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“Is a picture made by an artificial intelligence ‘art’ if there’s no emotion involved? And what happens if you train a neural net to make music using only the Friends theme tune?
Jonathan Jones is unhappy about artificial intelligence. It might be hard to tell from a casual glance at the art critic’s recent column, “The digital Rembrandt: a new way to mock art, made by fools,” but if you look carefully the subtle clues are there. His use of the adjectives “horrible, tasteless, insensitive and soulless” in a single sentence, for example.
The source of Jones’s ire is a new piece of software that puts… I’m so sorry… the ‘art’ into ‘artificial intelligence’. By analyzing a subset of Rembrandt paintings that featured ‘bearded white men in their 40s looking to the right’, its algorithms were able to extract the key features that defined the Dutchman’s style. Trained on over 160,000 fragments of the Rembrandts, the AI would soon learn enough to produce its very own masterpiece. Or failing that, the Friends theme tune.
Of course an artificial intelligence is the worst possible enemy of a critic, because it has no ego and literally does not give a crap what you think. An arts critic trying to deal with an AI is like an old school mechanic trying to replace the battery in an iPhone – lost, possessing all the wrong tools and ultimately irrelevant. I’m not surprised Jones is angry. If I were in his shoes, a computer painting a Rembrandt would bring me out in hives.
Can a computer really produce art? We can’t answer that without dealing with another question: what exactly is art? I’m an engineer who writes cynical things in newspapers for money, so I’m probably the worst person to ask. As far as I can tell, it’s a futile question that nobody will ever agree on the answer to; or as I like it call it, ‘philosophy’. So let’s move on.”“Tesla founder Elon Musk, big-name venture capitalist Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several other notable tech names have launched a new artificial intelligence startup called OpenAI, assembling a particularly impressive array of AI talent that includes a top researcher from Google. But the idea, ostensibly, isn’t to make money.
Overseen by ex-Googler Ilya Sutskever along with Greg Brockman, the former CTO of high-profile payments startup Stripe, OpenAI has the talent to compete with the industry’s top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook—but the company has been setup as a non-profit. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” Brockman said in a blog post.” http://www.wired.com/2015/12/elon-musk-snags-top-google-researcher-for-new-ai-non-profit/
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