The portrait of Edmond de Belamy was knocked down for $432,500 at a Christie’s auction last October. But who was Edmond de Belamy and why was his portrait sold for such an amount? The artist of the portrait is listed under the name “Obvious” and Edmond de Belamy never really existed. This painting is the first generative adversarial network piece ever sold at an auction. It is a portrait of a blurry man, printed on canvas, set in a wood frame and signed with an algorithm instead of a name.
So, is this a sign that Artificial Intelligence will become the next medium of art? Can a result derived by AI be considered as art and if so, can it be equivalent to a human mind’s product?
Practically this is not a valid question anymore. It is quite impossible for anyone to distinguish an AI from a human generated painting, but the query is whether a machine can approximate the unique creative process of the human mind.
Other forms of art are also being explored in terms of AI impersonation, resulting to intriguing and sometimes funny mash-ups. Music is a field where AI can really help expand the limits of human creation. Google’s AI Experiment The Magenta Project has built an AI sound blender in order to help people generate two-dimensional sound palettes and create evolving beats.
AI can also be a surrealistic content creator when bots are asked to generate scripts, poems or any other form of literature, based on trained algorithmic tools with predictive text programs. A hilarious example is the short film Sunspring (2016), which is the first AI script ever shot in film, generated by a bot. The bot was originally named Jetson but was later renamed by itself as Benjamin. Benjamin wrote the screenplay, including the dialogues and the stage directions. It was trained to produce content by feeding it with a corpus of pre-existing screenplays. The film is shot according to the bot’s directions and is a totally absurd piece of art.
So, can AI replace an artist and create things without being able to feel the initial need for it? An AI mediated piece may be a product of an algorithmic procedure of a trained bot but art is such a wide concept that even this could be incorporated in it. So, there is plenty of space for AI to impact the future of art and it will definitely be an exiting time ahead!
Invisible Environments 
Very interesting article. I think that artificial intelligence will constitute a paradigm shift in today’s society. We have already entered an era where artificial intelligence is a daily subject of news stories and public conversations. An interesting piece about the ways AI has affected science can be found here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-science-20190311/
Nevertheless, this approach of AI in relation to art is new to me and, to my mind, raises questions about what constitutes the actual core essence of art. To elaborate, there were indeed tests conducted around this matter. Ahmed Elgammal, director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University, mentioned that in some tests, “artistic” AI work was presented to humans in order to discern if it originated from a human or a machine, and to judge its possible artistic value. The results indeed showed that individuals were neither able to always distinguish between the piece’s creators, nor disregarding of their perceived artistic value (for the actual study, see here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.07068.pdf ).
I personally believe that art should go beyond artistic principles and preoccupations with form, regardless of how impressing those will become at some point. Instead, art should be more about conveying actual meaning, emotions and viewpoints of unique individuals, and AI is not at this point. At least not yet. However, if people find meaning in such works, isn’t it art after all?
The conversations surrounding this topic could be endless, and could extend to the debate of what it actually means to be a human. Generally speaking, I am skeptical about the ways artificial intelligence will play out in the future. It is true that great applications of AI are already happening, but the extent to which humanity is ready to tackle the challenges that will inevitably arise is surely something to feel uneasy about.
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