The Groove Issue 23 - The Art and Business of Artificial Intelligence
Welcome to the 23rd issue of The Groove.
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THE ART AND BUSINESS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCE
Ai-Da, the artist robot, in her studio in Oxford. Photograph by Nicky Johnston
People have asked me if creativity is under threat now that robots can undertake so many human activities, including making art and writing books through technology that simulates human intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, allows these machines to think like humans and mimic their actions.
The Curious Case of Ai-Da, The Artist Robot
Last week, all major art publications including Artnet and The Art Newspaper, reported that Ai-Da, the self-labeled “world’s first ultra-realist robot artist,” created by gallery director Aidan Meller and developed with the help of researcher Lucy Seal, with a company called Engineered Arts and students at the University of Oxford, will have its first major exhibition at London’s Design Museum.
I looked up Ai-Da on Instagram and realized that the robot was already following me. (Not the first bot to be on IG but definitely the most interesting!) She sports dark hair in an Anna Wintour-style bob - bangs and all - has clear, rosy skin, high cheekbones, puffy lips, and wide eyes. Her body is that of an android and her arms are made of exposed metal, wires, and mesh. She makes figurative and abstract paintings, none of which I found had any merit other than the fact that they were created by a machine. Oh, and she’s also dabbling into performance, as a video posted last Thursday on her Instagram page shows the robot reciting poetry generated through her AI language model.
Imagine what Ai-Da can do. If you remember the line of famous economist John Maynard Keynes when he said, “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” had he been alive today and witnessed how the art market behaves, he would have realized that the frontiers of irrationality can go beyond what anyone could imagine. In the case of the sexy robot, her creators can put her to work 24/7 churning art that will be sold to everyone who wants a piece of her novelty since most people willing to bet on the newness of this technology won’t care if the art is good or bad.
The $432,500 Painting Made by Algorithms
Edmond de Belamy, a generative Adversarial Network print on canvas, created by Obvious Art in 2018 and sold at Christie’s for $432,500.
In October 2018, Christie’s sold an AI “painting” on canvas whose estimated value was between $7,000 and $10,000 and went for the whopping amount of $432,500. The 27 ½ x 27 ½ inch portrait of Edmond de Belamy, a fictional character, was published by Obvious Art, a three-people art collective based in Paris. Obvious Art fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th and its algorithm has two parts: the “Generator” and the “Discriminator.”
The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image, and one created by the Generator. Hugo Caselles-Dupré, one of the three artists in the collective, told Christie’s that “the aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.”
If Obvious Art wanted to control supply and consign an AI painting to a different auction house every quarter, they would be making almost $2 million every year. Assuming the prices would remain stable of course, which rarely, if ever, happens.
DALL·E: The Cross Between Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s WALL·E
When feeding the words “a snail made of harp,” DALL·E was able to generate hundreds of different combinations of hybrid figures, these are some of them.
Then last month, San Francisco’s OpenAI (which counts Microsoft as an investor) unveiled a neural network known as DALL·E that converts text into striking images. The name of the generator was found using a portmanteau of the artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s WALL·E. DALL·E works when someone prompts the network with a caption or with a combination of a caption and a photo.
For example, when feeding the words “a snail made of harp,” DALL·E was able to generate hundreds of different combinations of hybrid figures between a snail and a harp, each one of them completely different from the next. One of the implications of a system like DALL·E is the ability to generate hundreds of images quickly from every angle and reduce the time and cost of photoshoots needed in e-commerce, real estate, interior design, and any other industry where tons of pictures taken by real photographers are needed.
Where Do We Go From Here?
From the standpoint of a venture capitalist or an angel investor, all these AI initiatives seem like hot opportunities that will keep growing and developing. From the point of view of an art collector who is passionate about artists, a moment in history, loves stories, and is moved by emotions, then this AI thing is heinous.
I’m too much of a humanist to see robots taking over creative endeavors. I still believe in people’s experiences and in feelings that go both ways: those that can be transmissible through a piece of art, music, film, literature, poetry, and those that can be received and processed by an audience exposed to them.
There are ethical implications too and nobody put it better than Stephen Hawking during a 2014 BBC interview: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.”
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.