The famous Mona Lisa. Elegy for Fanny. Lake Swan. These are the kinds of works that immediately spring to mind whenever the subject of art is brought up; they are instances of really massive manifestations of creativity that have stirred people’s emotions for millennia.
The arts are typically seen as uniquely human endeavors. Recently, however, computers have become adept at doing tasks that previously stumped them (such telling the difference between a picture of a dog and a cat). This is all because to the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
Because of how quickly technology is developing, we wonder whether AI is capable of producing artistic works.
Everything is subjective, even art.
There is no simple solution to this problem since there is no simple definition of art. Just the variety across genres is astounding, as seen by the introduction’s examples. It’s true that both Leonardo da Vinci and Banksy are artists. Both Beethoven and Beyoncé may be considered musicians. The performing arts include both Swan Lake and Hamilton.
Even between humans, opinions vary on whether or not an inverted urinal constitutes art. Let’s make things easy for ourselves and classify everything (writing, painting, dancing, etc.) as creative endeavors. We may also embrace the adage, “l know it when I see it.”
The time for the future is now
The issue of “can AI produce art?” is, in a sense, moot since there are already examples of such creations.
Returning to Beethoven, a team of musicologists, composers, and computer scientists recently completed his unfinished 10th Symphony by using artificial intelligence to do it.
The whole canon of the renowned composer and information on his creative process were put into a machine. When listening to one of the iterations, music historians and specialists were unable to distinguish between Beethoven’s original notes and the AI’s modifications, but the team realized they were on the right road.
Also, have a look at these paintings that wouldn’t be out of place above the fireplace in a medieval castle. However, instead of a paintbrush, lines of code were used to create this masterpiece. There are a lot of AI-made works that could easily be put in a surrealism gallery at a museum. Simply enter terms like “a summer day” or “city lights at night,” and the AI model will generate an image.
When we think about art as a way to express creativity, however, we find that AI art doesn’t do a good job. After all, the idea behind machine learning-based AI is to use what you learn from a lot of data to predict what will happen in the future.
Some could argue that this is only a technicality and that AI artwork should be considered art. Given the “I know it when I see it” standard, does it matter if there was no apparent emotional investment in the production?
As technology keeps getting better and better, this will become a more important and urgent problem. Today’s conversation has brought up several topics and probably even more questions, but there is currently no clear solution. We don’t see any signs of it changing any time soon.