June 30th 12:01 SKYNET becomes active; actually nothing so threatening but on June 30th the first computer AI composing program became listed on France’s SACEM (an artists rights society) as the true composer of an album of music. Around the same time across the pond in South Carolina a team of researchers unveiled their new AI duo, a pair of programs called a GAN or generative adversarial network which are able to produce painted art in styles never before seen.
Artificial Intelligence is set to become the most important technology of the 21st century. But what do you think of when you think of AI? SPAM filters? Poker playing bots? Terminators? Futurism.com sums up our current view of AI as:
When we think about AI, we often look at those areas where humans can easily be replaced: high-level computation, manual labour, or data-driven optimization. Yet, there is now a new wave of emerging potential for AI in creative industries – one of which happens to be [in artistic] composition.
Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist or AIVA for short was created by startup Aiva Technologies out of Luxembourg. Pierre Barreau, Denis Shtefan, Arnaud Decker, and Vincent Barreau the brain-children behind the technology used in AIVA have great plans for AIVA. They taught it to compose classical music something that most would assume would be still outside the realm of what is possible for a computer program to successfully do. After many hours of work AIVA has now composed its first album which has been recorded and produced. What does the future hold for the budding computer composer? Well, Futurism.com reports though that AIVA is already signed up for “soundtracks for film directors, advertising agencies, and even game studios”. The future looks bright for AIVA and even if it doesn’t write the next top 40 hit, at the very least maybe we can now all get some variety to our hold music.
Do computers only have a hope of making music? What about other kinds of art? If a team of researchers from the College of Charleston, South Carolina have their way then they would add painting to that list as well. The team (which also includes researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey and Facebook’s AI lab) has developed an algorithm which utilizes a pair of neural networks to create art. To do so they pair two programs against each other, one creates the art, the other evaluates it. New Scientist reports that the team utilized 81,500 paintings to help the program be able to evaluate things as art or things we would call a diagram, image or noise. The really interesting part of the program is that it can produce art that does not exactly fit our current style definitions but is still recognizably art.
While the jokes about terminators and SKYNET spring to mind there really is no reason to fear these new AI programs. In making their art they help us understand what art really means to all of us, and if the world has a few more good paintings and songs then we can hardly say we are worse off. I for one look forward to seeing this technology flourish and all the interesting things people working with it can create. It just might be that if you ask your computer to make some art for you it will be able to respond “i can do that Dave”.
For those interested you can check out AIVAs album on soundcloud here; as well as some examples of the AI art here.
References
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2139184-artificially-intelligent-painters-invent-new-styles-of-art/
- https://futurism.com/a-new-ai-can-write-music-as-well-as-a-human-composer/
