The Art That Machines Make

2023-01-14

It's always good when the tools to create art get more accessible, right? "More accessible" often means "cheaper", but the accessibility is what matters. Another way to make art "more accessible" is to make it easier. Think the advancement of camera technology, from complex and high-skill equipment in darkrooms on film, to many of us able to take pretty decent photos from a phone we already need to have for a thousand other reasons.

'AI Art' has a lot of momentum right now. Specifically, the kind of images made in convolutional neural networks after they process and 'learn' on what the experts call 'a metric fuckton' of input data. The technology is really neat and the output is really impressive... so long as you don't care too much if your art has human emotion or decent looking hands.

A twisty turny mess of a painting hanging in a strange gallery
Generated using "The art machines make" as a prompt on deepai.org

Convolutional neural networks are no more 'intelligent' than any other algorithm. There's not really any compelling evidence we've come meaningfully closer to creating actual intelligence in the entire history of forever. Industrial futurists dreamed of brains made of gears. The idea that intelligence can arise through sheer computation may seem just as ridiculous to people someday.

The trickiest part of evaluating non-human intelligence is that all we've really got to go off are the vibes. But then again, all we've really ever had to 'prove' even humans are intelligent are the vibes. I think therefore I am me, so it makes an intuitive sense that you are you. Whereas we have no such intuition about machines.

I do believe AI techniques have a place in the creative process, but once the novelty wears off, does anyone really want to be told stories by machines?

I mean, don't we tell stories to connect to people?