Today, on May 12th, I attended the Midterm Presentation event where 3 students from each discussion presented their midterm projects for the class. Although I presented as well, I wanted to cover one of the presentations that left an impression on me.
This student presented about AIs and music composition. He started off with a question: "What is the difference between art and craft?" He then proceeded to give some context regarding AIs that created music and poetry in the Classical style, trained on composers such as Brahms and Bach. His project revolved around performing these generated pieces.
After his presentation, the instructors began a conversation regarding how we could view the artistic products of AIs. In fact, could they be considered "art" at all? Although the discussion started claiming that the procedural method of generation couldn't be equated to human art, a TA brought up a very novel viewpoint: given that computers have computation abilities beyond human limits, given a sufficiently complex generational procedure that humans couldn't replicate or understand, it could be considered an inversion of the classic idea of "computers can't understand or replicate human decisions".
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| "What, you don't know log base 15 of 187502037 off the top of your head? Humans lack intelligence..." |
I found this eye-opening, as I've always been interested in topics like extraterrestrial life, non-carbon-based lifeforms, etc, and this statement made me wonder if humans were too limited in our conceptions of creativity and awareness. If you've ever read up on theories about aliens, you'll know that a common arguing point for our lack of discovery of other "intelligent" life is that we are too constrained in what we consider "intelligent"; I believe this idea could be extended to AIs very easily. After all, extremely simplistic lifeforms like bacteria or other single-celled organisms that only make decisions based on stimuli and survival are considered living. They do not feel emotions or create art (that we know of...).
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| If you've ever taken a biology or chemistry class, you've probably seen a slide like this. It's pretty ingrained in Earth-based societies that life=carbon (and validly so). |
In contrast, AIs are orders of magnitude more complex in their reactive abilities. They may not have composed Bach's original sonatas, but they are able to analyze and imitate them, almost like (or better than) a child or novice music student. Although the procedure to arrive there may be different, I'm sure any sufficiently unskilled human could produce similar outputs. On some level, I believe our aversion to classifying AIs or robots as
creative or living stems from their origin. Humans programmed these
computational existences; prokaryotes were here before us, and will
probably be here after us.
A question I asked the presenter in private chat was this: If a human follows the exact same steps as the AI to create the same product, can we really make a distinction between human and computer? After our discussion, I realized what my final question really was. Is art the product or the process?
References
Ghadjeres. Ghadjeres/DeepBach. github.com/Ghadjeres/DeepBach.
Kulpati, Sarvasv. Can Ai Be Creative? 30 July 2018, towardsdatascience.com/can-ai-be-creative-2f84c5c73dca?gi=b046fc445e8d.
Life. www.britannica.com/science/life.
Non-Carbon Based Life Forms. teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlnasa/reference/imaginedvd/files/imagine/docs/ask_astro/answers/980221b.html.
SonyCSLParis. DeepBach: Harmonization in the Style of Bach Generated Using Deep Learning. 13 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiBM7-5hA6o.
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