Yesterday, the UMich and Carnegie Mellon AI4ALL chapters co-hosted an 'AI in Humanities' event over Zoom. We invited an amazing panel of distinguished professors and Ph.D. students from the two universities. Panelists from Carnegie Mellon included Professor Henny Admoni and Ph.D. student Dr. Kim Baraka. From UofM: Professor David Fouhey and Ph.D. student Richard Higgins who works with computer vision and machine learning.
During the event, the presenters shared how their work in AI/robotics relates to art and social justice. I could probably write a dozen blog posts about the research projects and the concepts we discussed (perhaps, I will write a few more), but for now, I'd like to focus on two projects that stood out to me.
The first project is a robot that Kim Baraka and his teammates created—a paintbrush attached to a robotic arm. The arm guides a human hand to follow its pre-programmed instructions—a certain paint design loaded into the code. But the human can take over at any time, by merely stiffening his grip on the brush. This way, the artist chooses what to paint; he may choose to use the robot's design for the sun rays in the top half of his painting while painting the rest of the piece without guidance.
This project captured my attention not just because the robot can sense your grip-pressure (wow!) but also because this is a perfect example of how AI can aid the creation of art...guide it, not necessarily make it from scratch.
Following the same idea, a recurring theme throughout the event was the idea of AI as a tool to help humans express their creativity in art. Many students came with concerns about AI replacing humans in artistic fields such as painting and music production. We've seen researchers develop intelligent systems that can take in a thousand song samples and output their own original song! However, during our discussion, a student mentioned that art is all about emotional expression, something that a machine without emotions cannot begin to comprehend. Therefore AI cannot create real art, it must only aid a human to do so. Professor Admoni also mentioned that art was first discovered as a way to connect humans, but if we now expect robots to make that art for us, we've lost its purpose. So for now, we're keeping AI as our sidekick as we continue to bring light to the world through art.
Another interesting point was brought up: art cannot be original, by definition. Everything we create is technically a remix of the artwork we take in every day. A song is a mixture of sounds you've likely already heard before—the thumping bass, the soothing piano ambiance, the record scratching—but simply morphed in a new manner and labeled as your own. This is not to say that art has lost its value; rather, art is learned and improved every day, just like our AI systems.
Take a look at the following image. Would you call the final product art?
Take an image, apply a (very famous) filter, and viola: Canines take on The Starry Night! Professor Fouhey and Richard shared this modern artistic process with us. The computer system transferred the style of Van Gogh's painting to the dog's image, figuring out where to implement each color through a pre-trained deep neural network. This method is called Artistic Style Transfer. The motivation behind it is simple: Van Gogh is long gone, but who wouldn't love to have their portrait painted by him anyway?
Now, this begs the question: do these artistic recreations qualify as art? They are remixes of historical paintings and modern photography, just remixed by a computer rather than a human. However, humans are at the source of the computer algorithm that transfers that style, perhaps the human is truly the artist rather than the computer.
Discussing the intersection of creativity and technology evoked a strong curiosity in me, and I have no answers to the questions I presented thus far (did you think I was gonna answer my rhetorical questions?). But I'd like to end this post with another thought offered by Professor Admoni: art is meant to invoke an emotional response in he who views it. If that emotional response is instead invoked by an intelligent system, who cares? Art is art, after all. I think I speak for everyone who attended yesterday when I say that we are truly excited to see where a collaboration between AI and creative expression can take us in the future. And yes, I'm still waiting for Van Gogh to pop back and paint my portrait, so let me know if you see him around.