When David Sylvester asked Francis Bacon about the future of art, he replied that art has entered a new era as the camera captured images by recording film and photographs. The expression of imagination, creativity and the transfer of emotions in art have changed a lot. Can we say that, after the emergence of artificial intelligence, we have entered a new era and AI art, like NFT artwork, has greatly influenced the medium?
Before answering this question, let’s consider a situation to understand AI art better. Imagine you have always wanted to paint an oil painting, but you never learned how to do it and never had the opportunity to learn. Maybe you don’t have the ability to work with brushes and colors. Here, artificial intelligence comes to your aid, and with the algorithms and the data the robot has received, it creates what you have in mind.
This data can contain thousands or millions of pieces of information, including texts or images, and the robot or computer uses these to create a new artwork.
So is this art that you created? Is it valid art?
These machines need algorithms to create AI art, and these algorithms are given to the machines with the help of humans. We can say that it is a kind of collaboration between humans and robots. This collaboration or new way of creating art is still very basic for all its complexity.
AI art may change a lot in the future as technology advances, and will surely make significant changes the course of art history, with two main methods. If robots are able to produce the algorithms they need, then they will no longer need human algorithms, or their dependence on humans and human imagination will be much less. In the second method, it is possible that these robots will connect directly to the human brain and convert imagination and emotions into algorithms and then artworks.
With the spread of artificial intelligence, we can expect artworks to be produced at a lower cost, but are they as creative as human-created artworks? And can we expect them to compete with masterpieces?
It is difficult to answer this question. All we know is that in the future, the quality of the works will improve.
The culmination of this disagreement can be seen in Théâtre D’Opéra Spatial by Jason Allen.
A painting called ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’ by Jason Allen has won first place at the Colorado State Fair competition, but the runners-up are particularly unhappy.
Why? The winning artwork was generated by Artificial Intelligence ⤵️
🔗: https://t.co/szrzafV00E pic.twitter.com/D2z5nM8fK5
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 4, 2022
This work won the first prize in the digital artwork category at the Colorado State Fair, USA, and caused many artists to protest this choice, accusing Jason Allen of being a fraudulent artist who did not use his creativity.
On the other hand, some people also supported him because they believe that artificial intelligence is just a tool and without the creative mind of the artist it is not possible to create such works.
AI art is not limited to paintings and it can be produced in the fields of music, writing and sculpture. Therefore, many fields of art will undergo fundamental changes and this will definitely affect the lives of artists.
Probably the most famous painting produced by AI art is the portrait of Edmond de Belamy with the strange signature min G max D x [log (D(x))] + z [log (1 -D (G(z)))], which is the function that produced it. The painting was sold for $432,500 at Christie’s in 2018, and its title was a tribute to Ian Goodfellow, inventor of GANs. It vaguely resembled the work of Francis Bacon and attracted the attention of the market.
This strange signature, and the unknown artist, raises this question: who is the creator of the work? A group of scientists? Artist? Or machine and computer? And will easy access to artificial intelligence in the future lead to the spread of low-quality artworks or not?
Dr. Ahmed Elgammel, who has created works in collaboration with artificial intelligence called AICAN, believes that we should not be worried, and he compares this process to photography and asks if the making of different cameras and people’s access to cameras has made all photographers great and professional.
We may have to wait for the answer to this question. But we know one thing for sure, and that is that artificial intelligence has created a revolution in the world of art that is impossible to get rid of.
Image: The featured image was created by AI with the instruction “a painting about artificial intelligence in the style of an oil painting”. The second image, of Edmond de Belamy, is in the Public Domain.
