The artist in the machine: the world of AI-powered creativity

402 Pages·2019·31.999 MB·English

by  Arthur I. Miller

Also by Arthur I. Miller
Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession
Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes
Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc
Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art
Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th-Century Physics
The Artist in the Machine
The World of AI-Powered Creativity
Arthur I. Miller
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2019 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without
permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed and bound
in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: The artist in the machine : the world of AI-powered creativity /
Arthur I. Miller.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059352 | ISBN 9780262042857 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Art and computers. | Creative ability. | Computer art.
Classification: LCC NX180.C66 M55 2019 | DDC 776--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059352
ISBN: 978-0-262-04285-7
For Lesley, as always
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
I    Understanding Creativity
  1   What Makes Us Creative?
Einstein, Bach, Picasso: What Makes These People Special?
  2   Seven Hallmarks of Creativity and Two Marks of Genius
1. The Need for Introspection
2. Know Your Strengths
3. Focus, Persevere, and Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
4. Collaborate and Compete
5. Beg, Borrow, or Steal Great Ideas
6. Thrive on Ambiguity
7. The Need for Experience and Suffering
The Two Marks of Genius
Intent, Imagination, and Unpredictability
  3   Margaret Boden’s Three Types of Creativity
  4   Unconscious Thought: The Key Ingredient
The Four Stages of Creativity
The Importance of Taking Time off
Unconscious Thought and Computers
5   The Birth of Artificial Intelligence
The First Inklings of Computer Creativity
Computers That Mimic the Brain
  6   Games Computers Play
Deep Blue Defeats Garry Kasparov
IBM Watson Becomes Jeopardy! Champion
AlphaGo Defeats the Reigning World Go Champion
II   Portrait of the Computer as an Artist
  7   DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the
Computer’s Hidden Layers
Mike Tyka Takes the Dream Deeper
  8   Blaise Agüera y Arcas Brings Together Artists and
Machine Intelligence
Memo Akten Educates a Neural Network
  9   What Came after DeepDream?
Damien Henry and a Machine That Dreams a Landscape
Mario Klingemann and His X Degrees of Separation
Angelo Semeraro’s Recognition: Intertwining Past and Present
Leon Gatys’s Style Transfer: Photography “In the Style Of”
10   Ian Goodfellow’s Generative Adversarial Networks: AI
Learns to Imagine
Mike Tyka’s Portraits of Imaginary People
Refik Anadol Creates a Dreaming Archive
Theresa Reimann-Dubbers’s AI Looks at the Messiah
Jake Elwes’s Dreams of Latent Space
11   Phillip Isola’s Pix2Pix: Filling in the Picture
Mario Klingemann Changes Faces with Pix2Pix
Anna Ridler’s Fall of the House of Usher
12   Jun-Yan Zhu’s CycleGAN Turns Horses into Zebras
Mario Klingemann Plays with CycleGAN
13   Ahmed Elgammal’s Creative Adversarial Networks
14   “But Is It Art?”: GANs Enter the Art Market
15   Simon Colton’s The Painting Fool
16   Hod Lipson and Patrick Tresset’s Artist Robots
III  Machines That Make Music: Putting the “Rhythm” into
“Algorithm”
17   Project Magenta: AI Creates Its Own Music
18   From WaveNet and NSynth to Coconet: Adventures in
Music Making
WaveNet: From Voice to Music
NSynth—Creating Sounds Never Heard Before
Coconet: Filling in the Gaps
19   François Pachet and His Computers That Improvise and
Compose Songs
The Flow Machine
20   Gil Weinberg and Mason Bretan and Their Robot Jazz
Band
21   David Cope Makes Music That Is “More Bach than Bach”
22   “The Drunken Pint” and Other Folk Music Composed by
Bob Sturm and Oded Ben-Tal’s AI
23   Rebecca Fiebrink Uses Movement to Generate Sound
24   Marwaread Mary Farbood Sketches Music
25   Eduardo Miranda and His Improvising Slime Mold
IV  Once Upon a Time: Computers That Weave Magic with Words
26   The Pinocchio Effect
27   The Final Frontier: Computers with a Sense of Humor
28   AI and Poetry
Pablo Gervás and His Poetic Algorithms
29   Rafael Pérez y Pérez and the Problems of Creating
Rounded Stories
30   Nick Montfort Makes Poetry with Pi
31   Allison Parrish Sends Probes into Semantic Space
32   Ross Goodwin and the First AI-Scripted Movie
33   Sarah Harmon Uses AI to Create Illuminating Metaphors
34   Tony Veale and His Metaphor- and Story-Generating
Programs
35   Hannah Davis Turns Words into Music
36   Simon Colton’s Poetic Fool
 V  Staged by Android Lloyd Webber and Friends
37   The World’s First Computer-Composed Musical: Beyond
the Fence
VI  Can Computers Be Creative?
38   A Glimpse of the Future?
Creativity in Humans and Machines
39   What Goes On in the Computer’s Brain?
Jason Yosinski and the Puzzle of What Machines See
Mark Riedl on Teaching Neural Networks to Communicate
40   What Drives Creativity?
Margaret Boden and Computer Creativity
41   Evaluating Creativity in Computers
Geraint Wiggins and the Mind’s Chorus
Graeme Ritchie’s Mathematical Criteria for Measuring the Creativity of a Computer Program
Anna Jordanous’s Fourteen Components of Creativity
42   Computers with Feelings
Rosalind Picard on Developing Machines That Feel
Machines Gaining Experience of the World
Machines That Suffer
43   The Question of Consciousness
John Searle’s Chinese Room and the Question of Whether Computers Can Actually Think
Reducing Consciousness to the Sum of Its Parts
44   Michael Graziano: Developing Conscious Computers
Awareness and Attention
Self-Awareness, Introspection, and Perseverance in Computers
Giving Computers Consciousness
45   Two Dissenting Voices
Douglas Hofstadter and the Horrors of a Future Controlled by Creative Machines
Pat Langley and Machines That Work More like People
46   Can We Apply the Hallmarks of Creativity to Computers?
The Need to Know Your Strengths
The Need to Beg, Borrow, or Steal Great Ideas, and the Need for Collaboration and
Competition
The Need to Focus and Not Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
The Need to Thrive on Ambiguity and the Need for Experience and Suffering
The Ability to Discover the Key Problem and to Spot Connections
47   The Future
Where We Are Now
Where We Are Going
And into the Future …
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
Figure 7.1 Mordvintsev’s reference image of a cat and a beagle, 2015.
Figure 7.2 Alexander Mordvintsev, nightmare beast created using DeepDream, 2015. [See color plate
1.]
Figure 7.3 “Dogslug cum puppyslug” created using DeepDream, 2015.
Figure 7.4 Two ibises— the original photograph (left) and as “seen” by a machine, 2015 (right).
Figure 7.5 Picture of clouds before (top) and after (bottom) being transformed by DeepDream, 2015.
Figure 8.1 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: DeepDream Edition, 2015.