In the Age of AI Art, What Can Originality Look Like? | Eileen Isagon Skyers | TED

83,480 views

2023-08-11 ・ TED


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In the Age of AI Art, What Can Originality Look Like? | Eileen Isagon Skyers | TED

83,480 views ・ 2023-08-11

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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I want you to envision a single piece of artwork
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generated by artificial intelligence.
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When most of us think of AI art,
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I bet we're imagining something like this.
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We're all probably picturing something totally different.
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Today, with machine learning models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney,
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we've seen AI produce everything from strange life forms
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to imaginary influencers
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to entirely foreign, curious kinds of imagery.
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AI as a technology is fascinating to us
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because we're inherently drawn to things we cannot understand.
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And with neural networks processing data from thousands of other images
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made by people from every possible generation, every art movement,
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millions of images in one simple scan,
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they can produce visuals that are so familiar
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yet strikingly unfamiliar.
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More poetically, AI mirrors us.
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The world is beginning to change right before our very eyes,
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and it's basically divided into two schools of thought.
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There are pessimists who think AI poses a great threat to human creativity.
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And then optimists who see it as an extension of our creativity.
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So is it even possible to be truly original as an artist anymore?
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How do we begin to critically engage with artworks made by machines?
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We can start by looking at some metaphors,
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narratives and insights from artists
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who are truly pushing the boundaries of AI.
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Let's look to these moments of delight, surprise,
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confusion and wonder
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that give us just one small glimpse
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into the possibilities of encounter with this technology.
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Because as we've seen,
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this is a very moral and ethical encounter
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as much as an aesthetic one.
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Mario Klingemann sold this piece on auction in 2019.
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It is running an AI model trained on thousands of portraits
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from the 17th to 19th centuries.
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The model constantly reveals uncanny interpretations of the human face.
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Each one is unique,
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generated in real time as the machine reads its own output.
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For the viewer, it's almost like peering into the machine's hallucinations
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as it conjures each new portrait.
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Sofia Crespo's series "Neural Zoo" uses neural network interpretations
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of the real world
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to generate unreal sea creatures and diverse biological forms.
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Frogs look like flowers.
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Translucent jellyfish have vivid internal organs.
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There’s no one real creature in these images,
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but AI allows us to envision otherworldly lifeforms in impossible detail.
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This abstract piece by Sara Ludy began as a digital painting.
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It was augmented to fit a 16-by-9 ratio,
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using a prompt for "torn edges" in DALL-E 2's Outpainting.
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Outpainting allows artists to extend their creativity
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beyond the frame using simple language prompts like "torn edges."
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This piece by Ivona Tau might read as a photograph,
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but it is also the work of AI.
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It's the result of GAN training on thousands of images
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from the artist's personal photo collection.
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Tau curates from her own photographs,
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carefully choosing the inputs and outputs for the model.
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In many ways, AI art is a form of curation.
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It becomes the process of selecting from hundreds of images at a time.
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This video pulls from models trained on a massive data set of Tau's photos,
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resulting in a kind of algorithmic memory.
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But she also created a destructed data set for the model
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to symbolize forgetting or fleeting memory.
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And finally, we have Claire Silver.
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Silver has called herself a “collaborative AI artist”
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in that she works intentionally with the machine to produce her art.
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Her process is constantly evolving as the tools evolve.
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She often works with inpainting techniques,
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masking and transforming just one small piece of an image.
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For this portrait, she shifted the opacity of various sections with an Apple pencil,
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transforming it bit by bit.
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She likens this technique to her version of glazing in oil painting.
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Silver feeds AI-generated images from one model into another,
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effectively creating new forms of language and understanding
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for the machine itself.
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Her work is half master painting, half digital art.
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Both old and new.
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This piece pulls inspiration from famed artists
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like John Singer Sargent, Evelyn De Morgan and Gustav Klimt,
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almost as an homage.
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Because different AI models are trained on different sets of information,
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it's almost like they're all speaking different languages.
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AI is everywhere now.
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We are all now collectively co-creating with AI,
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whether we're aware of it or not.
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If we want to be a part of these worlds, we cannot design alone.
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If we want to be culturally literate
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in these new kinds of images and predictions and forms,
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then looking to the work of artists is a very productive place to start.
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We need to brace ourselves for an increasingly technological future,
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which is only going to multiply
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all the creative possibilities at our fingertips now.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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