Can An Artificially Intelligent Computer Make Art?

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The human first plays a short tune, and the computer follows up with a longer variation of the tune. Is the computer-generated melody an original piece of music? Is it art?

At the music and technology festival Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina, Google researchers were onstage to put those questions to the test. Adam Roberts, one of the researchers in a group called Magenta, demonstrated a digital synthesizer program. Its artificial intelligence would listen to the notes Roberts played and play back a longer melody, according to Quartz, which attended the meeting. Magenta hopes to find out if artificial intelligence can be trained to create original pieces of music, art or video.

If Magenta succeeds, it brings into question whether the program's creation can be considered a piece of art like society deems works by Beethoven, Picasso or Spielberg. The question has been repeatedly asked over the past decades, regarding AI-induced artwork such as the colorful paintings by Aaron—a computer about 40 years old—and psychedelic-looking “dream” paintings from Google’s artificial neural networks.

In April, Microsoft and Dutch cultural institutions revealed a 3-D printed “Rembrandt” painting, produced by an AI program assigned to create the most typical piece in the 17th-century Dutch artist’s oeuvre. Critics weren’t kind, and many challenged whether it could be considered a piece of art.

Mark Milloff, a noted painter and art professor at the Rhode Island College of Design, is one of the critics of the program's painting of a Rembrandt because it copied the work of a dead artist. “For me, that's just a technological trick,” Milloff tells Newsweek. “That is the result of science people trying to quantify art.”

But did Magenta create an original work of art with the synthesizer melody at Moogfest? Milloff says yes, but adds that the humans were the ultimate artists. Milloff says the whole question of whether it's art was wrongly framed, and such questions are rarely debated within the art community.

“If AI is creating algorithmic art, all that needs to be asked is how most people talk about music: There's only good music and bad music,” Milloff says. “It's humans who create the AI, so it's not like this came down from on high above. This isn't like the art when I was a kid, but I'm open to it.”

Ali Momeni, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University who frequently uses technology to explore themes in his artwork, says Magenta is just the latest in a long line of innovators to challenge assumptions about art. Momeni sees the new AI-driven art as a progeny to the 20th-century artistic traditions forged by Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock in pushing the boundaries of what art is. “I think you would be naïve to say this was invented by Google,” Momeni tells Newsweek.

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