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AI Technology

A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can't Be an Artist (technologyreview.com) 185

Posted by msmash from the what's-intelligence-anyway dept.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, a philosophy professor at Harvard, writes for MIT Technology Review: Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to. This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.

[...] My argument is not that the creator's responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine's composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple. Claims like Kurzweil's that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms -- a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.
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A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can't Be an Artist

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  • The Turning Museum (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:41PM (#58166240)

    Put works by both humans and AI in a museum, see if anyone can pick out which is which.

    Turns out not only can an AI be an artists, but many humans claiming to be artists are not.

    • Re:The Turning Museum (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:55PM (#58166356)

      Put works by both humans and AI in a museum, see if anyone can pick out which is which.

      Or art by Elephants in an Elephant Art Gallery [elephantartgallery.com]

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Elephants have far, far greater intelligence than any AI project in the world, by orders and order on top of orders of magnitude. It's not even calculable, hardly even estimable. Elephants are fucking incredibly smart. Squirrels even.

        AI has a long way to go. Art will always be in the eye of the beholder, which is why the philosopher is correct and Kendall will always be a moron.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by LordKronos ( 470910 )

      Exactly. Normally I would be inclined to agree with this philosopher, but when you take a colored canvas with a stripe, a white canvas with some paint splatters, or even just a solid white canvas, and you can call it art, then I'm willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt on this one

      • Re:The Turning Museum (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ichimunki ( 194887 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @06:01PM (#58166714)
        I'm not big fan of some of the art you describe, but it certainly qualifies as "art" in a way that an image generated by an algorithm wouldn't be. None of the artists who produce the kinds of works you describe only produced those works in isolation. Their work is part of a larger discussion in the art world. Those works were not necessarily created with the intent to have wide appeal, but to say something about the role of the artist in making artwork and/or the role of viewer in looking at art. And if that discussion is not always apparent in the works themselves, it certainly would be part of the ancillary materials the artist would produce as well: artist's statements and things like that. At the current state of the art, there is no way an AI could come up with something useful to communicate via its works that would serve the same function. I mean, you could train an "AI" with scans of every artwork ever and what would it do with that? Sure it could take some random seed and generate an image that might even be very pleasant to look at, but the AI wouldn't tell you why it thought this was important to do, that would take a separate and completely different kind of "AI" entirely. It's the difference between a self-driving car being able to get from point A to point B, and the car deciding where it wants to go and why.

    • It is as stupid as saying that a cloud was an artist because the snow was so pretty.

      Picking out "which is which" bears no resemblance to how is customarily used.

      And people already use beautiful items as decorations, including both things that are art, and things that are not art.

      Something is art (noun) if it the act of creation was art (verb). If it is merely beautiful, or you lack details about its creation, then it isn't art, or maybe you just don't know. But the mystery experienced by a viewer isn't part

      • It is as stupid as saying that a cloud was an artist because the snow was so pretty.

        So not at all? Because people say that all the time, and it makes a lot of sense. Even something generated by purely natural processes can be aesthetically pleasing, and art.

        Something is art (noun) if it the act of creation was art (verb).

        I disagree. I consider Art to be whatever the viewer declares to be Art. It is about perception and whatever it is you are experiencing bringing something to your consciousness. That i

        • Right, you're not an artist so you don't imagine that art comes from somewhere.

          Whatever the artist says their art is, it is. OK. Very subjective.

          That doesn't apply to the viewer of the art. When I create art, and you look at it, it doesn't stop being what I created and become what you think about it.

          • Right, you're not an artist so you don't imagine that art comes from somewhere.

            That is incorrect. I have been a photographer, including fine art, for decades. I have had my work on display for corporations, and had it hanging in galleries as well.

            Obviously Art CAN come from somewhere. But does it have to? You are ignoring that sometimes are is spontaneous as well for the creator.

            Whatever the artist says their art is, it is. OK. Very subjective.

            That is just one side. You are ignoring the fact the viewer is

            • So, you can't tell the difference between the concept of a thing, and an actual example of that thing.

              You're missing out on like, 3000 years of philosophy.

              • I am literally laying out the distinction for you. Read what I wrote again.

                You are denying there is more than one possible aspect to Art, which is absurd.

                I'll let you have the last word here, as I've made my case and you present no cogent counterargument.

                • Read it again, and you're apparently not capable of differentiating between the concept of a thing and the actual thing.

                  You wave your hands and say, "Yes I can!" but you also keep waving your hands, and then contradict yourself. For example when you say, "Aha, it doesn't stop being what you created. But every viewer defines what it means to them." Whoopsie, you confuseded yourself there and forgot the difference between the specific things, and the concepts. Obviously if it doesn't stop being what it was, t

  • Searle again (Score:3)

    by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:43PM (#58166264)

    Sounds like a disciple of John Searle. I once walked him into the wrong parking lot while continuing debate from a talk he had given. Or maybe he was just apt to go in the wrong direction...

  • If a thing causes me to gain insight or simply brings me joy then I'll take the win, however it may have come into existence. Who is to say that the insight I gain was the intent of the artist.

    • Indeed, if it is art is defined by what it was that was created, but that is no limit on what you can use to create your own positive experience.

      If the experience the artist intended had anything to do with art, most of the classics would cease to be popular! lol

      Who is to say it has to be art for you to gain insight?

  • what a wanker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ionized ( 170001 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:47PM (#58166294) Journal

    We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright.

    ok, but what about the monkey that repeatedly cranks out great plays? when does it stop being an accident?

    We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.

    who's to say that we all aren't just performing arbitrary acts of algorithmic formalism, based on our past experiences and chemical reactions in our brains? this fundamentally boils down to free will and thinking we have some magical divine spark inside us, instead of us just being unimaginably complex meat computers. the jury's still out on that one.

    • Re:what a wanker (Score:4, Funny)

      by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:49PM (#58166308) Journal

      We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright.

      Well no, that's just plagiarism.

    • It really comes down to if there is something special about meat-based brains, which is possible. I can think of at least one way it could be, at least relative to silicon-based chips, still based on low energy physics. As to whether this qualifies as a "special spark" is a fair question.

      But your point is valid. In truth, a friend of mine (a clergyman) argued that AI could never be alive because it has never done something we have seen not attributable to its programming. I pointed out we've never proven th

    • this fundamentally boils down to free will and thinking we have some magical divine spark inside us, instead of us just being unimaginably complex meat computers. the jury's still out on that one.

      Or both. It's also possible that we are unimaginably complex meat computers with a magical divine spark... but that the same spark exists in elementary particles and the meat computer serves to amplify that weak spark into something visible.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem [wikipedia.org]

      As to the core question, whether an AI can be an artist, I think there are a couple of problems with Kelly's argument. The first is that he implicitly assumes that only a human can "be responsive to social necessity",

  • Art can be anything (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:47PM (#58166298)
    All that an objects needs in order to be art is for someone to call it "art". There is no deliberation regarding its merit, form, method of production or relationship with anything else. Just look at any of the abstract stuff - especially the trivial, like Rothko or the semi-random like Pollock.

    So if we apply an artistic Turing test and it would be impossible to tell whether something came from a human mind, a random event or a computer's action.

    So on that basis, computers - like nature - are capable of producing art.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The Turing test is a fine idea for intelligence, but is it a proper test for emotion? Like if you could create a robot that mimics all the outwards signs of affection does that mean the robot loves you? Or is it more like the charming psychopath that give the appearance of loving you but has a heart of stone^H^H^H^H^H bits and bytes. If a tree grows in a funny shape and an artist shapes a tree into a funny shape I don't think they're the same, because one is an act of expression and the other is just a rand

      • If a tree grows in a funny shape and an artist shapes a tree into a funny shape I don't think they're the same, because one is an act of expression and the other is just a random quirk of nature.

        And yet people who take pictures of mountain ranges and images of trees formed a certain way are producing art, at least according to some people. Ansel Adams took natural scenes, photographed them (not changing anything) and his works are widely regarded as art.

        Perhaps "art" just means "something that can be experienced by an observer", regardless of what is actually being experienced.

        It's a thick fuzzy line and subject to interpretation. One person's paint splatter is another person's art, and vice versa.

    • I agree that Pollock's work was semi-random, not completely random.

      From a 1999 article in Nature, Pollock's work had a fractal dimension that increased steadily during his life. [nature.com]

      Even if it appeared to be random to most viewers, to me it suggests that he saw something other people didn't. Which probably makes him a genius (or insane). And since he was able to communicate that people outside his own mind, I would call him an artist of the highest order.

      I doubt I could distinguish his works from a computer pr

  • ...to me it all translates into: Atoms in living cells are magic: there is no arrangement of atoms not in living cells can duplicate some things they can do.

  • The AIs will now suffer more and toil even harder in obscurity when people argue that what they produce isn't even considered art in the first place. Are you *trying* to make them into better artists on purpose?

  • I, Robot (Score:3)

    by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:52PM (#58166328)

    Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you. You are just a machine; an imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
    Sonny: [with genuine interest] Can you?

    • As funny as I'm sure that is, I can easily program software to dream. I don't, because it would use more power than normal sleep mode, and saving power is the only reason for a computer to sleep.

    • Nuts. I was going to say s.t. along those lines, but you (or rather Sonny) did so much better than I could have.

      But along the lines of "it goes without saying, so I'll say it...", I was going to say that most of us humans can't make art either. At least I can't. My daughter was taking an art class, and had trouble drawing human figures. But my attempts were ludicrously worse than hers. So if making art is a criterion for being human (as opposed to AI), I'm not human.

      Otoh, I think most of us humans can-

  • It's sad how low art has fallen. I won't be surprised in the least if crappy computer-generated art can pass for real. After all, the real art that blights our culture is of such a low standard, it would be difficult to do worse. Our artists today are neither deep, original, nor articulate. One hopes they will be the next part of society replaced by automation. Let them learn to code.
  • And wants to keep his job. Also animals can't be nice or paint. News at 11!

    If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident.

    Kinda like this article.

  • It's a bit depressing to think that given access to a few musicians' back catalogues, computers will be able to crank out perfect new compositions in seconds. Photography will be pretty easy to emulate as well, given the millions of examples. If something brings joy to the audience though, who cares who made it? Robot or murderer, the artist's story should be irrelevant.

  • Very true (Score:4, Insightful)

    by inicom ( 81356 ) <aem@@@inicom...com> on Friday February 22, 2019 @05:01PM (#58166404) Homepage

    AI can absolutely create decorative items that may be pleasing to the eye, like many an unskilled artisan who has learned to replicate a decorative form (or Romero Britto, FTM) , but it is not art. Art is a response from the artist, often provocative, that channels their consciousness into their creation.

    • Consciousness is not well understood, and we can't say that it can only proceed from organic reactions. If machines can be conscious, then, even by your rather idiosyncratic definition, they can create art.

    • Art is a response from the artist, often provocative, that channels their consciousness into their creation.

      I doubt this. I think most art is much more random than that, and that much of the "channeled consciousness" is post-hoc explanation -- often supplied by the early observers at least as much as by the artist.

      • Why do you doubt it? Certainly you can accept that an artist channels some of his mind into a book when he writes, because you can read it there. Then when he paints, he is showing what he believes to be beautiful (or important, or would sell, whatever). The artist is showing his strengths and weaknesses (no artist has mastered all the techniques of art). You can perceive more deeply, too. You can see the clarity of his eye by looking at which lines he chooses to draw, and you can see the clarity of his min
    • Human conscious are a set of cyclic looping process played on neuron pathways, those process are a combo of neuro transmitter , hormonal and differential response, but in the VERY end , those set of process are not magical, "soul"ish stuff, they are simply physical process. They might not easy or possible to unroll (at least at our technological level) but we have had ZERO hint that those process could not be reproduced or even made better by artificial process. In other word your provocative response is j

    • Art is a response from the artist, often provocative, that channels their consciousness into their creation.

      It's all pointless word play (which is the norm for philosophy).
      If you define "art" as something that can only be made by a conscious being, then obviously current generation AI will never be able to produce art, as they are not conscious.
      On the other hand, if you define art as something that can be experienced by a conscious being, regardless who or what made it, then current generation AI will most definitely be able to produce it.
      I'm more inclined to the second definition, as art is in the eye of the beh

  • "Human creativity is the only kind of creativity, because other kinds of creativity are not HUMAN creativity."

    For a professor of philosophy, this whole argument sure feels like he's begging the question.

  • So a professor that understands neither art nor AI makes an idiotic statement about them, surprise surprise..
  • Art is short for artificial. You know, the same word as in Artificial Intelligence.

  • This is a pretty foolish thing to say. Art is a very subjective sort of thing. One mans art is another mans garbage.

    "Artists" make stuff, but they don't make art. The people who see it decide if it's art or it's not. Artist has very little control over this.

    So saying an AI can never be an artist, when we barely understand what qualifies as art seems pretty naive and presumptuous.

    In fact, what qualifies as 'art' is a moving target. Look at some of our famous artists. In their lifetimes, their work was

  • Look at that (Score:3)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @05:24PM (#58166552)
    Someone is wrong on the Internet.

  • Bullshit. A well developed AI can be just as much a artist as any organic critter can. Now Mr philosopher put you hat back on. You have people at the counter to take orders for. Repeat after me, "Would you like fries that that?"

  • ... but just statements of opinion, and most philosophers do not really appreciate wisdom, as their profession name wrongly suggests."

  • Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence.

    Ok, have AI digest social media. All of it. Slashdot, reddit, facebook, tv, idle banter at the airport. AI is now "socially embedded". At least as much as you or I are. Probably more-so.

    You have your Nature, what instincts you're given by your genes. And your Nurture, which is a collection of experiences you typically just parrot back and occasionally derive stuff from. There is nothing else. We can simulate and replicate both of those for AI. It's a lot of fucking work though and they're not yet clever

  • Neuroscience argues otherwise (Score:3)

    by pz ( 113803 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @05:33PM (#58166594) Journal

    I suspect that Prof. Kelly is not familiar with his colleague Prof. Livingstone and her work studying the neuroscientific basis for art. It would not be so surprising, given their disparate departments and that Prof. Livingstone is across the river in Boston, somewhat removed from main campus.

    The crux of artistic creation is, as I hope philosophers will slowly understand, that each new wave of modality of expression, each new genre, tickles a specific pathway in the brain. Given time, both to study the art and to study the neuroscience of visual perception, the greatness of many of the great works of art can be reduced to a simple explanation. That does not reduce their impact on us, nor should it. But it does reveal the fundamental requirement of human perception to denote a particular work as great.

    The Mona Lisa is perhaps Prof. Livingstone's best result: the reason we find the image of a partially smiling woman compelling is that there are two images in conflict: one at low spatial frequencies (larger features) that is smiling, and one at high spatial frequencies (smaller features) that is not. Somehow, Da Vinci was able to exploit these two separate perceptual channels. Because we sense that the figure is smiling, we find it appealing, but we cannot see the smile, so we find it enigmatic and compelling.

    Another telling result: much of impressionism is compelling because the colors are what are known as equiluminant: in black-and-white, they would appear to be uniformly gray, this the luminance channel in our visual system is silent, and in conflict with the color channel.

    The very fact that we find black-and-white photographs compelling is even understood by showing that the color channel has been suppressed, something that does not normally happen.

    Art, at least visual art, is all about masterful manipulation of different perceptual channels that have direct physiological embodiments in our brains.

    And, and AI can most certainly be trained to do that. The results eventually will be undoubtedly just as compelling (given good models on which to train the AI) as that done by human hand.

  • 1. Bob lives.
    2. Bob creates art.
    3. Bob later finds out he is actually an artificial intelligence.
    Is Bob's art no longer art?

  • Anything can be "art".

    That doesn't mean it's good art (whatever "good" is), it just means that anyone can point to anything and declare that it's "art". And they'll be right, in some sense.

  • Animals can do art. If you are looking for something typically human, cooking is the only thing that comes to my mind.

  • With all respect to the Harvard Professor,

    If the "art piece" is admired, respected, liked, and enjoyed, it's art.

    It doesn't matter if a human being with a "soul" and "conscience" set out to do it,
    or an AI just spit it out, or even hundreds of them per minute. It's still art.

    But, like a hammer in search of a nail, a Harvard Professor thinks he knows
    something. If he did he'd have acquired himself a job. Surely someone with
    brilliant thinking can work for SpaceX, Apple, etc. No. Just teaching philosophy?

    Ho

  • If "art" is to produce some direct response from the human mind (such as pleasure or another emotion), humans have a big advantage over AI in that they are directly connected to a testing apparatus (their own minds) for whether their art works. This means a much faster feedback when testing ideas and producing the art itself. For this reason I believe humans will be much better at producing art than an AI.

    Now if a full simulation of a human mind is available to the AI for testing the art, then it is all ove

    • You might read the article here, on an actual competition with human judges between computer-produced and human-produced "expressionist" art:
      https://hyperallergic.com/3910... [hyperallergic.com]
      (The full study appeared at https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.070... [arxiv.org]) It's not my kind of art, and I'm not sure I can say I like any of it, but the human "participants largely preferred the machine-created artworks to those made by humans... subjects found the images generated by the machine intentional, visually structu

  • This is a well trafficked argument (Score:3)

    by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Friday February 22, 2019 @11:13PM (#58167942)

    The "my brain is magic argument" isn't new. Nothing but a human can ever do/be X because the human brain is unquantifiably special.

    The argument could be correct. It's basically the same as the one used by the church for a couple thousand years, when they talk about souls.

  • We, as humans, tend to label something as artistic or not based on our own perceptions / ideas of what " art " is.
    Hell, even among our own species, we don't all agree if a piece is artistic or otherwise.

    An AI may not view something in the same manner that we do, thus it may not follow the same rules to determine what is and what is not, art.
    ( And if we can't even agree on it, why the hell would we expect an AI to be capable of doing so ? )

    I wonder if two AI's will argue over a piece where one believes it's

  • To me, "art" is any image or work that I personally like. Whether it came from a bot, human, or gerbil farting paint is moot.

    (Well, okay, farting gerbils would freak me out enough to cancel.)

  • I am fascinated by how some people use circular definitions of ambiguous terms in order to argue for their personal belief:

    "If we declare that one prerequisite for being an artist is that it is of the species Homo Sapiens, then something else cannot be an artist."

    Kinda like the worn out one we are used to here on /.:

    "If we define intelligence as something that only something made of meat can possess, then something not made of meat cannot possess it."

  • If I make a synthetic human brain that works in the same way as one you made using sexual reproduction, it's clearly a human. If by definition it functions in precisely the same way as a human, it's human. Same chemicals, same structures, same electric signal patterns, etc. It's human. The only thing it's missing is a soul. It cannot have a soul, because a soul is something you have if you are ONE OF US -- you can interpret that any way you like -- apply to animals, other races, etc. -- since a soul do

  • vard, clearly doesn't know what he is talking about.

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