What Happens When Art Meets AI
[Music]
i
hate math
i know that might sound strange and
maybe even a little bit controversial
considering that i am employed
at the faculty of mathematics and
natural sciences
and that i’m here to talk to you guys
about artificial intelligence
but it’s true
i am horrible at math
yet i have found a way of dealing with
this which is part of what i want to
share with you all today
now i should perhaps specify
i don’t hate all math
i hate arithmetic
addition subtraction multiplication and
division
growing up i spent countless hours
crying in my mother’s lap as she
attempted to bribe and console me
through my recitation of the
multiplication tables
instead
i was your typical
artsy kid
i loved singing painting dancing
but i also loved science
and logic puzzles i was curious about
life and consciousness and how that all
came about
now what i found was that more often
than not
we tend to think of the world of art and
the world of science
as inherently
separate
opposites even
and for a long time i felt
trapped in the middle
with my math homework standing like a
gatekeeper
making sure that i would never be able
to achieve my goal of working somewhere
in this cross-section
between art and science
so how did i end up here
talking to all of you about art and
artificial intelligence
well
i learned how to code
computers unlike me
are really good at arithmetic
in fact they really only deal in numbers
numbers are their whole world
and for me
programming was like solving little
logic puzzles where the prize was that
my computer would do all the
calculations that i couldn’t
and i loved it
finally i had an accomplice
an aid
a friend even
that would do for me the tasks that i’m
not good at
and allow me to focus on the questions
that i was really interested in
i found that me plus my computer friend
was greater than me alone
and allying myself with my computer
was truly empowering for me
it has been what has enabled me to work
in this fascinating space
between art and science
i was able to begin an academic career
in computer science working with
computational creativity
and now i get to work on all these
really really interesting questions
like can i teach my computer friend
to be
creative
what kind of computational mechanisms
would even support that kind of behavior
can it learn these tasks where
there isn’t a single correct answer or a
goal state to reach
these tasks that are
inherently
subjective
for example
can i teach my computer
to dance
here i’ve shown
my computer a bunch of examples
of dancers improvising in these
beautiful motion capture suits which are
fixed with reflective
markers now as i said my computer only
deals in numbers so it doesn’t get to
see these beautiful polyester suits
all it sees are these giant matrices
and here each cell
contains a number
which represents one of these reflective
markers as it moves through time
it doesn’t know anything else
like the kinematics of human movement
or our body’s natural limitations
all it knows is what it can extract
from this data
and this
is what it comes up with
a little ai dancer
pretty good huh
i mean
it looks
human
you might even say it looks like dancing
but to be honest
it doesn’t always look like this
at first
all it was able to learn was to wiggle
its hands and feet
a lot
and if you think about it this kind of
makes sense
the dancers that it has seen they move
their hands and feet a lot too
not like this
not at this insane speed
but it’s not a completely unreasonable
first step
now this guy was a breakthrough for me
i i know that might seem a little sad
considering that this still looks uh
pretty crazy
but after only getting wiggly guy for
ages
i was
over the moon when i saw this
shapeshifter
smooth movements
kind of beautiful in a way no
of course it’s not very human-like to be
able to grow and shrink at will
but at least it was
learning something different
the method that i’m using here is called
supervised deep learning
i build an artificial neural network
which has recurrent connections
this allows it to hold a sort of
short-term memory
so that it can remember the things that
it has seen
and use that to make predictions about
the future
so by increasing the size of this
artificial neural net and showing it
even more examples
my computer friend was finally able to
generate ai dancers that move in a
smooth and realistic way
but my question
for you guys
is this
do you think
this looks
interesting
did you maybe think that wiggly guy or
the shapeshifter was more interesting to
look at
while this guy might be the most
realistic looking ai dancer
do you think it is creative
is it art
now some of you might say yes yes this
is art
and others will say no
this is one of the biggest challenges in
ai and art
what i would call the subjectivity
challenge
so let’s have another look at this task
that i’ve given my computer friend
i show it a sequence of movement
and then i ask it to predict where each
of these reflective markers will be at
the next frame
i measure its success at that task
by comparing its prediction
to the actual position that the dancer
moved to
so basically i’m saying
there is only one correct answer
what the dancer did
everything else is wrong
so i am
removing
some of this
subjectivity and that
will only ever encourage imitation
now
imitation is definitely part of our
artistic process
but by me never encouraging my computer
to do things differently might i be
forcing it into this mediocrity
now if i do encourage my computer to do
things differently we quickly end up
here
and yes
it’s definitely different
i would say it is uh chaos
so how do i define
this subjective sweet spot between
chaos
and mediocrity
how do i define what is good art
finding a precise metric for evaluating
a creative artifact
is a challenge that raises both
philosophical and technical questions
i mean for the most part we don’t even
agree on what is good art made by humans
and if we can’t agree on this then how
am i supposed to teach my computer what
art is
another
valid question here
is why
why should we teach computers to solve
creative tasks
when we outsource other things to ai it
doesn’t always go as we would hope
and ai is becoming a larger and larger
part of our everyday lives and with it
comes challenges relating to
discrimination alienation data ownership
and bias in our algorithms
and it is actually up to all of us
and especially those of us that work on
or with ai
to work on solutions for mitigating
these issues
still i am
cautiously optimistic
i believe that there is enormous
potential for ai to improve our lives
and our creative practices
but perhaps the solution is not for me
to
try and outsource everything to my
computer friend and have it do
everything on its own
perhaps instead i should teach it to
work with me
teach it to collaborate
take for example how we might use ai in
medical diagnosis
when you’re sick and you visit your
doctor
they can compare your list of symptoms
against hundreds of patients that
they’ve seen before
but if you use an ai
your symptoms could be compared to
millions of patients from around the
world in a matter of seconds
now i don’t imagine that many of you
would prefer the ai over the doctor
well maybe in the future
but for now
i think that the ai and the doctor
together has the potential of giving the
optimal care
and in a similar way ai can improve our
creative practices
by building advanced ai models for
generating creative data we could have
them function as suggestion givers
the ai dancers that my computer made for
example could be used by a dancer to
explore their movement repertoire
offering reflection stimulation
and
feedback
we already have a bunch of examples of
how ai and technology in general can
help improve and even democratize the
world of art
like assistive music software digital
drawing tools
and even something like advanced spell
checkers
but these tools
won’t be making any art without us
my computer was an enormous help for me
to get into science
i literally cannot do my job without it
and it seems that in the case of
artistic endeavors
the tables have turned on me and my
computer friend
here it might never be able to do its
job properly
without me
but i guess my point is
does that really matter
perhaps the solution to the subjectivity
challenge lies in this collaboration
in what we can achieve
together
now
i warned you
arithmetic is not my strong suit
but i think that in this case one plus
one is equal to three
because together my computer friend and
i
are greater than the sum of our parts
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
you