and human-society. Then, In the end of this article, I will show whether AI will be harmful to individual life or not from my own analysis and view.
The definition of creativity in the first place
If you look up 'creativity' in a dictionary it will show you like this: "the use of imagination or original ideas to create something;" moreover, we can classify 'creativity' in several type: combinational creativity, exploratory creativity, and transformational creativity.
・Combinational creativity is the ability to put random or seems-not-related things together to light up the hidden-insights.
・Exploratory creativity assess how you redefine your ideas and connect with others in pre-defined or limited set of rules.
・Transformational creativity let you change the concept of and the old view towards something: Copernican revolution.
Does creativity make sense to AI ?
First of all, does AI has those creativity I listed above, so far? Although it depends on how people understand and interpret, I think AI only has combinational and exploratory creativity as default.
In the first place, creativity is only possible if it is useful to humans, and it is only possible when humans give it value. In addition, the usefulness of humans in creativity should not be something aimed at, but rather something that has to happen incidentally, so there is no predetermined standard for it.
As for transformational creativity, it asks you to exceed and make new thing out of the existing rule and concept. Since AI does not have emotional senses and self-consciousness like humans do, even if it can do a lot of formal conceptual changes, there is no standard for what is good, and as long as it is not able to make a judgment or evaluation inside the algorithm, it is likely to create something that is either aimed at a fixed, expected range or ends up with no longer making any sense.
How AI supports human to create
So far we have focused on what AI can do on its own, especially in terms of creativity, but now let’s take a look at what it can do in collaboration with humans through some concrete examples.
Thera are a lot of AI tools or package made by engineers all over the world to let your creative works much easier and comfortable.
For example, there is a software called Teachable Machine made by Google.
This is a very simple machine learning tool. You just simply put a series of image or audio data as input, it automatically extracts the features of the data for you. You can just utilize the well-trained algorithm from it, and apply to your creation such as a website like below.
Another example, there is a software that enables you to make more art-like complicated creations by using Generative adversarial networks (GAN) algorithm called RunwayML.
GAN is pretty famous nowadays, but it is still difficult for a non-engineer person to program and implement the algorithm of that. RunwayML is as easily for using as Teachable Machine. Thus, we can create an art work by GAN just through some simple intuitive operations of RunwayML. The following is an instance showing imaginary dresses created by GAN model using RunwayML.
Key factor: data bias
There is one more easily-use software example that depixelize your blur image using GAN and GPU.
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1f9PEGwKkWIc-vT6xY1Wp37uR8Vzgs1_I?usp=sharing
If you successfully run the program, you will get an output like below.
As you can see from my example, although the result shows a clear image, it is apparently different person; what is more, it shows different race.
Because of the majority of AI engineer and the data we can reach are mostly from white people, especially white men, the output of AI tend to include more traits or habits got from white men; in other words, AI does not optimize for all people. Data bias is one of the biggest issues for developing AI.
AI by itself cannot improve and decide your life quality
Data bias will not disappear as long as the developers of each AI model or AI based software have their purpose for development and the environmental difference cause collecting biased-data. In addition, I argued that AI does not have transformational creativity before; therefore, we may reach a conclusion that AI does not deserve supervising your life or suggesting an optimized exciting plan for you by its creativity.
Nonetheless, AI is good enough at purpose-oriented works and creations and it does has other two creativity; hence, as a supportive tool which gives us incidental tips or insights for enhancing life, we could rely on it for some extend.
Our life is our own choices.
AI is no more than 'mirror' of our society.
We will keep creating our exiting life by ourselves.
