Here I'm going to look at the area of research into whether computer/machine can be creative and how that impact on society, this is going to follow on from the research done by Christine:
http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/ai.html
Artificial Intelligence Tutorial Review Developed and compiled by Eyal Reingold and Johnathan Nightingale
Can Computers Be Creative?
Historically, human creativity has been a neglected topic in psychology in general and intelligence testing in particular. Despite this, creativity is considered by most to be an essential component of human intelligence. Consequently, in attempting to answer the question of whether computers can think, it is only natural to ask whether computers can think creatively. Many feel, in fact, that whereas computers can excel in well-structured areas of problem solving - e.g. logic, algebra, etc. - they have little hope of ever producing truly creative work. For a work to be creative, it must be novel and useful- this represents an enormous challenge for AI.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25095969
BBC News 29 November 2013
The quest to turn computers into creative artists by Alex Hudson
One of the differences between humans and machines has often been said to be creative thought. But several efforts are under way to let computers seek inspiration from their surrounding environment to create art. The Iamus project has taught a computer to write modern classical music at the touch of a button, taking account of performers' limitations - such as the number of fingers available to play notes. Its works have been performed by the London Symphony Orchestra . Some might argue that computers will never be able to match human ingenuity but it is difficult these days to argue they can't at least mimic many of our skills.
Take the eDavid painting robot. The computer-controlled arm - adapted from a welding machine - chooses from five brushes and 24 colours to create impressive artworks on canvas. It works by snapping a photo of its subject matter and then making the necessary calculations to turn the image into a drawing or painting in a wide variety of styles. Its creators admit that it has no awareness of what it is doing. But it is able to make decisions about things like shading and brushstrokes as it goes, tweaking its moves based on how the picture is evolving, rather than just creating a pre-determined image.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/07/can-computers-be-creative
Technology 07 August 13 by Kadhim Shubber
Artificial artists: when computers become creative
"There's no inherent creativity," says Simon Colton, a computer scientist who for the last ten years has been developing The Painting Fool, a piece of software that he says exhibits creativity. "There are [only] processes that are more likely to have creativity projected onto them by people." The Painting Fool's most recent iteration was on show at an exhibition in Paris in July called "You Can't Know my Mind", where it painted portraits of attendees. It is now a moody artist, which reads news articles to give it a "mood" -- positive news stories make it happy, negative news stories make it sad. That moodiness results in some interesting outcomes, including sometimes refusing to paint the person sitting for it, which Colton says happened six or so times. When the person sits in front of The Painting Fool, which lives on a laptop, the software chooses an adjective based on the mood it is in -- for example, it might choose the adjective colourful if it's in a good mood. It then tries to paint a portrait of that person -- using pencil, paint or pastels -- that evokes that adjective."It sets [itself] a goal at the start, based on a mood that we don't give it," explains Colton. "It [then] attempts to achieve that mood with the painting styles that it has." After completing the painting, it self-assesses to see whether it has achieved the goal it set itself. It's this self-assessment, achieved by combining the software with an artificial art critic called "Darci", that means The Painting Fool now displays all of the behaviours that amount to creativity, says Colton.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/01/ai-artificial-intelligence-robots-sautoy
The Observer, Sunday 1 April 2012 Marcus du Sautoy
AI robot: how machine intelligence is evolving
No computer can yet …………… be taken as human. But the hunt for artificial intelligence is moving in a different, exciting direction that involves creativity, language – and even jazz
The AI community is beginning to question whether we should be so obsessed with recreating human intelligence. That intelligence is a product of millions of years of evolution and it is possible that it is something that will be very difficult to reverse engineer without going through a similar process. The emphasis is now shifting towards creating intelligence that is unique to the machine, intelligence that ultimately can be harnessed to amplify our very own unique intelligence
For me one of the most striking experiments in AI is the brainchild of the director of the Sony lab in Paris, Luc Steels. He has created machines that can evolve their own language. A population of 20 robots are first placed one by one in front of a mirror and they begin to explore the shapes they can make using their bodies in the mirror. Each time they make a shape they create a new word to denote the shape. For example the robot might choose to name the action of putting the left arm in a horizontal position. Each robot creates its own unique language for its own actions.
The really exciting part is when these robots begin to interact with each other. One robot chooses a word from its lexicon and asks another robot to perform the action corresponding to that word. Of course the likelihood is that the second robot hasn't a clue. So it chooses one of its positions as a guess. If they've guessed correctly the first robot confirms this and if not shows the second robot the intended position.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/technology/the-rapid-advance-of-artificial-intelligence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
New York Times Technology Published: October 14, 2013
The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence by John Markoff
Emotional Computing
At a preschool near the University of California, San Diego, a child-size robot named Rubi plays with children. It listens to them, speaks to them and understands their facial expressions. Rubi is an experimental project of Prof. Javier Movellan, a specialist in machine learning and robotics. Professor Movellan is one of a number of researchers now working on a class of computers that can interact with humans, including holding conversations. Computers that understand our deepest emotions hold the promise of a world full of brilliant machines. They also raise the specter of an invasion of privacy on a scale not previously possible, as they move a step beyond recognizing human faces to the ability to watch the array of muscles in the face and decode the thousands of possible movements into an understanding of what people are thinking and feeling.
https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/will-machines-ever-become-human
Big Questions Online. David Gelernter July 31, 2012
Will machines ever become human?
Someday, digital computers will almost certainly be intelligent. But they will never be conscious………….. Suppose you tell one computer and one man to imagine a rose and then describe it. You might get two similar descriptions, and be unable to tell which is which. But behind these similar statements, a crucial difference. The man can see and sense an imaginary rose in his mind. The computer can put on a good performance, can describe an imaginary rose in detail—but can’t actually see or sense anything. It has no internal mental world; no consciousness; only a blank.
http://createquity.com/2012/10/artificial-intelligence-and-the-arts.html
Createquity.com
Artificial Intelligence and the Arts by Jacquelyn Strycker | Published: October 24th, 2012
………the Tate Gallery, SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and the Brooklyn Museum are among the institutions that have exhibited paintings made by AARON, an autonomous art-making program created by Harold Cohen. Indeed, computers’ capabilities now rival cognitive functions once thought to be intrinsically human. Computers can form links, evaluate, and even make novel works; they can function in ways that we think of as creative. The obvious question is, if computers are performing creatively, should we consider the resulting works art?
The simplest answer, and in many ways most appealing to the human ego, is that no, these computers are not making art. Art requires intention. This is why projects like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 1993 (Café Deutschland), in which the artist set up a functioning cafe in a private gallery in Cologne, or Lee Mingwei’s The Living Room, in which Mr. Lee transformed a gallery into a living room and selected volunteers to act as hosts, are art; their makers intended them as such. By contrast, EMI, AARON and other AI systems have no sentient intentions to make art, or anything else. Therefore, the works they create are not art, although they could be considered as such if a human had made them. Instead, it’s the software itself that is the art, and its programmers the artists.
By this reasoning, even if the computer-generated works are, in fact, works of art, they are authored not by the computer, but by human software designers. The computer is merely a tool for making art, analogous to a brush or musical instrument.
http://miwalab.cog.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp/database/paper/2004-09-24.pdf
MIWA LAB
Creativity and artificial intelligence by Margaret A. Boden
Creativity is a fundamental feature of human intelligence, and an inescapable challenge
for AI.
Perhaps the best-known example of AI-creativity is AARON, a program-or rather, a series of programs-for exploring line-drawing in particular styles and, more recently, colouring also. AARON is not focussed primarily on surfaces, but generates some representation of a 3D-core, and then draws a line around it. Versions that can draw many idiosyncratic portraits use 900 control points to specify the 3D-core, of which 300 specify the structure of the face and head. The program’s drawings are aesthetically pleasing, and have been exhibited in galleries worldwide.
It chooses colours by tonality (light/dark) rather than hue, although it can decide to concentrate on a particular family of hues. It draws outlines using a paintbrush, but colours the paper by applying five round “paint-blocks” of differing sizes. Some characteristic features of the resulting painting style are due to the physical properties of the dyes and painting-blocks rather than to the program guiding their use. Like drawing-AARON, painting-AARON is still under continuous development.
The drawings (and paintings) are individually unpredictable because of random choices, but all the drawings produced by a given version of AARON will have the same style. AARON cannot reflect on its own productions, nor adjust them so as to make them better. It cannot even transform its conceptual space, leaving aside the question of whether this results in something “better”.
Further Research:
http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/20734326468/aaron-the-first-artificial-intelligence-creative
AARON: Claimed to be the first art created by a computer. The interesting thing about this is that AARON follow rules to produce these pieces, these rules are generated by the creator of the programmer Harold Cohen. This opens up the question, that despite the computer creating unique images, is the computer being creative or is it just acting as extension of Harold Cohen. The answer comes from the fact that AARON cannot learn and change it's style, it is confined to the rules by which it was programmed. In that respect it is fundamentally flawed as you cannot be creative without learning from your mistakes and adapt your techniques/style as you go. There is no learning here.
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http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/cache/ai_creativity.html)
In the late 1970s, AARON was producing simple closed-figure drawings whose sketch-like quality viewers found surprisingly human and attractive. Ten years on and Cohen had provided the program with more information about the outside world and its proliferation of shapes - including human shapes.AARON obliged by creating pictures of humans set amid stones, trees and plants. Very recently, Cohen has succeeded in encoding rules for colouring, so that AARON now produces full-colour illustrations that show a certain amount of skill and imagination.
Cynics may ask whether AARON is any more creative than an intelligent paintbox program that prompts human artists through a series of stored templates. In reply, Cohen points to AARON's endless ability to surprise, and the fact that it never comes up with the same work twice. It doesn't even need any inputs, but will happily produce some artistic creation without detailed prompting. So, again, it is hard to deny that AARON is, in some sense, creative.
What it cannot do, however, is to break the bounds set by its rules. In its present state, AARON could not elect to subvert reality, like Dali, or create a new reality, like Picasso. Cohen himself fights shy of the 'creative' label for AARON. He believes the program will deserve that accolade only when it shows some signs of artistic development, of creating something today that it could not have done a year ago. How that might be achieved is, as yet, unclear: formulating some kind of metarules is one possible route.
eDavid is a robotic arm that can mimic our skills, while not being creative it can make decision about light and shade which can change the way the image looks.
This article explore how artificial intelligence is already being used and the implication for future endeavours.
