Nowadays, we call AI quite a number of things while many times it’s not AI but just simple automation or software that has nothing to do with AI. There are different classifications of AI that depend on the perspective and assessment criteria we take on to measure the advancement. I like the one that classifies AI based on their likeness to the human mind, and their ability to “think” and perhaps even “feel” like humans and breaks down into 4 main types.
I was wondering how far AI has gone in the creativity space. Not how much it can imitate, how fast it can repeat actions, how good it responds to stimulus but what’s the output of its’ independent thinking and creation of the unique pieces of art, movies, poems and others. Self-driving cars, digital personal assistants and even automated spam filters fall within the basic level ‘narrow AI’. Whereas, artificial general intelligence (AGI) describes a machine that can apply knowledge and skills on a more advanced level and can learn by itself and work out problems like a human.
Film
Let’s watch Sunspring – A Sci-Fiction short film with Thomas Middleditch. The team created “Jetson” and fed him with a lot of sci-fi TV and movie scripts and then played whatever he wrote.
If you like it, you can watch the sequel to Sunspring – It’s No Game with David Hasselhoff.
Book/Content Writing
1 THE ROAD is an experimental novel composed by artificial intelligence. It won the IDFA DocLab Award for Storytelling. ‘1 The Road’ was created, not authored, by Ross Goodwin who, with the help of Google, rigged the Cadillac with a GPS unit, microphone, clock, and roof-top camera that fed information to the portable A.I.
It was named ‘A car wrote a book worth reading.‘.
A college kid’s fake, AI-generated blog fooled tens of thousands, illustrating the dangers of this technology. “It was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.” (using GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool).
The initiator said that he wanted to convince people that GPT-3 could be a real human writer. The algorithm did some weird writing and random errors but only 3 – 4 people commented on his post raising suspicions and saying that it looks like artificial and may be done by an algorithm or machine. All comments were downvoted by other members immediately.
Forbes, The Washington Post, Reuters, among others, use machine learning tools to help them produce content. Bloomberg uses a computer system called Cyborg to turn financial reports into mini articles (around 1/3 of all content produced by Boomberg!).
‘A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?‘
‘I’am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!’ from The Guardian.
Art
Artificial Intelligence can now create real human portraits taking random drawings and it looks awesome.
The idea comes from Hongbo Fu from the University of Hong Kong. More than 17k portrait photos were used to train the AI algorithm.
Deep Dream Generator (by Google) is used to create pieces of art. You can easily create inspiring visual content in a collaboration with the AI-enabled tools.
NVIDIA GAUGAN: Gaugan, named and inspired by the post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, creates beautiful photorealistic images from segmentation maps, which are labelled sketches that depict the layout of a scene.
NVIDIA Image Inpainting is an image reconstruction that perfectly fills in missing parts of a picture with new pixels that are generated from the trained model, independent from what’s missing in the photo.
Gaming
Well known AlphaGo, an artificial neural network created at DeepMind, defeated the Go master in 2016. The machine did new, creative, unexpected moves which were out of the scope of the data on which it was trained.
GameGAN, a powerful new AI model created by NVIDIA Research, can generate a fully functional version of PAC-MAN. It’s the neural network model that mimics a computer game engine by harnessing generative adversarial networks, or GANs.
Music
Flow Machines is a machine learning (ML) platform, AI-Assisted Music, that is used to create songs. Used by Sony, and Warner Music Group among others. I love the ‘Imaginary Line’ piece of music. Listen here:
“Beautiful the World” won the AI Song Contest (competition run by Dutch broadcaster VPRO). The global teams produced a pop songs with the help of artificial intelligence. Australia won the contest with the ‘Beautiful the World‘. They trained the AI on a data set from Eurovision songs + koala + kookaburra cries.
Debate
IBM’s Project Debater participated in a World Debating Championship not so long time ago. IBM’s AI system presented a number of convincing arguments, created by its own, and formulated a closing argument about whether preschools should receive government subsidies. It really made sense and was reasonable to back up the statement.
Fashion
Fashion is a space where creativity and imagination are the most desired skills. You may free up your mind and let it get wild combining different styles, designs, colours and fractures. Can AI do that having already seen millions of collections and clothes sets? Amazon has already developed an AI fashion designer that can design clothes. The AI fashion designer can be trained to use, let’s say, images from a particular style and create different clothes within this taste and perfectly consistent.
Reading Minds (Wait WHAT? o_o)
Most interesting to me is the ability of AI to know what humans think. ‘Functional magnetic resonance imaging‘ allows computers to visualize what people are thinking about and draw a picture of the object. ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories and Kyoto University came up with the model that ‘reconstructs’ or ‘generates’ images from brain activity.
Self Creation
Let’s go a step further! Why don’t we let AI build another AI? Google already proved that Artificial Intelligence can build an AI that outperforms any done by people. AI created a “baby” AI that outperformed the human-made AI in the given task. This shows AI’s limitless capacity to do complex tasks, exercises, experiments and to learn and evolve without supervision, exactly like people.
Other Resources
Here are a few more interesting articles that show how to make robots more independent, human and give them senses, feelings that can make them behave like people.
Giving soft robots feeling
Emotionally aware technology could help us beat Zoom fatigue
Can We Have Conscious Artificial Intelligence And Other Mind-Blowing Things Science Can’t Answer
Book: The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity
Computers Learn How to Paint Whatever You Tell Them To
The United States Of Artificial Intelligence Startups Market Map
Great collection of 160+ AI-driven companies that will revolutionize the way we receive, digest and create media in the future by Quang Do from Samsung NEXT.
All of the above are amazing achievements in AI technology. I strongly believe that a creative machine may be able to collaborate with humans, empowering us, augmenting our abilities rather than replacing us. Together we can create amazing things and reach the level we wouldn’t e able to achieve otherwise, working alone and betting on human minds. However, we shall keep in mind the technology should be used to do good, therefore we need to have proper regulation that ensures data privacy and human-centric approach in all of the technology developments.
