Tag: Art

Art in the Age of AI

Let’s start with a little challenge: which of the following tunes was composed by an AI, and which by an HI (Human Intelligence)?

I’ll tell you at the end of the answer which tune was composed by an AI and which by an HI. For now, if you’re like most people, you’re probably unsure. Both pieces of music are pleasing to the ear. Both have good rhythm. Both could be part of the soundtrack of a Hollywood film, and you would never know that one was composed by an AI.

And this is just the beginning.

In recent years, AI has managed to –

  • Compose a piece of music (Transits – Into an Abyss) that was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and received praise from reviewers. [source: you can hear the performance in this link]
  • Identify emotions in photographs of people, and create an abstract painting that conveys these emotions to the viewer. The AI can even analyze the painting as it is being created, and decide whether it’s achieving its objectives [source: Rise of the Robots].
  • Write a short novel that almost won a literary prize in Japan.
  • Create a movie trailer (it’s actually pretty good – watch it here).

Now, don’t get me wrong: most of these achievements don’t even come close to the level of an experienced human artist. But AI has something that humans don’t: it’s capable of training itself on millions of samples, and constantly improve itself. That’s how Alpha Go, the AI that recently wiped the floor with Go’s most proficient players, got so good at the game: it played a few million games against itself, and discovered new strategies and best moves. It acquired an intuition for the game, and kept rapidly evolving to improve itself.

And there’s no reason that AI won’t be able to do that in art as well.

In the next decade, we’ll see AI composing music and even poems, drawing abstract paintings, and writing books and movie scripts. And it’ll get better at it all the time.

So what happens to art, when AI can create it just as easily as human beings do?

For starters, we all benefit. In the future, when you’ll upload your new YouTube clip, you’ll be able to have the AI add original music to it, which will fit the clip perfectly. The AI will also write your autobiography just by going over your Facebook and Gmail history, and if you want – will turn it into a movie script and direct it too. It’ll create new comic books easily and automatically – both the script and the drawing and coloring part – and what’s more, it’ll fit each story to the themes that you like. You want to see Superman fighting the Furry Triple-Breasted Slot Machines of Pandora? You got it.

That’s what happens when you take a task that humans need to invest decades to become really good at, and let computers perform it quickly and efficiently. And as a result, even poor people will be able to have a flock of AI artists at their beck and call.

What Will the Artists Do?

At this point you may ask yourselves what all the human artists will do at that future. Well, the bad news is that obviously, we won’t need as many human artists. The good news is that those few human artists who are left, will make a fortune by leveraging their skills.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Homer is one of the earliest poets we know of. He was probably dirt poor. Why? Because he had to wander from inn to inn, and could only recite his work aloud for audiences of a few dozen people at the time, at most. Shakespeare was much more succesful: he could have his plays performed in front of hundreds of people at the same time. And Justin Bieber is a millionnaire, because he leverages his art with technology: once he produces a great song, everyone gets is immediately via YouTube or by paying for and downloading the song on iTunes.

Great composers will still exist in the future, and they will work at creating new kinds of music – and then having the AI create variations on that theme, and earning revenue from it. Great painters will redefine drawing and painting, and they will teach the AI to paint accordingly. Great script writers will create new styles of stories, whereas the old AI could only produce the ‘old style’.

And of course, every time a new art style is invented, it’ll only take AI a few years – or maybe just a few days – to teach itself that new style. But the human creative, crazy, charismatic artists who created that new style, will have earned the status of artistic super-stars by then: the people who changed our definitions of what is beautiful, ugly, true or false. They will be the people who really create art, instead of just making boring variations on a theme.

The truly best artists, the ones who can change our outlook about life and impact our thinking in completely unexpected ways, will still be here even a hundred years into the future.

Oh, and as for the two tunes? The first one was composed by a human being and performed by Morten Faerestrand in his YouTube clip – 3 JUICY jazz guitar improv tools. The second was composed by the Algorithmic Music Composer and demonstrated in the YouTube clip – Computer-Generated Jazz Improvisation.

Did you get it right?

This post was originally written as an answer at Quora

Images of Israeli War Machines from 2048

Do you want to know what war would look like in 2048? The Israeli artist Pavel Postovit has drawn a series of remarkable images depicting soldiers, robots and mechs – all in the service of the Israeli army in 2048. He even drew aerial ships resembling the infamous Triskelion from The Avengers (which had an unfortunate tendency to crash every second week or so).

Pavel is not the first artist to make an attempt to envision the future of war. Jakub Rozalski before him tried to reimagine World War II with robots, and Simon Stalenhag has many drawings that demonstrate what warfare could look like in the future. Their drawings, obviously, are a way to forecast possible futures and bring them to our attention.

Pavel’s drawings may not based on rigorous foresight research, but they don’t have to be. They are mainly focused on showing us one way the future may be unfurled. Pavel himself does not pretend to be a futures researcher, and told me that –

“I was influenced by all kind of different things – Elysium, District 9 [both are sci-fi movies from the last few years], and from my military service. I was in field intelligence, on the border with Syria, and was constantly exposed to all kinds of weapons, both ours and the Syrians.”

Here are a couple of drawings to make you understand Pavel’s vision of the future, divided according to categories I added. Be aware that the last picture is the most haunting of all.

 

Mechs in the Battlefield

Mechs are a form of ground vehicles with legs – much like Boston Dymanic’s Alpha Dog, which they are presumbaly based on. The most innovative of those mechs is the DreamCatcher – a unit with arms and hands that is used to collect “biological intelligence in hostile territory”. In one particularly disturbing image we can see why it’s called “DreamCatcher”, as the mech beheads a deceased human fighter and takes the head for inspection.

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Apparently, mechs in Pavel’s future are working almost autonomously – they can reach hostile areas on the battlefield and carry out complicated tasks on their own.

 

Soldiers and Aerial Drones

Soldiers in the field will be companied by aerial drones. Some of the drones will be larger than others – the Tinkerbell, for example, can serve both for recon and personal CAS (Close Air Support) for the individual soldier.

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Other aerial drones will be much smaller, and will be deployed as a swarm. The Blackmoth, for example, is a swarm of stealthy micro-UAVs used to gather tactical intelligence on the battlefield.

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Technology vs. Simplicity

Throughout Pavel’s visions of the future we can see a repeated pattern: the technological prowess of the west is going to collide with the simple lifestyle of natives. Since the images depict the Israeli army, it’s obvious why the machines are essentially fighting or constraining the Palestinians. You can see in the images below what life might look like in 2048 for Arab civillians and combatants.

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Another interesting picture shows Arab combatants dealing with a heavily armed combat mech by trying to make it lose its balance. At the same time, one of the combatants is sitting to the side with a laptop – presumbaly trying to hack into the robot.

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The Last Image

If the images above have made you feel somewhat shaken, don’t worry – it’s perfectly normal. You’re seeing here a new kind of warfare, in which robots take extremely active parts against human beings. That’s war for you: brutal and horrible, and there’s nothing much to do against that. If robots can actually minimize the amount of suffering on the battlefield by replacing soldiers, and by carrying out tasks with minimal casualties for both sides – it might actually be better than the human-based model of war.

Perhaps that is why I find the last picture the most horrendous one. You can see in it a combatant, presumably an Arab, with a bloody machette next to him and two prisoners that he’s holding in a cage. The combatant is reading a James Bond book. The symbolism is clear: this is the new kind of terrorist / combatant. He is vicious, ruthless, and well-educated in Western culture – at least well enough to develop his own ideas for using technology to carry out his ideology. In other words, this is an ISIS combatant, who begin to employ some of the technologies of the West like aerial drones, without adhering to moral theories that restrict their use by nations.

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Conclusion

The future of warfare in Pavel’s vision is beginning to leave the paradigm of human-on-human action, and is rapidly moving into robotic warfare. It is very difficult to think of a military future that does not include robots in it, and obviously we should start thinking right now about the consequences, and how (and whether) we can imbue robots with sufficient autonomous capabilities to carry out missions on their own, while still minimizing casualties on the enemy side.

You can check out the rest of Pavel’s (highly recommended) drawings in THIS LINK.