Originally published in print, September 2021.
Artificial intelligence has firmly asserted itself as one of the most influential technological developments in recent decades- an influence that is beginning to make waves in the art industry, and may soon change the concept of creativity as we know it today. A rapidly increasing amount of artists are now experimenting with AI to support, enhance or replicate creativity, resulting in the emergence of new and exciting artistic forms. This technology comes with endless, sometimes unpredictable, possibilities that could revolutionize the ways in which we consume art.
AI predominantly fulfils three primary functions within the realm of art, that of an impersonator, collaborator, and lastly, the much debated role of independent creator. Some techniques that are frequently used to impersonate art through AI include style transfer and image to image translation. Style transfer uses deep neural networks to replicate, recreate and blend styles of artwork. It does this by identifying and combining the stylistic elements of one image and applying them to another. Chris Rodley’s viral creation, entitled Dinosaur x Flower, is an aesthetically pleasing fusion of floral and animalistic imagery which demonstrates the broad scope of creative opportunity offered by style transfer. Similarly, image to image translation can alter the appearance of an image; in this case it allows artists to transform an image’s context, for instance by changing the season, weather, or time in which it is set.
The prolific German artist, Mario Klingemann, is a leading pioneer in the AI art movement. Klingemann is a widely admired resident of Google Arts and Culture, most known for his use of code, algorithms and neural networks. Reflecting on one of his most recent exhibitions, Memories of Passersby, Klingemann acknowledged the risk that comes with using AI to create art saying “it’s a system where you only have a certain amount of foresight about what it might do”. It is likely that it is this mystery and volatility which makes AI-driven art so fascinating. The allure of Memories of Passersby stems from the technology’s ability to generate unique portraits in real-time. In Klingemann’s eyes, the art is not the images, which disappear, but the computer code that creates them.
AI is also being used to make engagement with art a more interactive and accessible experience. Some of you may have heard of the widely popular ‘Art Selfie’ feature on Google’s Arts and Culture app, an impressive exploration of the power of machine learning and facial recognition technology. Users’ selfies are matched with their artistic doppelgangers, selected from an extensive database of portraits from museums and galleries worldwide. Machine learning technology achieves this by mapping each individual’s face and matching them to portraits with the highest percentage of resemblance – ingenious, isn’t it?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many people are skeptical of AI’s budding relationship with art, and it is a topic which has raised a vast amount of profound questions, critique and ethical issues. Some of the concerns raised by the rise of AI include, but are not limited to, value alignment, dataset challenges, privacy concerns, security issues, and, of course, how to assess the creativity of computational systems. The Turing test, invented by Alan Turing, strives to address some of the ethical issues surrounding AIby determining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human. Turing proposed that a computer can be said to possess intelligence if a human interrogator cannot tell the difference between a computer and human respondent when communicating with them. However, researchers in recent years have shed light on the limitations of this as a method of assessing the intelligence of computers, as they can be taught to manipulate this test, rendering it inaccurate. Evidently, the questions raised by AI are not easily answered, but one thing that is certain is that it will indefinitely mould life and art as we know it.
