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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans.

We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists without classical training that encounter these attributes on their own, and manipulate them in different ways. I think part of the reason why the arts are such a great platform for human creativity is because of this.

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>I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans

That debate goes way, way back. In 1966, a researcher at Bell Labs used a computer to generate an image in the style of Mondrian. The images were presented to 100 people; not only were test subjects unable to identify the computer-generated image, but the majority liked the computer-generated image better. The computer-generated art is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection.

http://thekidsroad.com/assets/images/blog/blog-content/mushu...

I believe the essence is this: The computer creates some number of pieces, from which a human selects the one that is shown.

Brian Eno quote about a related field: music "The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement"

>I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans

Does they though? I bet in 10 years, if you walked into an art gallery, you'd still be drawn to certain pieces and not others regardless of wether they were created by human or AI.

As AI improves it will get ever closer to that "hand-made" look to the point we probably won't be able to tell, especially with something with as much intrinsic variety as creativity. In fact, if AI is trying to copy a "human style", we might be able to define how narrow or broad our range of creativity really is.

I think there are (at least) two parts to evaluating a creative product. The aesthetics and the context around it. I think AI will do a wonderful job of generating aesthetically pleasing art, but could an AI generate something like Guernica? when you look at Guernica you can feel the pain and trauma behind it, when you learn that Picasso was compelled to create it after Guernica was firebombed it adds something special to the final product.

At it's current state I have doubts about AI's ability to create new movements in art as well, a lot of the AI floating around there is very good at "coloring within the lines". If I watch a video of NFL highlights on YouTube I will be recommended more NFL highlights, where is the discovery? A fundamental challenge for AI art is can it create new genres. Could an AI create Jazz? How about Hip-Hop which has some Jazz elements. Could an AI create cubism? Guess we'll have to see.

You could feed a machine with context, on top of feeding it with existing imagery, or any kind of additional data you can imagine. A more sophisticated version could scrape a certain amount of "drama" for instance. Input from different news sources could be programmed to affect art style. You could enable artistic "moods" based on a set of random parameters. Each new source of data would affect its ability to generate new content. Given the fluctuating definition of art, I see no reason why AI wouldn't be able to generate original artworks in the future and trigger human emotions in the process. A new machine-generated artistic movement sounds much more complex but may well happen further down the line.

I fully agree. I believe that AI will be used in the future to pump out aesthetically pleasing, but "meaningless" art. The type of art that would be hung on a living room wall to bring the room together.

I am skeptical how much art by AIs will actually feature in museums and exhibits. High-caliber art is very reliant on its emotional context and the message that the artist is trying to convey with the piece. However, I could see AI art featuring when an artist invents a new algorithm or new AI-based technique. Again, going back to the context of the artist and the piece itself.

I'll never understand a bat and they'll never understand me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

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