Artists have been experimenting with AI for their art virtually since the technology’s inception.
Harold Cohen was a computer art pioneer who created, beginning in the 1970s, an art-creating software named AARON — “the world’s first pure AI artist,” according to a description of one of his works in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Cohen’s program, on the other hand, was not open source and hence not publicly available, and development on AARON came to a stop with Cohen’s death in 2016.
However, AI in the arts has “exploded” in recent years, according to Drew Hemment, a professor of Data Arts & Society at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Alan Turing Institute. This is due to “advances in technology as well as the emergence of strong new tools.”
Because of this, AI offers artists superpowers. Today, artists may create pictures, sounds, or anything else they can think of that harness the creative abilities of previous artists and blend human intuition with powerful computer technology.
We are in the middle of a very, very fast development, if not a revolution, of robots seeping into these creative art areas. Creativity is the capacity to connect, develop new combinations, produce new ideas based on previous ideas, draw analogies, and construct metaphors.
So, whatever risks these new technologies may provide, it is apparent that AI is here to stay in the creative domain. Just as we have essentially delegated our navigating skills to Waze and our information collecting to Google, we will increasingly delegate portions of the creative process to machines.