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