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THIS IS THE YASMIN-DISCUSSIONS DIGEST
Today's Topics:
1. AI and Art...dangerous art ? (YASMIN DISCUSSIONS)
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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2019 18:31:08 +0200
From: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@ntlab.gr>
To: yasmin_discussions@ntlab.gr
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] AI and Art...dangerous art ?
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<mailman.11.1561566749.25463.yasmin_discussions_ntlab.gr@ntlab.gr>
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Jon Ippolito et yasminers,
Jon ,thanks for launching the discussion AI and Art- which I fear
merits discussion- for those of us who have been around the AI track
about seven times- this time it is getting our attention. Thouseef
Syed in our ArtSciLab has developed an AI/Machine learning virtual
assigned- designed to interact with the 30 or so people who use the
lab in some way ( a hamlet in my metaphor of our being part of
archipelago of artsciencetech villages, with Leonardo and many other
boats transfering merchandise and ideas between them). The virtual
assistant is called Michele Besso (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso ) Besso for short.
(https://artscilab.atec.io/projects/besso)
I remember 50 years ago when Aaron Cohen had an ahha moment when his
colleague AARON who was 'born' in 1973 ( created ) (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON ) started collaborating with him
rather than being a tool: he said "If what AARON is making is not
art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does
it differ from the 'real thing?' If it is not thinking, what exactly
is it doing?"- at some point the interaction between the human and the
code became symbiotic modifying the human's thinking as well as the
code's structure. (thank you Bernard Stiegler)
Besso has been talking and listening to the lab members for about 6
months and now remembers discussions that the individual people have
forgotten and can make connections between incidents or find patterns
in the questions and answers. Besso has yet started creating art on
his own, but he will soon, I suspect, just by sonifying the data being
fed to him using our data stethoscope software
(https://atec.utdallas.edu/content/data-stethoscope/ ).
I just fininished reading Stuart Kauffman's brilliant new book (
http://malina.diatrope.com/2019/06/26/1-book-that-made-roger-happy-1-that-made-him-unhappy-1-that-he-has-yet-to-read-so-his-future-state-of-mind-is-un-prestatable-due-to-constraint-closure/)
A World Beyond Physics: The emergence of evolution and Life; Stuart A.
Kauffman, Oxford University Press, 2019 ISBN 978-0-19-087133-8. It
seems to me to be relevant to your provocations. Perhaps this time
around the degree of complexity of the internest and its associated
human and AI-beings will lead to , (his neologism)"unprestatable"
forms of life ( Roy Ascott you only had to wait 40 years
http://eejournal.no/home/2018/3/2/consciousness-in-danger-roy-ascott
I hope other YASMINERS will respond to jon's provocations below
Roger Malina
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2019 11:52:09 -0400
From: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@ntlab.gr>
T-8
Hi everyone,
Since Yasmin appears ready to bloom again, I'll take this opportunity
to broach the subject of AI as art. To judge from a recent spate of
articles, artists may be no more immune to ouster by artificial
intelligence than truck drivers or Walmart cashiers. I have yet to
read any article that focuses on whether AI-driven art is good.
Instead they ask, is it art, or more often, can machines be
artists--and if so, will they replace artists?
The spring issue of the Swiss-based open-access journal MPDI, for
example, includes a claim that AIs can produce autonomous art by
Marian Mazzone and Ahmed Elgammal [1], as well as counterarguments by
Arthur Still and Mark d?Inverno [2] and Andreas Broeckmann [3]. Artist
Ernest Edmonds [4] argues for an intermediate position, in which AI
acts as a sort of communication medium between artists.
Apart from the general hoopla about machine learning making life
better (or taking your job), much of this art-related interest seems
precipitated by Christies' sale last October of an algorithmically
generated print for $400,000, because money. That auctioned AI is the
subject of Ian Bogost's piece for the Atlantic magazine [5], though
there are concurrent ripples in other creative industries, notably
Warner signing a record deal with a startup that makes music
algorithms [6].
While the radiologists and taxi drivers may be grappling for the first
time with whether robots will take their jobs, we artists have been
down this road before. A century ago, theorists like Walter Benjamin
wrung their hands over whether photography would make artists obsolete
thanks to its automated depiction of the natural world. Artists,
however, just kept on painting and in so doing shifted the definition
of what it meant to be an artist.
I don?t see how a similar vocational dodge will rescue doctors and
cabbies from the encroach of AI in the longer-term. However, it might
be instructive to note that most of the academic articles I cite above
implicitly or explicitly discount the idea of an artificial
intelligence as artist (5 out of 7 articles). So why the undeterred
attention on art and AI? Is it because artists are no longer the only
people capable of generating believable faces of people who don't
exist [7] or a video of the Mona Lisa chatting about the weather [8]?
My colleague and AI artist Sofian Audry pointed out that some artworld
insiders just smell a new business opportunity. They're already
thinking through the insurance risks, for chrissakes:
"If it's on a video screen, you're going to be thinking about the risk
management in the same way as you might with a Bill Viola exhibit or
another video piece. With Klingemann's AI-brain, there might be
additional risks with the algorithm itself. How do you know if the
algorithm or the artificial brain is somehow malfunctioning? If that
happens, does that constitute a damage to the work of art, or is it
simply an extension to the performance and how the artwork is
presenting itself?" [9]
At Glenn Smith's suggestion, Audry and I contributed an MDPI article
of our own. For us, the important issue is not whether an AI can be an
artist, but whether the artist that viewers construct from seeing an
AI artwork will be human or machine. Monkie selfies and computer
viruses loom large in our argument [10].
Cheers,
jon
______________________________
Jon Ippolito
Professor of New Media, University of Maine
Study Digital Curation online at http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
[1] Marian Mazzone and Ahmed Elgammal, "Art, Creativity, and the
Potential of Artificial Intelligence,"
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/26/htm
[2] Arthur Still and Mark d?Inverno, "Can Machines Be Artists? A
Deweyan Response in Theory and Practice,"
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/36/htm
[3] Andreas Broeckmann, "The Machine as Artist as Myth,"
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/25/htm
[4] Ernest Edmonds, "Communication Machines as Art,"
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/22/htm
[5] Ian Bogost, "The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here,"
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/ai-created-art-invades-chelsea-gallery-scene/584134/
[6] Dani Deahl, "Warner Music signed an algorithm to a record deal?
what happens next?"
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18283084/warner-music-algorithm-signed-ambient-music-endel
[7] Tom Simonite, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming for Our Faces,"
https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-fake-fakes/
[8] Devin Coldewey, "This technology can make the Mona Lisa talk (sort
of)," https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/mona-lisa-frown-machine-learning-brings-old-paintings-and-photos-to-life
[9] Bethan Moorcraft, "Klingemann?s AI-brain artwork raises intriguing
art insurance questions,"
https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/klingemanns-aibrain-artwork-raises-intriguing-art-insurance-questions-162464.aspx
[10] Sofian Audry and Jon Ippolito, "Can Artificial Intelligence Make
Art without Artists? Ask the Viewer,"
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/1/35/htm
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