Let’s talk about the elephant in the room….AI.
The are current discussions or if you like to call them controversies about artists and the uses of AI. Sam Leach a Melbourne based artist, this year submitted a landscape based on a GAN…..a Generated Adversarial Network to the Wynne Prize, which is a section of the Archibald Prize for landscape called “Machine Assisted River”. He cites his inspiration to be Fragonard the 18th century Rococo painter. He used a collection of his own works to generate images the machine learning.
A Gan is an innovation in machine learning, (AI) that will create and/or generate images that resemble your training data. By loading data (ie. Images) it will interrogate (inspect) that data and come up with an interpretation of the collection of images. Sort of like a random matching of images. Sometimes they are incomprehensible but according to Sam Leach can serve to inspire a painting. A tremendously interesting thought. Should artists use AI to assist in their practice? Who then has copyright of the works produced? Are they the new studio assistants? Will this GAN be a tool used by all creatives or is it just a current obsession. The generation of this material takes an enormous amount of energy both at a PC level and at the level of the cloud-based data centres we see in our landscape. Big foreboding cubes where you know that something is happening, but you do not know what. Does this matter? I have included below some images from an artist called Anders Hoff who uses GAN to generate Images.
What is AI and GAN?
I write this to throw out the pros and cons of artists and creatives using AI as it is what is happening in our contemporary world. There is an enthusiastic audience of converts and those who are intrigued by the world of AI. Machine Language models are what AI is where the algorithm scopes and uses data across both the internet and the data fed to it by us and databases and processes it both randomly and to a set trained program. It takes an enormous amount of energy and resources. To power the machines (computers, etc), natural resources such as lithium and endless other inputs both artificial and human to build the models, in what is becoming a world of concern for our environment and living things.
AI Experiment with Dalle-2
I tried AI to generate some creations of my own. I gave instructions to generate some inspirational images as follows:
Tropical plants in rocks in a desert, Paper banksia in a pool with swimming fish. See the results and think about what these images mean.
If you are interested there is so much information out in the web world. It is a conundrum we all face even in our daily lives as we engage with chat bots, voice command , activation keys, connections of the next stage of the internet of things. Are we leaving our familiar world and entering a world of interminable data.
There two movies which can set us thinking about this and if we are able to get our little human brains around these concepts which takes it far beyond the works of art. One is called “Transcendence ” and a current Apple TV series called “Foundation”. (Which has its rulers engaging in some old-fashioned painting with AI). Both thought provoking. Or you could read Issac Asimov who wrote about these things in the last century.
I, for one, am intrigued by the possibilities of getting inspiration from integrating some images to get a new piece of art started but is that cheating. Or is it just like a paint brush or and new art material. I have included some GAN generated works and references to the creators.
Who remembers the Mandelbrot Images or fractals of the latter part of the last century.? In conclusion, there are pros and cons to creatives using GAN for creative inspiration. The discussion is ongoing and no one seems to know where this could end up in the future as it is developing so fast. Are humans going to be able to differentiate between original creations or be happy to leave the creative thoughts to AI and GAN. What will happen to whole industries and businesses involved tin the creative endeavour?