What comes to your mind when you think about AI? Is it the vision of a new evil tech conquering the world or a friendly robot that makes our lives convenient? What about an artist? If you've used tools like Midjourney or DALL-E, then you've already encountered one form of generative AI. Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence algorithms and models designed to generate new content, such as images, text, music and more.
Generative AI operates by learning patterns and structures from large datasets: the training data. Then, when we prompt it, it tries to deliver exactly what we ask for. The output is similar to the training data, but not exactly the same. This generative AI has raised eyebrows and stirred a controversial discussion that cuts across industries: art, technology and copyright laws. On one hand, you can make the argument that technology makes art more democratic.
Using AI, anyone with a vision can create art without having the traditional skills to execute it. On the other hand, artists whose work is used to train the AI, often without their permission, can argue that it's a copyright infringement, particularly if the output of the AI system competes with the training dataset. The generative AI we're most familiar with creates images based on what we humans ask for, using the training set that we provide.
But what if we can create art that looks nothing like its training data, in other words, truly original art? Not only compositions based on human-imagined prompts. What would a machine dream about after seeing the entire public collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)? AI artist Refik Anadol explored this question. In collaboration with data scientists, he tested various AI models and their studio-trained AI
to create original art. The team at Refik Anadol Studio trained the AI using the publicly available data of the MoMA collection in its 200-year history, from Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, to even images of Pac Man. They used 380,000 extremely high-resolution images taken from more than 180,000 art pieces. It's astonishing that it looks nothing like its inputs. If you've never heard of it, you have to check it out.
It's overwhelming, mind-blowing. The result is a large 24x 24-foot or 7.5 x 7.5-meter installation, which is called 'Unsupervised'. 'Unsupervised' is a constantly changing animation of abstract visuals based on the machine's interpretation of MoMA's collection. MoMA writes that: "It reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been
and what might be to come." When we experienced this piece of art, we had no doubt that it was indeed a completely new style of art. We have not seen anything that comes even close to that artistic expression. It's original in a way that you can compare to how Picasso and Van Gogh created completely new art styles while being inspired by the past. What's more, the training data that the artwork relies upon responds to its environment.
The AI uses real-time data about the weather and live feed of the visitors in the museum to adapt the visualization, giving the illusion of a living being. And it does feel as if it's alive. If you ever see one of Refik Anadol's art pieces, you will have a hard time leaving. 'Unsupervised' is a captivating and aesthetic installation that has a profound emotional effect on you when you see and hear it. However, we must remember that this installation is unsupervised only from an *output* point of view.
To attain this level of autonomy, it has undergone extensive training by a whole team of data scientists and artists for several years. AI still relies on human processing to sort data for it to learn from. Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century playwright, famously said: "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." Humans have the incredible capacity to imagine and to come up with visions that do not exist anywhere on the planet.
Popular culture has often inspired people to bring fictional concepts to life. Imagination is our superpower. What if we could train technology to imagine the world? Most experts think it's unlikely, at least for now. No one lives alone in a dark room all their lives and creates something out of the blue. We are all inspired by things we see hear, smell, touch and taste. We add our spin to it to produce art. The same will be true for AI.
It will always need inspiration, which will likely always come from humans.