Of human art and machine art...

Hi!

Most of you might have heard the term AI or artificial intelligence. We say YouTube uses AI to recommend videos, Google Maps uses AI to navigate correctly (most of the time), etc. But, what exactly is AI?

Well, what we have now is not true AI but rather machine learning (ML). What’s the difference? Well, in ML, you train a system by showing it thousands of images of cats and dogs and then if you show it a new picture, it’ll identify it. But if you show it a photo of a cat dressed as a dog, it might call it a dog. Whereas a true AI would correctly identify it as a cat. That’s the simplest explanation I could come up with. If any of you have a better one, do let me know!

Now that you have a basic understanding of AI, let’s get back to the topic, which is machine art. One of the hot topics of discussion in tech circles this month has been AI-generated art. There have been lots of text-to-image art generators cropping up recently such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, etc. Using these tools, you can describe a scene as a sentence and it’ll use ML techniques to generate the corresponding artwork. For example, if I provide the phrase “yellow fall colors with blue sky and buildings”, I’d get an image as below:

Pretty neat, no? I generated this using a demo site (here). Looks a bit nice but nowhere near what people would call art. But what if I could set this up on my much more powerful desktop, and generate artworks that would be downright amazing? Well, you absolutely can create artworks that go on to win prizes (alternate link). And this has cropped up a very big question: what can be accepted as art?

On one hand, the art is generated by AI without a human working on the actual artwork, but on the other hand, it was the artist’s very specific textual input that lead to such an art.

I’m still not sure which camp I am in, but I do have to admit this is very cool. If I get time, I might set up one of these generators and try my hand at creating some art! Hopefully, an AI will help mask my terrible drawing skills.

In the meantime, Fall’s here so here’s a human’s (my) interpretation of “yellow fall colors with blue sky and buildings”!

In other news, been reading more in the short intervals I get between studies, classes and work. I realised if I wait for a proper “reading time”, I’ll never read. But midterms and bigger project deadlines are coming up. So that reading is also gonna reduce, I guess.

Anyways, that’s all for now I guess. Thanks for your time and I’ll see you soon!