What Happens When Art Meets AI? | Benedikte Wallace | TEDxArendal
[Music] i hate math i know that might sound strange and maybe even a little bit controversial considering that i am employed at the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences and that i'm here to talk to you guys about artificial intelligence but it's true i am horrible at math yet i have found a way of dealing with this which is part of what i want to share with you all today now i should perhaps specify i don't hate all math i hate arithmetic addition subtraction multiplication and division growing up i spent countless hours crying in my mother's lap as she attempted to bribe and console me through my recitation of the multiplication tables instead i was your typical artsy kid i loved singing painting dancing but i also loved science and logic puzzles i was curious about life and consciousness and how that all came about now what i found was that more often than not we tend to think of the world of art and the world of science as inherently separate opposites even and for a long time i felt trapped in the middle with my math homework standing like a gatekeeper making sure that i would never be able to achieve my goal of working somewhere in this cross-section between art and science so how did i end up here talking to all of you about art and artificial intelligence well i learned how to code computers unlike me are really good at arithmetic in fact they really only deal in numbers numbers are their whole world and for me programming was like solving little logic puzzles where the prize was that my computer would do all the calculations that i couldn't and i loved it finally i had an accomplice an aid a friend even that would do for me the tasks that i'm not good at and allow me to focus on the questions that i was really interested in i found that me plus my computer friend was greater than me alone and allying myself with my computer was truly empowering for me it has been what has enabled me to work in this fascinating space between art and science i was able to begin an academic career in computer science working with computational creativity and now i get to work on all these really really interesting questions like can i teach my computer friend to be creative what kind of computational mechanisms would even support that kind of behavior can it learn these tasks where there isn't a single correct answer or a goal state to reach these tasks that are inherently subjective for example can i teach my computer to dance here i've shown my computer a bunch of examples of dancers improvising in these beautiful motion capture suits which are fixed with reflective markers now as i said my computer only deals in numbers so it doesn't get to see these beautiful polyester suits all it sees are these giant matrices and here each cell contains a number which represents one of these reflective markers as it moves through time it doesn't know anything else like the kinematics of human movement or our body's natural limitations all it knows is what it can extract from this data and this is what it comes up with a little ai dancer pretty good huh i mean it looks human you might even say it looks like dancing but to be honest it doesn't always look like this at first all it was able to learn was to wiggle its hands and feet a lot and if you think about it this kind of makes sense the dancers that it has seen they move their hands and feet a lot too not like this not at this insane speed but it's not a completely unreasonable first step now this guy was a breakthrough for me i i know that might seem a little sad considering that this still looks uh pretty crazy but after only getting wiggly guy for ages i was over the moon when i saw this shapeshifter smooth movements kind of beautiful in a way no of course it's not very human-like to be able to grow and shrink at will but at least it was learning something different the method that i'm using here is called supervised deep learning i build an artificial neural network which has recurrent connections this allows it to hold a sort of short-term memory so that it can remember the things that it has seen and use that to make predictions about the future so by increasing the size of this artificial neural net and showing it even more examples my computer friend was finally able to generate ai dancers that move in a smooth and realistic way but my question for you guys is this do you think this looks interesting did you maybe think that wiggly guy or the shapeshifter was more interesting to look at while this guy might be the most realistic looking ai dancer do you think it is creative is it art now some of you might say yes yes this is art and others will say no this is one of the biggest challenges in ai and art what i would call the subjectivity challenge so let's have another look at this task that i've given my computer friend i show it a sequence of movement and then i ask it to predict where each of these reflective markers will be at the next frame i measure its success at that task by comparing its prediction to the actual position that the dancer moved to so basically i'm saying there is only one correct answer what the dancer did everything else is wrong so i am removing some of this subjectivity and that will only ever encourage imitation now imitation is definitely part of our artistic process but by me never encouraging my computer to do things differently might i be forcing it into this mediocrity now if i do encourage my computer to do things differently we quickly end up here and yes it's definitely different i would say it is uh chaos so how do i define this subjective sweet spot between chaos and mediocrity how do i define what is good art finding a precise metric for evaluating a creative artifact is a challenge that raises both philosophical and technical questions i mean for the most part we don't even agree on what is good art made by humans and if we can't agree on this then how am i supposed to teach my computer what art is another valid question here is why why should we teach computers to solve creative tasks when we outsource other things to ai it doesn't always go as we would hope and ai is becoming a larger and larger part of our everyday lives and with it comes challenges relating to discrimination alienation data ownership and bias in our algorithms and it is actually up to all of us and especially those of us that work on or with ai to work on solutions for mitigating these issues still i am cautiously optimistic i believe that there is enormous potential for ai to improve our lives and our creative practices but perhaps the solution is not for me to try and outsource everything to my computer friend and have it do everything on its own perhaps instead i should teach it to work with me teach it to collaborate take for example how we might use ai in medical diagnosis when you're sick and you visit your doctor they can compare your list of symptoms against hundreds of patients that they've seen before but if you use an ai your symptoms could be compared to millions of patients from around the world in a matter of seconds now i don't imagine that many of you would prefer the ai over the doctor well maybe in the future but for now i think that the ai and the doctor together has the potential of giving the optimal care and in a similar way ai can improve our creative practices by building advanced ai models for generating creative data we could have them function as suggestion givers the ai dancers that my computer made for example could be used by a dancer to explore their movement repertoire offering reflection stimulation and feedback we already have a bunch of examples of how ai and technology in general can help improve and even democratize the world of art like assistive music software digital drawing tools and even something like advanced spell checkers but these tools won't be making any art without us my computer was an enormous help for me to get into science i literally cannot do my job without it and it seems that in the case of artistic endeavors the tables have turned on me and my computer friend here it might never be able to do its job properly without me but i guess my point is does that really matter perhaps the solution to the subjectivity challenge lies in this collaboration in what we can achieve together now i warned you arithmetic is not my strong suit but i think that in this case one plus one is equal to three because together my computer friend and i are greater than the sum of our parts thank you [Applause] [Music] you