isthisartis

[isthisartis]

Artificial intelligence has proven to be an enormous help in the medical sector, especially in diagnosis, it analyses large data sets with ease giving us opportunities, which we have never had before. The idea about robots and algorithms was rather to help humans in tasks that require a lot of counting, brain power and energy, which humans have limited supplies of, whereas machines do the tasks quickly and never get tired. However, one could only imagine in their wildest dreams that the AI will become an artist! This idea scares and fascinates people, the way technologies usually do. AI bots have already  created paintings unrecognisable from Picasso, played Mozart's music and composed its own tunes. Although it does better in recreation that in original creative work, it proved itself to be capable of more than we expected. The Washington post has an AI algorithm used to write news and we have no clue whether we are reading a human or a robot thought. These news provoked me to pose myself the old, well known question: what is art? whether we conclude that robots can make art depends on our very definition of art. I once was in the museum on Mark Rothko's exhibition. He is widely famous for his painting, which basically are canvas covered with one or two colours of paint. One painting was all white. I stood there, among the amazed crowd, knowing that the market value of these paintings is so high, that if I had one, I would be settled for life. It seemed bizarre, it shocked and i thought to myself, i could have painted that! But I didn't, right? It is hard to explain why some pieces move something inside us and other pieces don't, but this debate has been a long lasting one. Marcel Duchamp is another artist who provoked discussions about the definition of art itself. Being a well known artist, he exhibited a toilet seat in a famous museum and titled it "The Fountain". Many were outraged by his behaviour, however it fulfilled its purpose and provoked massive discussions on the definition of art and whether everything that is being put in a museum is automatically art? Can a copy be a piece of art? The questions are endless. For me personally, creativity and something I would call soul or idea must be present in a piece in order for it to matter and appeal to me. That is why I am not so sure that a piece created by an IA algorithm could ever move me and spark any reflection inside, the way art does. Is art a domain reserved to humans then? Elephants, chimpanzees and other animals have been seen painting; however, it has always been under some human guidance, or it was performed in captivity. This observation is also an interesting one in the context of AI making art. For me, the situation is similar in a way, that the AI does not have a burst of creativity, a spark of inspiration, which pushes it to create, it does not have an inherent will to express itself through art, it is forced in some way by a human, performing the will of the human. Should art be voluntary? More and more questions appear. Mario Klingeman – a german artist who uses AI to make his work, claims that humans also are not original, we do not make from scratch, but we reinvent what was already made, we get inspiration from culture and years of experiences of other humans, therefore the question of creativity becomes blurry in his eyes. I will end with a quote from Edgar Degas: “Art is not what You see, but what You make others see”.