Here's an idea.
The question is not whether computers
and artificial intelligence can make art.
The question is whether we will allow them to make art.
[DING]
From drawing machines to early digital art, and now AI,
we've wondered whether the fundamentally human
seeming endeavor of art making can be done by machines.
I say yes, absolutely it can.
But-- and it's that but that we have to work our way towards.
Let's start with some specifics.
I hope you're in the mood for jargon.
The Google Brain team, a machine intelligence team
focused on deep learning, has developed
Magenta, a piece of technology that
generates art and music using recurrent neural networks,
for example, after the un and semisupervised
computational feature extraction of preexisting works.
Basically a powerful computer learns
what art is by analyzing art.
And then it makes its own art based on that art.
In short, how cute?
It thinks it's people.
At Moogfest this year, the team played some of Magenta's music.
Here's a clip.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Catchy, so catchy.
Now Magenta isn't the only machine
making art, composing music, writing stories, et cetera--
far from it.
But it's recent, well appointed, and its creators' goals
are well documented.
In a recent blog post, Magenta researcher Douglas Eck
writes about how, in the short term,
they want to get this technology into the hands of artists
and see what they'll make, to build a community of people
doing this work.
Their long term goals are more, grand, let's say.
For example, Eck asks, how can we
make models like these truly generative, meaning start
from truly nothing to create truly something?
He also writes about how artists get
surprised by new discoveries and have
different interests over time.
He asks, how do we capture effects
like attention and surprise in a machine learning model?
The largest challenge Eck writes is
having a machine generate something that's
interesting over a long arc.
So much machine generated music and art
is good in small chunks, he writes.
So for everybody keeping track at home, that's figuring out,
one, how to have original ideas, two,
how to keep those ideas fresh, and three,
sequencing those ideas into a significant and pleasurable
final product.
Machine or not, that's just making art, period.
And to read the headlines, you would think that we are there.
Muse, captured, analyzed, deep learned, and neural networked,
prepare your soft, meaty body for the truly generative AI
masterpieces.
But-- and here's that but that I mentioned earlier-- as
I see it, there are at least two challenges
to overcome before we have our first AI Warhol.
The first challenge isn't everybody's favorite question,
but is it really art?
I say if you have to ask if it's art, it probably is.
The first challenge really has to do
with how audiences will or won't appreciate machine made works
as art.
This is going to seem backwards based on our conversation thus
far, but artists, machines, and artist-machine hybrids
for as long as there's been art have actually made art.
They've made works-- objects, media, performance,
software-- works.
What makes art is an audience.
An artist makes a work and audiences
turn that work into art through appreciation.
There are certain media styles, audiences,
and artists for whom this contract is
basically guaranteed.
Beautiful oil paintings, ballet, symphonies, Godard films,
are art.
Not because of a shared fundamental characteristic,
but because how and why we should appreciate
them is understood.
They're traditionally beautiful.
They are hard to make.
They tell a meaningful story, et cetera, et cetera.
But sitting still for a very long time?
Appreciable?
For some people, yeah.
An arrangement of curved sticks placed in a shallow stream?
Deeply affecting for me.
For others, stupid and meaningless.
Four minutes and 33 seconds of silence?
Hugely influential, but to some the pinnacle of the art
world's laziness, bravado, and hucksterism.
These are works some audiences don't turn into art, often
because it's unclear what about them deserves appreciation.
Machine generated works could have
an even harder time than sitting sticks and silence I think.
There are some new and exceptionally challenging
facets to its appreciation.
Up until this point, art practice
has sat atop a kind of poetry, a world of meaning,
sometimes hidden, but present, even and often especially
if it's not agreed upon.
Art has been a testament to the organization, technique,
or skill of a creator.
Even the "I could have done that stuff"
is the result of labor and sacrifice.
For better or worse, the human appreciation
of art by human beings is built on a framework that
values work, physical and intellectual,
meaning and intention, even when it's murky or unsuccessful,
and subjectivity, the perspectives
and background of the artist.
This framework applies not at all or in a totally different
way to entirely machine made work,
which is the direct result of a very different kind of labor,
which lacks intended meaning and which
is the result of zero subjectivity.
Or as discussed in our face swap episode,
is the result of experience totally unlike our own.
Now I'm not saying we can't or don't appreciate AI art,
or that machines aren't creative.
Just the nature of that creativity is hard for humans
to internalize.
Margaret Boden writes about how David Cope, composer
and pioneer of machine creativity,
destroying the database of his music
writing program EMI after 25 years because,
quote, "Even those who did appreciate EMI's scores
tended to regard them not as music but as computer output.
And as such, they were seen as infinitely reproducible
and devalued accordingly."
Ironic, Boden points out, now that EMI is decommissioned.
It's also worth noting, I think, that many successful machine
made works, like the music of EMI or Cope's
subsequent machine creativity project, Emily
Howell, or the screenplay for Sun Springs,
rely heavily on interpretation by humans,
making the machine prominence of the source
a novelty which excuses the search for meaning
instead of encouraging it.
By which I mean, it's difficult to say
what Benjamin, the AI that wrote Sun Springs could possibly
be getting at, because Benjamin is an artificial intelligence.
The common sense read is that Benjamin is getting nothing.
Whatever you need to know what the presence of the story,
I'm a little bit of a boy on the floor.
This reflexive reaction is boring and hard to avoid
really.
In time maybe it'll fade, or maybe we'll
learn how to appreciate machine meaning,
or maybe machines will create more humanlike meaning.
That's probably the most likely.
But for now, both critically and practically, humans
need to be close to machine generated works
so they're in human terms, so they
fit within the traditional structures
we often argue make art what it is.
Which brings us to robot Warhol complication number two.
In addition to asking if we can appreciate machine made works
on their own terms, I think we may ask if machines are really
making that work.
Bear with me here for a second.
Remember Eck saying that he wanted to arrive
at a truly generative process?
That challenge has two parts.
The first is figuring out how to make Magenta's creativity
causing algorithms and sources as chaotic as a human artist.
Primarily this may lead us to reflect on how or if
any creative practice is truly generative.
Is originality simply a cipher for
unknowable yet deterministic complexity?
Cf.
Barthes, "Death of the Author," Kirby Ferguson,
"Everything is a Remix," the creative ether,
there are no new ideas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The second part of the truly generative challenge,
the part that Eck doesn't really get into,
has to do with independence and intent.
Machines have been making art for a very long time,
but they've always been guided by humans.
Brushes have painted paintings.
Typewriters have written literature-- cameras, photos,
computers, movies, video games, music.
But none of these things are independent.
They require direct and sometimes constant
human involvement.
And humans, not the tools, are rightly
credited with making the work.
Magenta and technology like it complicates this.
For now Magenta is like a typewriter, a tool for artists.
But the hope it seems is that it'll eventually
create art by itself, if it hasn't already.
The Brain team created a complex, powerful typewriter
that may eventually write something original,
fresh, and significant without constant and direct
human involvement.
But will it ever do so without human involvement period?
Like Twitter bots, which can assemble
remarkably human seeming thoughts,
and aleatoric music or visual art,
which mitigates the conscious intentions of the artist,
artificial intelligence may assemble source material
in unimagined ways.
But are these algorithms so far removed
from the intentions or aims of its programmers?
I would wager that the truly generative
isn't truly original since true originality exists perhaps
in name only.
The truly generative, I think, is the truly independent.
Speaking with the MIT Tech Review,
Georgia Tech Professor Mark Reidl put it like this.
"Neural networks or kind of in the imitation mode.
You can pipe in the works of the classics,
and they'll learn patterns.
But they need to learn creative intent somewhere."
This is especially interesting given the current conversation
about the ripple effect of algorithmic decision making.
Not decision down by algorithms, but the decision
making processes of humans who design algorithms.
The romance is that algorithms decide.
They sort and measure so that we don't have to.
They do it better and faster and more logically
and with less bias.
The reality is that humans bring their humanity and bias
to every piece of technology they build,
even if it operates autonomously.
This is what leads to situations where, even though they're
placed algorithmically, Google searches for popular male
African American names are more likely to generate
ad results suggested of arrest.
Or even though it's determined algorithmically,
people who live in areas with a dense Asian population
were automagically charged more for online SAT prep.
Tons of sources for these stories
and a lot more in the doobly-doo by the way.
Of course we'll hope that machine
made art isn't literally racist, but it's
naive to assume creative tech can shun human intent.
Maybe there's a watering down process underway where people
design an algorithm which designs.
another algorithm which designs another
until all of the humanity is scrubbed away.
And also it's the singularity.
And I for one welcome our new robot blah, blah, blah, blah.
But for now, and in the near future,
Magenta isn't flying solo.
It's autonomous, yes, impressively so.
But will its relationship to Google ever
be besides the point?
Will it ever not be a project of the Brain team, who
will probably continue writing blog posts about it, who
maintain its operation and manage its technology?
The question concerning artificial intelligence
then isn't, can machines make art, because they already do.
One question is, will we allow machines
to make art by themselves?
What conditions must be met for us
to look artificially intelligent art output
and think of that work not as agentive, not
as doing work at the command of a human
or extending human capability, but as independently derived?
How can we see a machine as having made its own art?
And pending that, another question
is which of us, which we, will appreciate that art?
And how will it be appreciated?
We can easily find novelty in machine works,
but will humans always be the gold standard
for meaningful art making?
Will AI produced works ever be treated as art is traditionally
treated-- widely traded, curated, collected, critiqued.
And maybe more importantly, can it
ever be understood as created by an artist,
but divorced at last from all the messy stuff often
considered inextricable from the practice-- ideas, feelings,
whims, labor, and humanity?
What do you all think?
Will we ever see machine made works as made independently
of human control?
And under what conditions do you think that might happen?
And when or if it does, how do you think we
will appreciate those things?
How will that appreciation differ maybe from the way
that we've appreciated art up until that point?
Let us know in the comments, and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comments response video,
we talked about your thoughts regarding "Zhaif 4 Laif."
Also there were a lot requests for "Zhaif 4 Laif" merchandise,
which, we're going to work on that.
We just released a hat, so we've got to give that a little
while, I'm told, that that's the best practice,
to not just release like a thousand T-shirts
and merch things all at the same time.
But the next time we have an opportunity
to release something that makes sense to do it, rest assured,
it will have the zhaif on it.
And in case you missed it, yesterday we actually released
an Idea Channel episode that was written
by an artificial intelligence.
It was trained on the entirety of the Idea Channel corpus,
almost five years worth of scripts
as kind of an experiment of what it's
like to do that kind of thing, what
it's like to experience it.
So if you want to watch that, we'll
put a link in the doobly-doo, and also probably something
around here, or way over there, somewhere.
But most importantly, it was so great to see everybody
at VidCon.
It was just-- VidCon is always a blast,
and I think it keeps getting better and better.
And it's awesome to see the same people every year.
It's awesome to meet new people.
So I just want to say, thank you to everyone
who came to the panels that I moderated,
who came to the meetup, who just stopped me to say hey.
It was-- yeah, it was a lot of fun.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And tweet of the week comes from Darcy Paynter who points us
towards a clipping music video.
If you don't know Clipping, they're like a sort of noise,
hip hop group slash person.
They're really great.
I really like their work.
And in this music video, there is not
only zhaif inspired editing, but there just
are zhaifs, like well known, animated zhaifs
used to illustrate some of the lyrics in the music video.
And it's really-- it's very interesting.
And also I just like the song.
I think it's worth a watch.
Just fair warning though, there is some language.
I mean, there's language in many places.
There are four letter words.
Well there-- I mean, they're-- OK, you know what I'm saying.
[DING]