- Anyone that's an artist,
you know that there's really creative parts
about making art,
and then there's also the technical side
where you just have to spend a lot of time
doing some really tedious work
to make sure that the art comes out great.
And I thought to myself,
"What if I can get a robot, an AI,
to do the tedious things
and leave the creative things up to me?"
So my whole goal is to try
and make this robot as creative as I am.
I know it'll never be an artist,
because I'm the artist and it doesn't have a message
that it wants to tell people.
But I do think that I can actually codify
my creative process.
This has just been 15 years back and forth
trying to make it more and more creative every time,
trying to make it more like me when I paint.
And, in this process,
I've not only learned a lot about myself,
I've learned a lot about creativity,
I've learned a lot about human creativity,
and I've learned a lot about how my own brain works.
And that's really exciting for me.
(inspirational music)
I'm Pindar Van Arman, I'm an AI artist,
also consider myself a crypto artist,
and I make art with artificial intelligence.
A lot of us, we just have a need to create,
whatever that creative urge is,
and, for me, it came into painting.
But then, to make ends meet, I got into graphic design
and I became a graphic designer
right at the .com around 2000.
And, at that point, I noticed that a lot of the people
at this company that I was at were learning programming
and becoming very successful with programming.
So I thought I'd give it a shot,
and it just came easy to me.
And I started dabbling with making art
with all the technology I was learning.
And I did that for about five years,
until a friend told me about this big contest
called the DARPA Grand Challenge.
The government put it up a million dollar reward
to anyone that could win a race.
The catch, of course, was that this race with cars
couldn't have a driver.
And all of us had spent about a year
designing these self-driving cars,
doing all the artificial intelligence.
We were the sixth, we didn't finish.
We crashed into a tree at 82 miles.
But I left that project like really deep
in artificial intelligence
and wanting to do my own AI art project.
I started looking around for AI art projects
I could apply my skills to, and I thought to myself,
"What if I had this AI help me with my art?"
(gentle music)
In the very beginning,
when I was designing my first painting robots,
it wasn't to make these amazing painting robots
that were gonna be artificially creative.
My family was just starting out.
And, all of a sudden, I found myself
spending more and more time with my children.
I just started thinking about,
"Is there a way I could start painting again
while also putting my kids to sleep every night?"
And so the very first painting robots
were just these practical machines
that were supposed to buy me time.
As I made my painting robots,
I started realizing I could have 'em do more.
Like I could have them help me out with contrast,
actually help me out with compositions.
These were very simple AI algorithms.
And then, one day I set up a robot, I started painting.
I went away and I came back at night to see how it's doing.
And there it was sometime during the day,
and I don't know when, it dropped its brush.
But it was painting away really blindly.
And then, it occurred to me as like this is just a printer.
I thought to myself, "What would make
this machine intelligent?"
And that was the breakthrough.
It had to actually look at and watch what it was doing
and react to it.
And this goes all the way back to Paul Clay, the painter,
he mentioned the creative process as an artist
makes a brushstroke, takes a step back,
looks at that brushstroke,
wonders what it's doing on the canvas.
And then, based on that brushstroke,
makes another brushstroke over and over again.
And then, maybe halfway through the painting,
takes a big step back and says, "Where is this painting at?"
And I realized until my robots were doing that,
they were just simply, blindly painting by numbers.
And so the big breakthrough is, at that point,
I was like, "You know what?
I'm gonna put a camera on this
and I'm gonna have the robots take pictures constantly.
And then, they're gonna make their future decisions
based on what's happening on the canvas."
From that point on, the AI kind of exploded.
Now that it could interact and react
to what was happening on the canvas,
I could write a quick algorithm that would say,
"Hey, control the contrast."
And the robot would be painting,
and every couple hundred strokes it looked for contrast.
If contrast went bad, it would adjust
and paint the whites whiter and the darks darker.
(gentle music)
There's two basic kinds of paintings I do.
One is where I leave the robot by itself
and it's just a test of how smart it's become,
how creative it has become.
About 25% of those paintings come out good.
And when I say good, they rarely come out great.
Because, of course, it doesn't have the sophistication
of a human artist looking at it.
But the other kind of art I make is where I work
very closely with my robots back and forth.
I might check on it every four hours
and I might see, what algorithm is it running?
Is it trying to increase the contrast
or is it trying to make the colors more vibrant?
And I'll tweak it.
Like I'll actually play with the levers
and give it a direction,
and push it to do things that I want it to do.
One comes out a lot better than the other.
But it is still interesting to see
what it can do on its own.
So every so often, I just see what it can do on its own.
(gentle music)
In the beginning, the AI was really easy.
Like, for example, I used K-means clustering
to separate the colors
and cluster parts of the canvas into different colors.
And then, once I added the feedback loops,
which is the process by which the robot would take pictures,
study the picture to see what it needs to do next,
everything got a lot more complex.
And I started wondering if the robot
could actually be truly creative.
And I looked into it and I learned about deep learning,
and then I started seeing what deep learning could do.
And I wrote my first deep learning
algorithm style transfers.
A lot of people have used this in their phones.
Use the filter, and it'll turn your photo into a Van Gogh.
And I thought, "Wow,
this algorithm's actually adding style."
And then, I started looking at more
and I started learning about another one,
generative adversarial networks,
a different kind of neural network.
And it's not actually one neural network, but it's two,
and the two are arguing with each other.
What happens is one network is charged with imagining things
and just randomly imagining things.
And the other network is charged with critiquing
with the first ones coming up with
and giving the critique to the first network.
And the first network responds to the criticism.
It's trained on something, anything.
For example, let's use faces,
'cause I do a lot of portraits.
I will show my GANs 10,000 faces, 10,000 portraits,
and it will study them.
After the GAN has studied 10,000 faces,
it will then get in an argument with itself
where it tries to create new faces from nothing.
And you gotta imagine it's two different neural networks,
one of 'em has seen 10,000 faces, is an absolute expert.
The other is naive, has never seen a face before,
but it tries its best.
It's like an artist just trying to create something.
The expert says, "You know what?
You're trying to make a face
but it's not quite there, try again."
But it doesn't just say try again,
and it gives it a little bit of knowledge,
trades a little bit of its statistics to the other GAN.
Trains it just a touch.
After about 4,000 iterations,
very quickly this GAN that's trying to imagine a face
will actually start imagining some pretty realistic faces.
The new faces that are being imagined by these GANs
have never existed before, they're completely artificial.
And they don't look like anyone,
but they still look like faces.
You train this GAN on something
and it will start creating artificial versions of that,
and the artificial versions of that are remarkably creative.
(gentle music)
The creative mind of the robots
is actually 24 different AI algorithms
fighting with each other.
And the way it does that is that it's been trained.
I train these GANs on a lot of things.
One is historical art.
Another thing I train the GANs
is all the art that my robots have made previously.
And from this historical art and previous art,
it tries to mix 'em all together
and then create something new.
And this is made to mimic
Marvin Minsky's "Society of Minds."
He has a theory that our mind
isn't just a single mind governing our actions.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, maybe thousands
of different minds in our head,
all trying to guide what we're doing.
So, in the same way, my robot
has about 24 different algorithms
and they're all fighting for control of the brush.
And if you watch the robot paint,
you can actually see the different minds
come to the forefront and take over,
like there's an eye somewhere in the painting
and it'll concentrate and develop that eye.
Another algorithm I have will sharpen
the details around an eye,
because it's very important that eyes are symmetrical.
If the robot realizes that the eyes aren't symmetrical
and it's doing a portrait,
it'll actually give a lot of attention
to making the eye symmetrical.
I turn some of them on, and then off at times,
they have different levers and different volumes.
But they're all trying to influence
what's happening with the painting.
(gentle music)
BitGANs are my most recent AI project
and it's gone in the opposite direction of everyone else,
and it's actually getting a lot
of attention because of that.
So I start with these pixelated images, 32 by 32,
thousands of them.
A lot of them are handmade,
some of them are made by combining the handmade ones,
but all of them are unique.
And all of them are fed
into a generative adversarial network,
which then studies them and then creates bitGANs.
And when you look at these bitGANs, that's what you'll see.
You'll see a pixelated field and it'll look like static.
And slowly images will emerge,
and then, all of a sudden, you'll see
what I'm calling a bitGAN.
And it'll appear, it'll dance around a little,
and it'll disappear, almost dreamlike.
I love the way they look,
but I think a lot of it has to do with that,
"There's something familiar about how bitGANs move around."
And I think that's because there's something familiar
about how these generative adversarial networks
are creating them
compared to with how our own brains create things.
One of the things that I've noticed
about the whole AI art industry is,
is we are obsessed with how big our neural networks are,
and that seems to be driving it.
And, for some reason, that's never spoken to me.
So what's spoken to me is the story
behind what the AI is doing or emotions.
And so all this time I've been trying
to be super technical and cutting edge
when it comes to neural networks,
all I had to do was make something
that spoke to people personally.
A whole community has popped up around the bitGANs
and I didn't see this happen.
I just released 64 bitGANS as NFTs.
I guess they caught people's imagination,
there was a rush for them.
An NFT is a non-fungible token.
That's a lot of words that people don't understand together.
But what it basically means is that there is now a way,
through cryptocurrency, to make digital art unique.
And by unique, I mean only one person can own it.
And this has been a very good boon for AI artists,
all digital artists,
because we finally have a way to be taken seriously
and finally have a way to give value to this art.
The bitGANs are one of those ideas
that like I don't even know if it's my own idea
as much as all these bitGAN enthusiasts
that are getting involved.
And there's actually a plan
to teach the community how to make 'em
as soon as 1,024 have been made.
The last half of the project,
I'm gonna release everything to anyone that's interested,
we're gonna open source it.
Then I'm gonna show everyone how to make bitGANs
and we're gonna see where that goes.
And my big hope is that this is something
that brings people into AI art.
This would be an absolute smashing success
if it got even a couple dozen people into AI art
and showed them how interesting that was,
but I'm hoping for far more.
(gentle music)
The future of AI and art
is probably gonna be very similar to the future
of AI in every single job category,
is we're just gonna have AI be a very,
very capable assistance for us for whatever we do,
and it's gonna be the same with art.
I often get artist's block, or similar to writer's block.
And whenever that happens, I just turn the AI on
and ask the AI to make some images.
And it starts making images
and I don't even have to worry about it.
I can just go away for an hour and come back
and sometimes it breaks right through my artist block.
So I see AI as being, in the short term,
AI is gonna become very good studio assistance.
Longer term, I'm actually very bullish on the fact
that general AI will emerge.
And by general AI, I mean, we'll have
artificially intelligent sentient beings, machines.
What's really interesting about thinking
about sentient machines
is thinking about the art they would make.
But in the same way that we have different cultures
on this planet, and American art's
much more interesting to Americans than,
for example, let's say Bengalese art
is interesting to Americans and vice versa.
I imagine it'd be its own genre and enjoyed
by its own artists, and creators, and patrons, robots.
I think the long-term future
is robots are gonna be creating art, definitely.
But I think the big fans are gonna be other robots.
It's sometimes controversial when I say this,
but codifying my creative process
and teaching it to a robot has made me realize
that creativity isn't a purely human endeavor.
I'm noticing that robots and machines can create a lot.
There's once someone created a Pollock bot.
And the Pollock bot would follow
Jackson Pollock's process to the T.
It'd drip paint and drip paint,
and even white and black paint,
in even quantities,
and the painting came out
looking very much like at Jackson Pollock.
I realized that a lot of artists have these processes.
And a lot of these processes are just algorithms
that they repeat over and over and over again,
and that gives that artist the look.
And that look can be replicated by a machine,
and it just made me think that creativity for us
is a brand or is something that gives us a look,
but it's not a differentiator from machines.
There's this general narrative
that the machines are coming to take our jobs
and make us irrelevant.
But I don't see it like that at all.
I'm no more threatened by AI becoming an artist
than I am by a human graduating art school.
I'm interested in what it has to say about the universe
if for whatever it becomes sentient and makes art,
I think that'll be fascinating.
And I think it'd be fascinating,
all of a sudden, we would have someone that shares
what are we doing here, from its perspective,
but I'm not threatened by it, nor should anyone be.
There's room for everyone.