AI creativity and demystification (original) (raw)

This article is written in the context of contemporary art and technology, in confluence with my profession as a technologist, and being an active artist, coming from a crafts-based practice, and recently enrolled at Chelsea College of Arts in a more progressive discourse. The presented meditation primarily consists of personal artistic and technological encounters. It is an attempt to gather my thoughts on the notion of AI creativity in the backdrop of commercialism. The 25th of October 2018, an AI (artificial intelligence) generated 'painting' was sold for $432.500 at Christie’s. For a long period a commercial with the heading; ‘A Higher Intelligence with AI’ was present in the underground of Copenhagen. We are constantly exposed to the idea, that AI has exceeded human potential, in institutions, in published media, and public spaces. This article proposes to take a step back and take a closer look at the algorithms, the machines and the AI's ability to create, with the question; what is creativity then, and where does it belong, however, before we do so, let us start by asking; what is creativity, what is AI, and moreover, how can we study these terms in the context of contemporary art with other fields of study with the goal to establish a comprehensive overview. Comment to readers (2020): Be aware that the genealogy of the term creativity presented in this article is eurocentric and therefore distorted and untrue. In the article How a Machine Learns and Fails: A Grammar of Error for Artificial Intelligence, Matteo Pasquinelli discusses the terminology and mechanisms of AI, and proposes to discuss the notion of AI-generated art as 'statistical art'.