When the line between machine and artist becomes blurred

When the line between machine and bewegungsknstler becomes blurredWhen the line between machine and akrobat becomes blurredWith AI becoming incorporated into more aspects of our daily lives, from writing to driving, its only natural that akrobats would also start to experiment with artificial intelligence.In fact, Christies will be selling its first piece of AI art later this month a blurred face titled Portrait of Edmond Belamy.The piece being sold at Christies is part of a new wave of AI art created via machine learning. Paris-based akrobats Hugo Caselles-Dupr, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier fed thousands of portraits into an algorithm, teaching it the aesthetics of past examples of portraiture. The algorithm then created Portrait of Edmond Belamy.The painting is not the product of a human mind, Christies noted in its preview. It welches created by artificial intelligence, an algorithm defined by an algebraic formula.If artificial intelligence is used to create images, can th e final product really be thought of as art? Should there be a threshold of influence over the final product that an artist needs to wield?As the director of the Art AI Lab at Rutgers University, Ive been wrestling with these questions specifically, the point at which the artist should cede credit to the machine.The machines enroll in art classOver the last 50 years, several artists have written computer programs to generate art what I call algorithmic art. It requires the artist to write detailed code with an actual visual outcome in mind.One of the earliest practitioners of this form is Harold Cohen, who wrote the program AARON to produce drawings that followed a set of rules Cohen had created.But the AI art that has emerged over the past couple of years incorporates machine learning technology.Artists create algorithms not to follow a set of rules, but to learn a specific aesthetic by analyzing thousands of images. The algorithm then tries to generate new images in adherence t o the aesthetics it has learned.To begin, the artist chooses a collection of images to feed the algorithm, a step I call pre-curation.For the purpose of this example, lets say the artist chooses traditional portraits from the past 500 years.Most of the AI artworks that have emerged over the past few years have used a class of algorithms called generative adversarial networks. First introduced by computer scientist Ian Goodfellow in 2014, these algorithms are called adversarial because there are two sides to them One generates random images the other has been taught, via the input, how to judge these images and deem which best align with the input.So the portraits from the past 500 years are fed into a generative AI algorithm that tries to imitate these inputs. The algorithms then come back with a range of output images, and the artist must sift through them and select those he or she wishes to use, a step I call post-curation.So there is an modul of creativity The artist is very inv olved in pre- and post-curation. The artist might also tweak the algorithm as needed to generate the desired outputs.When creating AI art, the artists hand is involved in the selection of input images, tweaking the algorithm and then choosing from those that have been generated. Ahmed Elgammal, Author providedSerendipity or malfunction?The generative algorithm can produce images that surprise even the artist presiding over the process.For example, a generative adversarial network being fed portraits could end up producing a series of deformed faces.What should we make of this?Psychologist Daniel E. Berlyne has studied the psychology of aesthetics for several decades. He found that novelty, surprise, complexity, ambiguity and eccentricity tend to be the most powerful stimuli in works of art.When fed portraits from the last five centuries, an AI generative model can spit out deformed faces. Ahmed Elgammal, Author providedThe generated portraits from the generative adversarial network with all of the deformed faces are certainly novel, surprising and bizarre.They also evoke British figurative painter Francis Bacons famous deformed portraits, such as Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes.Three Studies for the Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Francis Bacon, 1963. MoMABut theres something missing in the deformed, machine-made faces intent.While it was Bacons intent to make his faces deformed, the deformed faces we see in the example of AI art arent necessarily the goal of the artist nor the machine. What we are looking at are instances in which the machine has failed to properly imitate a human face, and has instead spit out some surprising deformities.Yet this is exactly the sort of image that Christies is auctioning.A form of conceptual artDoes this outcome really indicate a lack of intent?I would argue that the intent lies in the process, even if it doesnt appear in the final image.For example, to create The Fall of the House of Usher, artist Anna Ridle r took stills from a 1929 film version of the Edgar Allen Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher. She made ink drawings from the still frames and fed them into a generative model, which produced a series of new images that she then arranged into a short film.Another example is Mario Klingemanns The Butchers Son, a nude portrait that was generated by feeding the algorithm images of stick figures and images of pornography.On the left A still from The Fall of the House of Usher by Anna Ridler. On the right The Butchers Son by Mario Klingemann.I use these two examples to show how artists can really play with these AI tools in any number of ways. While the final images might have surprised the artists, they didnt come out of nowhere There was a process behind them, and there was certainly an element of intent.Nonetheless, many are skeptical of AI art. Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz has said he finds the art produced by AI artist boring and dull, including The Butch ers Son.Perhaps theyre correct in some cases. In the deformed portraits, for example, you could argue that the resulting images arent all that interesting Theyre really just imitations with a twist of pre-curated inputs.But its not just about the final image. Its about the creative process one that involves an artist and a machine collaborating to explore new visual forms in revolutionary ways.For this reason, I have no doubt that this is conceptual art, a form that dates back to the 1960s, in which the idea behind the work and the process is more important than the outcome.As for The Butchers Son, one of the pieces Saltz derided as boring?It recently won the Lumen Prize, a prize dedicated for art created with technology.As much as some critics might decry the trend, it seems that AI art is here to stay.Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of Computer Vision, Rutgers UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.