Podcast about Neural Networks Reshaping Art (AI generated)

Introduction

The world is changing - we are in a technical revolution and arms race driven not by tangible things but by ones and zeros and transformers. Incredible things are happening in black boxes that we do not entirely understand. In this article I’m not going to go into AI so much as I will be talking about more… philosophical questions. (I’ll talk about AI a little too.)

My history

I’ve never been much of an artist. My mother is an excellent one, but I’m not sure I got those genetics. I’ve tried to draw and paint multiple times in my life, I even went for an art scholarship to my college (I did not get awarded it, because I wasn’t that good). However, as I grew up I learnt that my artistic talents didn’t lie in easels and paint and pencils and paper - my artistic talents were in code. My creativity sparks when I start a new project.

When I was younger, maybe 6 or 7 I took IT class at school. We had those little colourful Macs, I’ll attach a photo:

On these we had some software, I can’t find the exact one - but it taught us a concept known as Turtle Programming. I didn’t realise how important that would become, but I fell in love with it. I would spend my breaktimes and lunchtimes in the IT room making vector graphics using a functional programming language. Obviously at the time I didn’t know any of these terms, I was just making art:

Taken from wikipedia

So how does this lead on to what I’m going to talk about today? Well, at the time I truly thought that by putting in some instructions and sending the turtle on it’s way, I was being creative. The software was a tool but I was the artist. This is obviously, very primitive compared to what we have today - but has it truly changed that much?

How do we define creativity?

Let’s start with a cliché: Creativity is defined as -

the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.

This is pretty vague, but “use of imagination” is quite significant. Let’s jump right in.

What makes a person creative?

“Not everybody is an artist” - I was told this when I was younger. I was in college, I would have been about 14, forced to take an art class, and my teacher just sighed looking at my painting and said that. Pretty damn rude, but definitely proof that I shouldn’t have gone for that art scholarship. However, I disagree with the sentiment. I think everybody is in fact an artist, but the scope of the word is too small in most people’s minds. I was watching a presentation by Aaron Hertzmann from Adobe, that I will link here, and he says how many different things can be considered art - poetry, graphic design, video games, etc. He also says that art and the art you produce is a huge part of your identity, which I think is accurate and can lead to some gatekeeping of other art forms. Do painters think that photographers are artists? I think many do now, but historically there was a huge amount of distain for the art of photography.

So, what does make a person creative? I think think that if anybody is creating anything - there is a level of creativeness to you. If you are putting together a new spreadsheet to track spending in your business, that’s creative - and in fact art. I know a few accountants that would see a well made excel spreadsheet as art and who is to say they are wrong?

What make a machine creative?

This one is harder - but I’m not sure why. Computer’s have been creating art using random number generation (RNG) for years, well before AI art. Does that mean they are creative? I think not, because the creativity in telling the computer to use the RNG came from the person. The computer was the tool.

Okay.. what about Neural Networks then? Now it is getting.. interesting. By my definition, anybody who creates something is an artist. What about anything that creates something? I deem them as creative, not necessarily artists, but creative. To explain why I’m going to go a bit deeper into how they work.

How do these neural networks actually create art?

I’m going to do my best here but I’m no expert

In short - they are trained. They are trained on thousands and thousands of examples, fed into a network of transformers which effectively act as neurons mimicking the human brain. This is a gross simplification but from everything I’ve read it’s not inaccurate. When it comes to the creation, a prompt is given to the neural network - alongside a seed - and it uses all of it’s training data to create an output.

I’m now going to compare this to a human creating art:

A human is trained, over years of upbringing and input from life. It uses this to teach it’s network of neurons in the brain to create. When it comes to producing the art, they get a paintbrush and a canvas and they take a prompt (whatever they are painting, a person, a landscape) and they take a seed (the pure randomness of life and their experiences that day) and they create an output.

You can see where I’m going with this…

The question of intent.

I was talking to a friend and they mentioned that to be an artist you have to have intent. I think this is accurate. I can’t explain why, why are these neural networks not artists to me? I think that’s a bigger question, honestly I’m putting off talking about it because this Thursday the topic is “Consciousness: The Hard Problem” and I think I’ll talk about it then. Have a think about it yourself though, do you see these neural networks as artists?

Conclusion

I think to wrap this up I have to go back to the title. Neural Networks are Reshaping Art, definitively. However, is this a shock? If you look around you Neural Networks are reshaping every single aspect of human life in the 21st Century. I use AI every single day, it autocompletes code at an alarmingly fast and mostly impressive way. I use it to learn about things I would have no idea where to even start learning about.