Over the years, there have been so many ideas and innovations in technology.
In a bid to improve, get better and serve better, in the course of the latest inventions, artificial intelligence (AI) is now a common phenomenon.
Dating back to the 1950s, when AI took the stage, one would see that it has come a very long way. Its usefulness cuts across various industries, and its impact cannot be overlooked.
For one who is conversant with art and AI and the immense improvement both areas have witnessed, it is surprising that art and AI have somehow, one way or the other, found a way to come together.
Art and AI have merged.
Artists are known for their desire to explore and experiment with the latest technologies.
Owing to this, artists have not left AI as a field out of their quest for adventure; rather, they have found a way to bring art and AI together.
The concept of a merger existing between art and AI is exciting and, at the same time, intriguing.
It is not new knowledge that AI has taken the place of human skills, ideas, and abilities in many fields.
However, this development is the reason for the question, “With AI now in the picture, is it safe to say that we would no longer be needing the services of the artists?”.
The answer to that is No.
You probably do not understand because art as a field might as well suffer the same fate as other fields, but this is a question with roots, and the place of artists in the presence of AI, which now seems hidden, needs to be unveiled.
In a real sense, without art, there would be no way to imagine new ways in which we can use AI.
Of the many reasons we do art, the aim most of the time is to communicate, educate, recall memories, and create an emotional atmosphere regarding any topic.
In a quest to understand and truly be able to touch our personalities, we have each come up with ways to express ourselves in whatever form it may be.
You want to experience that feeling of being able to express your thoughts, ideas, and desires and being sure that you have successfully passed a message across.
Art allows you to communicate effectively even without words and gives you room to see yourself in things that are not you.
There was a period when of his many troubles, the last thing man would choose to engage in was some activity involving brushes and colors or dry bones and feathers.
Rather, he took to hunting, the fight for survival, and the daily challenge of a place to lay his head.
As time went by, man evolved. He began to think differently; he started to put his resources and abilities to good use, gathering food in easier ways than hunting and this little space; he thought of something a bit different from the concept of survival. Art was what he thought about.
Man’s ability to put his resources- dry bones and feathers, to good use while making simple art is what we have inadvertently tried to bring to life with machines.
The ability to multi-task, think fast, understand, reason, and carry out tasks effectively are core components of AI that have been major parts of man since time immemorial.
We should consider the possibility of our writing skills being sharpened and our becoming creative writers by using computers while they make rare connections between words and suggest new words.
Taking cues from machine learning could be the best way to positively impact education and training while developing a mutual approach to human-machine learning.
AI has been integrated into art gradually, and we started by using AI to create art by taking time to teach these machines to understand, interpret, and reproduce our art.
There is a technique known as style transfer, which uses deep neural systems to reproduce, redesign and align several varying art styles, ranging from paintings to sculptures and a lot more.
It recognizes and combines elements from one image and uses them in another without any necessary coding experience.
The form of art you choose to apply it to doesn’t matter; the procedures are the same, whether painting, sculpture, dance, music or photography.
You only have to choose an artwork whose style you want to reproduce and allow the system to apply that style to a different image. You can also choose several art styles and allow the machine to produce a perfect blend of styles.
Style transfer has made AI seem like an impersonator. The question of who owns the artwork remains unanswered. Artists control how the styles are blended and are allowed to edit as they please.
While using AI to imitate, we must begin to make maximum use of AI.
Many challenges have surfaced as interest in art has continued to increase. People are more intentional about gaining knowledge concerning art, and more people have picked an interest in art.
As people are beginning to develop a genuine interest in art, there is another issue of how to search or browse concerning art.
Most people who pick an interest in art have only stared at artworks. People need to understand the elements of art and its formal qualities like lines and composition.
AI has helped to successfully bridge this gap between art and the people.
Google’s “Deep Dream Generator” platform, which started to help scientists understand how AI works, has become a means to create art, producing results that can be termed psychedelic.
Beyond the deep dream, artists have started to use other forms of AI to produce art in different styles.
Tate Britain recently asked, ” how can AI help?”.
AI was chosen as the theme for the year because getting machines to do what humans can do only gets more exciting by the day while the entries rolled in.
The winning entry “recognition” features a program that’d continuously screens about 1,000 photographs a day, made available by Reuters, and tries to link them with 30,000 British artworks in Tate’s database based on whatever similarities the images share.
Google’s research project – Magenta, explores using AI to create art and make the process easier.
An artist has many objects placed in front of him that he intends to recreate with sketches, but this time around, using artificial intelligence.
He does a 3D scan of the objects to allow the artificial intelligence program to observe their contours, recognize the various objects, and then start to create their depictions.
Like his project (creating real-life objects in sketches using AI), the idea behind using AI in art is quite simple and easy to comprehend; it is a way of understanding the barriers to computational activity.
The artist, in this case, would be making use of a computer program that runs on a neural network like the human brain.
It is yet to be ascertained whether AI can make art without human intervention. There are basic differences between the work of robots and humans, and these differences, regardless of how much AI is used, will remain.
Until, certainly, AI can indeed produce art on its own without human intervention, it will be seen as a mere tool for human artists, so in clear terms, AI is not the artist; the artist can, however, make use of AI to create his art and twist it as he chooses.
Conclusion:
The place of artists cannot be overridden by robots or artificial intelligence because art is an idea or imagination finding expression without words.
Robots do not possess the ability to own ideas; humans do.
So if a person has an idea and has a robot to bring the whole idea to life, it is still art because of human intervention; however, little was provided.
The convergence of AI and Art continues to evolve.
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