Pretend to be in a hip cafe in October 2023, drinking an oat milk latte at the barista's request. The barista serves you a cup bearing such an elaborate and lovely design that this is something you have never seen before.
You can’t help but praise the barista for the work she has done, only to receive a shocking revelation – it was made by an AI.
What? Your childish drawings were surpassed by a machine?
Long ago, a small social robot named AI could solve maths problems quicker than any calculator but couldn’t tell red from blue and black such stuff. But now things have changed so much that we have a whole new kind of artificial intelligence on our hands.
Imagine if Iron Man decided to put away his suit and took out two things: a hat and paint.
What’s the thing? From where did it move from solving complex equations to painting, writing, composing music, and even making movies? It started when AI had enough of being the punchline at nerd parties. It hit the digital gym, bulked up on algorithms, and learned how to channel its inner Van Gogh, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Spielberg.
Picture a hypothetical scenario where R2-D2 and Picasso had a baby - that’s how it seems nowadays to deal with AI. It is all over, showcasing its talents in creative arts to make humans feel like they must retire from drawing.
The change?
AI has discovered its groove, acquired some neural networks, and has tons of things to learn from. Therefore, it’s time for them to leave the field of artistic expression.
Prepare yourselves for this. The time of the robot artist has come and it is irreversible.
And you know what? Perhaps someday, artificial intelligence will generate a work of art so incredibly stunning that we’ll completely forget about its clumsy teenage period filled with pixelated scribbles and wrongly matched colors.
Imagine that basically at its core, creativity resulting from an AI is fueled by various machine learning methods, neural networks, and a lot of data. Think about feeding an AI with thousands of artworks for it to begin seeing patterns and styles, as well as different techniques. It would be similar to training a robot to paint by making him watch Bob Ross’s shows in a row. Want a few happy little trees?
However, that is not all! The ability of AI to imitate is just one of its capabilities among other functions it has; learning and coming up with new things. For instance, let us consider OpenAI’s GPT-4 (I know this sounds like an advertisement but don’t we all agree that it is truly marvelous?).
It can compose poetry, write articles, and generate codes. It is akin to what Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, and Bill Gates put together minus any licensing fees or sporadic moments when they wonder about the meaning of existence itself.
This masterpiece was not just copy-pasted by a machine. It got inspired from the topmost and then got its twist added to it along with a few random bits too for the sake of just adding them.
Watching AI creativeness can be analogous to observing an insensible boy growing into some big muscular lad who as soon as he gained strength became talented enough to win different competitions that promote talents in arts and music like a pro. Who would have imagined that art could flow within codes?
Okay, people, let’s deal with the million-dollar question: Does AI have any real creativity, or does it simply replicate? Imagine this: Humans infuse their art with emotions, experiences, and a little bit of insanity. Van Gogh didn’t paint ‘Starry Night’ because he was told by an algorithm but he painted it as a result of him being undergoing all kinds of feelings.
If we were to compare the moods of an AI rabbit with those of your average one it would appear that they operate very differently. They seem not to do things just for the sake of it; colors do not appeal to them nor do they ever seem uninterested in what the humans call art.
Content production done using algorithms is not affected by creativity blocks or moods like humans do which are prone to emotional outbursts or memory lapses sometimes leading to sudden bursts of creativity.
By some people, this is referred to as shallow creativity because there is no soul in it, unlike human creativity which gives voice to thoughts and feelings arising from deep within oneself or expresses observations to a glorious degree. This is comparable with having a sumptuous meal prepared by an expert cook instead of settling for ready-made frozen food sold in supermarkets - both will satisfy hunger but there will always be something special about the former.
Various people, however, consider AI as a different species of artist that mixes human input with machine accuracy. It’s similar to having a partner who is always awake, happy without complaints, and does not ask for any rights. Indeed, AI can’t feel heart break or ecstasy but it can analyze this feeling and reproduce it through data thus bringing forth art that touches one’s soul in weird ways.
What is it that makes AI able to behave creatively or is it just a sophisticated photocopy machine?
It might be a combination of both aspects. However, there’s something we know for sure: this argument won’t end any time soon, and the artistic world will soon turn out to be extremely unpredictable with AI by its side.
