Photo credit of Donald Trump in the style of Francis Bacon: Open Art AI
One of the most notable assaults on humanity’s intellectual stronghold in recent history came in 1997. The battleground was New York City, and the combatants were chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Over a six-game series, the supercomputer squeezed Kasparov in the Spanish opening, while showing finesse in the English and the Caro-Kann, and resolve against the Réti, a chess opening Kasparov had selected due to its open-endedness, intending to confuse the machine. The series ended in fireworks and dismay for the flesh when the artificial intelligence computer played a knight sacrifice in the final game. A sacrifice, a move in which a player gives up a piece in exchange for a piece of lower value, is a move that had previously been reserved for humans exclusively. To play one effectively, the player must analyse many permutations and assess whether the potential gain justifies the cost. In Deep Blue’s case, it did not arrive at this move on its own, as it had been programmed into its opening database that morning by skilled players. Deep Blue went on to win this match, and ever since AI has marched on.
Modern chess AIs reject all the common wisdom of the game, playing sacrifices with little regard for material totals, and willingly entering into incredibly precarious positions that a human grandmaster wouldn’t dare play. This is because we sapiens often evaluate chess positions using intuition. We look at the board and feel the position using our prior experience to inform us. Thoughts like “that weak king could lead to problems”, “my pieces are far more active”, and “her position is paralysed” come to mind. This sometimes leads us astray, leading us to be afraid of threats that aren’t there. Chess AIs can navigate positions that resemble minefields using calculated steps, analysing every relevant permutation with blistering speed. While a young Kasparov was rising to the top of the chess world, cognitive psychologists were learning about the nature of the human brain. We can run permutations like computers do, but we do it nowhere near as efficiently, and it requires a great amount of effort, creating a fundamental difference in the way humans and machines approach tasks with well-defined rules such as chess. Modern chess AIs will always beat the best representatives of humankind, and as such the best players are now students of the machine.
While AIs have dominated the world of well-defined games, we have taken solace in the idea that no machine could gain mastery of the distinctly human endeavour of art. Our complex brains are wired with richly interconnected neurons that allow us to store experiences and support symbolic thinking that is unique, which we can then impart into our creations. Recently, however, the internet has been swept by a trend of AI art in which the user simply inputs a prompt and is met with a composition informed by the prompt. The results are impressive and somewhat eerie – sometimes the AI produces a composition with artistic flair that more literally recreates the prompt, and sometimes it produces a more nuanced composition that people are eager to attribute some sort of meaning to. While these pieces are often impressive from a technical standpoint, it is my opinion that AIs cannot overtake humans in the realm of art as they did in chess. The wave of AI art that has cropped up has demonstrated the importance of artistic intent in the consumption and enjoyment of art. While there is nothing wrong with simply enjoying a piece of art for what it is, many connoisseurs of art appreciate the meaning with which their favourite pieces are imbued by the artist. Although the initial attraction is often the technical finesse of the artist or the style of the piece, sustained enjoyment can be found in untangling the themes and emotion that the artist intended to communicate.
Referring back to cognitive psychology, when the rules for a problem are defined, we approach it in an algorithmic and steady manner. When the rules are less defined, as is the case in art, bursts of insight are a far more integral part of the process. This conjures images of a renaissance painter such as Leonardo da Vinci in his studio, having experienced an epiphany about his most recent work, slashing at the canvas with his brush as though it were a sword and burning his artistic vision into the composition. This passion and intent on behalf of the artist is something that we appreciate which, in my mind, cannot be replicated by an AI, which approaches art in the same algorithmic manner as it approaches chess.
The pieces of art produced by AIs would be impressive technically if composed by a human, however it is my fear that despite this, the art produced by an AI will scarcely be remembered five days from now, while we appreciate The Last Supper five hundred years removed. We still look at The Doctor by Luke Fildes and attempt to understand his vision for the characters and their backstories, the complex emotions that they feel, and the reservoir of experiences which he tapped into when composing the piece. If you imagine that the same piece was created by an AI, the contrast is obvious; the human product feels nearly enchanted in comparison.
The capacity of artificial intelligence has increased in leaps and bounds in the past twenty five years, from machine’s first victory against the world’s top chess player, to becoming the undisputed strongest chess players on the planet, to their first forays into the new frontier of art. While such a progression is novel and intriguing on the surface, there is something profoundly existential about seeing a machine recreate one of our most distinctly human abilities. Some are filled with dread at the idea that an AI can produce compositions free from aberrations and distortions which previously characterised AI-generated images; perhaps it feels as though an outsider is peering into the human soul and will momentarily step inside. The reality is that AI will continue to improve and venture into other varieties of art. Despite this, I think that there is something irrefutable about the value of the vision and intent of the artist when it comes to any piece of art, which a machine is unable to mimic irrespective of its accrual of technical skill. This suggestion likely goes against the grain in modern times with many favouring a postmodern approach to artistic critique, which is valid and valuable, however I feel that in the absence of a human artist, there is something irrevocably absent from art.
