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Can Artificial Intelligence Create Art?

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 M2 / International Business Major

Master Thesis

Academic Year of 2018-2019

Can Artificial Intelligence create Art?

Theotime / Gros

Under the supervision of

Professors Alain Busson & Françoise Chevalier

Public report

1
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my tutor Alain Busson for suggesting a topic revolving around
Artificial Intelligence and Creativity and accompanying me through the first steps of ideation and
structuring; I also express my gratitude to Françoise Chevalier for accepting to take up the torch when
Alain was not available anymore.

Next, I address my thanks to several thinkers and writers whose contributions made this thesis
possible: Tim Urban for initially sparking my interest in Artificial Intelligence through a series of eye-
opening articles on his blog Wait But Why; Olivier Ezratty for his ambitious and exhaustive book Les Usages
de l’Intelligence Artificielle which proved a real treasure of knowledge and insight on the subject; Jennifer
Sukis whose detailed article The Relationship Between Art and AI guided my approach and structure in
reviewing AI’s contributions to art today; Ahmed Elgammal for his outstanding and consistent efforts at
Rutgers University in pushing the limits of machine creativity; Antoine Peterschmitt for his inspiring thesis
on the neighboring subject of AI and literary creation.

Lastly, I express my utmost regard, admiration and gratitude to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who,
through the foundation of Wikipedia, blessed mankind with a beacon of infinite, free, accessible and
verifiable information, redefining our relationship to knowledge and impacting the world with pure good
for centuries to come.

2
1 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... 2
2 Introduction........................................................................................................................................... 5
3 History and definition of AI ................................................................................................................... 6
3.1 History and movements ................................................................................................................ 7
3.1.1 Launch and golden years (1956-1974) .................................................................................. 7
3.1.2 The first winter of AI (1974-1980) ......................................................................................... 8
3.1.3 Brief rebirth (1980-1987) and second winter of AI (1987-1993) .......................................... 9
3.1.4 From the 90s to now: the victory of connectionism ........................................................... 10
3.2 Why the sudden surge in AI? ...................................................................................................... 12
3.2.1 The assessment ................................................................................................................... 12
3.2.2 The analysis ......................................................................................................................... 14
3.3 The main blocks of modern AI..................................................................................................... 16
3.3.1 A visual overview ................................................................................................................. 16
3.3.2 Machine learning ................................................................................................................. 17
3.3.3 Neural networks .................................................................................................................. 19
3.3.4 Deep learning ...................................................................................................................... 23
3.3.5 Automated reasoning .......................................................................................................... 23
3.3.6 Agents and multi-agent systems ......................................................................................... 24
4 AI and Art today: where we stand ...................................................................................................... 26
4.1 The method ................................................................................................................................. 27
4.2 An overview of AI’s current contributions in the creation of art ................................................ 27
4.2.1 AI as an impersonator ......................................................................................................... 27
4.2.2 AI as a collaborator.............................................................................................................. 34
4.2.3 AI as a creator...................................................................................................................... 41
4.3 Does AI create art? ...................................................................................................................... 46
4.3.1 What is an artist? ................................................................................................................ 46
4.3.2 Is AI an artist? ...................................................................................................................... 46
4.3.3 The case for intention ......................................................................................................... 47
4.3.4 Generalizing the sentence ................................................................................................... 47
5 AI and Art tomorrow: where we could go........................................................................................... 48
5.1 Defining and contextualizing AGI ................................................................................................ 49
3
 5.1.1 Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) ..................................................................................... 49
5.1.2 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) ..................................................................................... 50
5.1.3 Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) ......................................................................................... 51
5.2 When will AGI be achieved? ........................................................................................................ 51
5.3 What will AGI mean to art? ......................................................................................................... 54
6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 55
7 Bibliography......................................................................................................................................... 56
7.1 Reports, books and research papers ........................................................................................... 56
7.2 Press articles................................................................................................................................ 57

4
2 INTRODUCTION
As his callous, clumsy hand applies the last stroke of ochre on the hardened limestone, an unknown
man steps back to observe his creation. Looking back at him, its shadows dancing under the torchlight,
stands a reddish-orange banteng. We are in 40 000 BC, in what corresponds to modern day Indonesian
Borneo, and the world is witnessing the birth of Art.1

The rest is history: from the megalithic structures of the Stone Age to Duchamp’s postmodern
Fountain, through Egyptian tombs, Hellenistic statues, Islamic architecture and European Impressionism,
art has followed men everywhere, driving fates, influencing societies and reflecting the collective
experience of mankind throughout time.

As technology developed along the centuries, so did its tempestuous relationship with art – the
former often being viewed as an existential threat by the latter. The most notable example is the invention
of photography, which was widely regarded by painters of the time as a danger for their profession –
Charles Baudelaire famously wrote that “if photography [was] allowed to supplement art in some of its
functions, it [would] soon supplant or corrupt it altogether”. Centuries later, it becomes evident that
nothing of the sort happened: not only did photography assist and inspire art, it became an independent
form of artistic expression. The same goes for every technological innovation: rather than suppressing art,
it either augments it or becomes itself another vehicle for it.

So why should it be any different with artificial intelligence? The answer lies within the very
conceptual scope of this innovation – indeed, we are not only talking about a new technology helping men
create art, but potentially about the technology itself consciously creating art. Such a possibility would
shake the artistic world – among others – to its core and pose an existential threat to human art as a whole,
incidentally forcing us to reconsider what makes us human. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the
extent to which this possibility has already been realized in our current world – and if it has not, to spell
out the conditions associated to its occurrence.

1
Sample (2018), World's 'oldest figurative painting' discovered in Borneo cave,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/07/worlds-oldest-figurative-painting-discovered-in-borneo-cave
5
3 HISTORY AND DEFINITION OF AI
Before discussing whether Artificial Intelligence (henceforth referred to as AI) can create art, it
appears necessary to clear up all confusion regarding the definition of AI itself. To many, the term “artificial
intelligence” summons to the mind images of science fiction: from destructive robots in the Terminator
series, to the near-omnipotent and malevolent program Hal in 2001, A Space Odyssey, to more modern
depictions such as the virtual assistant in Her (2013) whose ever-growing intelligence ends up propelling
her beyond the physical world, AI has often been painted in mighty and slightly overbearing tones,
resulting in a collective imagery far removed from the actual scientific state of the matter – fiction, more
than science.

The solution to this disconnection seems easy: turning to the scientists! As the ones developing AI,
they should know what their field includes. Unfortunately, it turns out the scientific community is as
divided as the general public when it comes to defining AI. For some, chatbots are already AI – for others,
only deep learning really qualifies, and even machine learning or expert systems are excluded from the
sought-after title. How did we end up in such a disagreement? Before all, the difficulty of defining artificial
intelligence primarily stems from the difficulty to define natural intelligence – that is, the human brain,
whose obscure functioning and extraordinary complexity we are only just starting to understand. To add
to this, AI is an extremely technology-based discipline, and as each innovation brings its share of doubt,
criticism and failures, more than a century of intense research on the subject by some of the brightest
minds in the world was bound to cause turmoil. Amidst the melee, however, several movements can be
identified – these are polarized around two main antagonists: symbolism and connectionism.

Let us start by retracing the history of AI and its movements, before explaining the surprising surge
of innovation and interest in AI of the last few years and ending with a description of the main bricks that
constitute AI today. This first part, which aims at giving the reader a satisfactory and contextualized
understanding of AI as of now, draws mainly from Olivier Ezratty’s 2018 updated work Les Usages de
l’intelligence artificielle2 as well as from the structure and references of Wikipedia’s “History of Artificial
Intelligence” article3.

2
Ezratty (2018), Les Usages de l’intelligence artificielle: https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2018/usages-
intelligence-artificielle-2018/
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence
6
3.1 HISTORY AND MOVEMENTS
The idea of investing matter with mind far predates the last century – indeed, it can be found in
ancient Greek myths, from Pygmalion to the golden robots of Haphaestus, in Paracelsus’ homunculus or
even in the Muslim concept of Takwin, the creation of synthetic life in a laboratory. This millennia-long
quest for artificial life was at last rewarded in the 1940s with the creation of the first computer, able to
mimic and exceed a human being’s computing abilities, hence the name. As for the field of AI research, it
was formally kickstarted in the Dartmouth Workshop of 1956 – following this seminal event, AI research
went through both prosperous and more frigid periods, the latter dubbed “AI winters”, before coming
back in the brightest of spotlights in the 2000s.

3.1.1 Launch and golden years (1956-1974)

Modern AI research started in 1956 when computer scientist John McCarthy agreed with fellow
scientists Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester to throw an 8-week brainstorming
session in Dartmouth on the subject of reproducing in machines various components of the human mind
such as language, vision and reasoning. One assumption that can be found in the initial proposal document
is that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely
described that a machine can be made to simulate it”4 . More than 30 researchers attended the workshop,
which led to the coinage of the now famous term “artificial intelligence” by McCarthy and to first steps in
the field of AI research, including the birth of the symbolic methods.

Many of the same attendees later joined the Middlesex Congress of 1958 whose chief focus was
the mechanization of thought processes. The result was an outpouring of publications later that year,
including Minsky’s self-explanatory “Some Methods of Artificial Intelligence and Heuristic Programming”
and “Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence”, Oliver Selfridge’s “Pandemonium: a paradigm for learning”
which paved the way for neural networks specialized in the recognition of patterns, and McCarthy’s
“Programming with common sense” which set the basis for expert systems. The latter also created the
LISP (“list processing”) language that same year, which was to become the main programming language
for formal logic AI solutions in the following decades.

4
A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. (2006). AI Magazine Volume 27,
Number 4.
7
 The period following these two events became known as the “Golden years”: governmental
agencies such as the DARPA began heavily financing AI research5, notably in the MIT Lab. Discoveries
abounded and people were baffled by machines’ abilities in various domains: Russell and Norvig state that
"it was astonishing whenever a computer did anything remotely clever."6 Various fields were developed:
“reasoning as search”, or an algorithm allowing machines to proceed step by step towards a goal, by trial-
and-error, allowed programs such as Gelernter’s Geometry Theorem Prover to solve mathematical
theorems. Natural language was also tackled with Bobrow’s Algebra Problem Solver and Weizenbaum’s
ELIZA – the latter which tricked many users at the time into thinking a real human being was discussing
with them – and Winograd’s SHRDLU, the first to really understand natural language. Optimism was at its
highest and wild predictions flowered everywhere: "in from three to eight years we will have a machine
with the general intelligence of an average human being", declared Minsky to the Life Magazine in 1970;
fellow scientists H.A Simon and Allen Newell agreed and doubled down on the forecasts, announcing that
robots would be able to perform any human activity within the mid-80s. The DARPA continued pouring
money into research institutes such as the MIT, Stanford, the CMU7 and the Edinburgh University8 with
very few strings attached, trusting the scientists to bring results soon…

3.1.2 The first winter of AI (1974-1980)

Unfortunately, as researchers stumbled upon fundamental obstacles, it soon became obvious that
most predictions were far from being realistic. Limited computer power meant that computers were still
“a million times too weak to exhibit intelligence” according to Hans Moravec9; the so-called “combinatorial
explosion” exposed a serious problem of scalability as an exponential amount of input was required to
solve harder problems; formal logic researchers encountered mighty obstacles in the form of the frame
and qualification problems, and Moravec’s paradox whereby the hardest human faculties to reproduce in
machines were actually those that seemed the most obvious in appearance, like motor capacities, was
increasingly verified as the vision and robotics fields struggled to reach satisfying results.

Not only did the field of AI research face internal challenges, it also suffered from extremely violent
critiques coming from various academic sources. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem was brandished by John
Lucas in an attempt to prove that no formal system, such as a computer program, could understand the

5
Crevier, Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence
6
Russell, Norvig (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.)
7
Crevier (1993), p. 94
8
Howe (1994), Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University: a Perspective
9
Moravec (1976), The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence
8
truth of all statements, contrarily to a human being; Hubert Dreyfus destroyed the Dartmouth assumption
that any form of human reasoning could be replicated by AI questioning man’s rationality and John Searle
raised the problem of intentionality, arguing that a machine would never understand the symbols it used,
and thus would never “think” in the way humans do. Minsky himself ushered in a dark age for
connectionism by annihilating Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron10, which was one of the first forms of neural
networks, and halting research in that field for about 10 years.

Both these external and internal hardships affected the government’s stance on AI research: in the
US, the Mansfield Amendments in the 1969 Defense Procurement Act requested ARPA-funded research
to have direct applications in the army, thus diverting money away from AI research towards what would
later become the Internet. The British side of the coin was the Lighthill report destined to the Science
Research Council, which violently attacked the very idea of AI and marked the transition to an AI winter in
the United Kingdom.

3.1.3 Brief rebirth (1980-1987) and second winter of AI (1987-1993)

The arrival of the 80s was accompanied by a wave of successes in the domain of expert systems,
whose goal is to solve problems in a very specific area of knowledge thanks to a set of rules provided
beforehand by human experts. The XCON was completed at the CMU and had the effect of saving its
sponsor company more than 40 million dollars per year11; this feat of strength resonated throughout the
corporate world and many firms started financing their own expert system development programs,
reviving research in that field. Knowledge engineering also emerged thanks to the conviction that
intelligence might just be “based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse knowledge in different
ways”12, as Pamela McCorduck writes.

Funding returned in the form of various gosplans by the US, the UK and Japan aiming at developing
“fifth generation computers”; and even connectionism enjoyed a brief recovery with the creation of the
Hopfield Net which redeemed neural networks to the eyes of the scientific community as well as the first
introduction of backpropagation, a method used to train neural networks.

However, this second breath was short-lived: most gosplans quietly failed in the 90s and the
outlandish expectations of companies concerning expert systems were predictably met with disappointing

10
Olazaran (1996). A Sociological Study of the Official History of the Perceptrons Controversy. Social Studies of
Science.
11
Crevier (1993), p. 198
12
McCorduck (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.)
9
results, in a manner similar to economic bubbles. Once again, government funding was significantly cut,
especially in the US13, as most goals set a few years earlier had not been met.

3.1.4 From the 90s to now: the victory of connectionism

What happened to AI after that second winter? And where do we stand now? By the 90s, several
distinct movements had already emerged within the field of AI research – identifying them is key in
understanding later developments.

3.1.4.1 Main movements within the field

From its very inception up to today, two main movements have been polarizing AI research:
connectionism and symbolism. The table below illustrates the differences between them.

Name of the movement Connectionism (“scruffies”) Symbolism (“neats” or “GOFAI”)

Principles Inductive reasoning Deductive reasoning
Biomimetism Provability
Whatever works Traceability
Methods “Hacking” Logic
Empiric experience Pure applied statistics
Self-organization Semantic representations
Tools Neural networks Expert systems
Deep learning Symbolic AI
Backpropagation Inverse deduction
Main actors and discoveries Marvin Minsky - SNARC John McCarthy - LISP
Frank Rosenblatt - Perceptrons Herbert Simon - GPS
Joseph Weizenbaum - ELIZA Allen Newell – GPS
Terry Winograd - SHRDLU Donald Michie – MENACE
Doug Lenat - Cyc Robert Kowalski – theorem proving
Rodney Brooks - Robots
Domains of application Speech recognition Theorem proving
(examples) Artificial vision Optimization problems
Figure 1: Differences between the two main movements in AI research

13
McCorduck (2004), pp. 430–431
10
3.1.4.2 Developments after the 90s: the scruffies win
In the second part of the 90s, the neats still seemed to be ahead: IBM’s Deep Blue – product of
formal logic – startled the entire world by beating world chess champion and legend Garry Kasparov,
processing an astonishing 200,000,000 moves per second. Intelligent agents, programs which react to
the environment to achieve specific goals, were also brought to life by symbolic researchers such as Allen
Newell and Judea Pearl. The increasing level of collaboration between symbolists and mathematicians
also established the AI discipline as a more rigorous and scientific one. As a result, Russell & Norvig
referred to this period as “the victory of the neats”14.

The scruffies, however, were far from idle during that period – neural networks enjoyed fast-
paced development in the early and mid-90s with Weibel’s creation of Time Delay Neural Networks in
1989, precursors of convolutive neural networks that emerged around the same time in France before
being really popularized in the late 90s, and transfer learning in the 1997 that allowed neural networks
to train faster using other networks’ training. Symbolic AI, on the contrary, was steadily declining – and
this trend would continue up to the present day. Following 2012, connectionism made a flamboyant and
definitive comeback on the scene of AI research and has now been the superstar of the field for nearly a
decade.

Overall, the following graph by Françoise Soulié-Fogelmann sums up the history and
development of AI research through the lenses of the feud between neats and scruffies from 1950 up to
today.15

14
Russell, Norvig (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.)
15
Available in Ezratty’s Les Usages de l’intelligence artificielle
11
 Figure 2: History of AI viewed through the battle between neats and scruffies

3.2 WHY THE SUDDEN SURGE IN AI?

3.2.1 The assessment

As seen in the previous part, formal research in AI is already more than 70 years old – and informal
research is millennia-old. It is marked with major breakthroughs and inventions, many of which have
spilled well over the scientific sphere, into the corporate world, or even the general public. Why, then, if
the discipline is that old, and has already come numerously in contact with spheres outside of the scientific,
does it feel like it has just been invented? How then to explain its sudden popularity in the media, in the
business world, in family dinners? These are not just impressions – indeed, they have been proven by a
Stanford-led team by the publication of diverse Artificial Intelligence Index reports in 201716 and 2018.
Their findings are so staggering that I think it important that some of them should be visualized – as seen
below:

16
Shoham, Perrault, Brynjolfsson, Clark, LeGassick (2017), Artificial Intelligence Index 2017 Annual Report,
http://aiindex.org/2017-report.pdf
12
 In terms of academia, we notice that the number of AI papers produced each year has increased
by more than 9x each year since 1996 – parallelly, introductory AI class enrollment in top universities has
skyrocketed, increasing by more than 11x for Stanford for instance.

As for the corporate world, it has more than followed that tendency, as shown in the graphs below:

The number of active US startups developing AI systems has increased 14x since 2000, while the
annual VC investment in these same startups has increased 6x in the same time period.

What these graphs point out is that although there has always been an interest in AI, it has
dramatically surged in recent years – since the 2000s, and even more sharply after 2012. In order to
complete our understanding of the history of AI and its different periods, and before moving on to a
typology of the main blocks of AI today, let us briefly account for this recent boom by giving some of its
main drivers.
13
3.2.2 The analysis
How can we account for that takeoff in the recent years?

Firstly, one must give credit where credit is due: as mentioned before, the vast majority of that
boom is the consequence of breakthroughs in connectionist AI. More specifically, theoretical and practical
progress in machine learning, neural networks and deep learning. Indeed, this become obvious when the
2018 Artificial Intelligence Index Report breaks down the number of papers published recently on AI by
subcategory:

Connectionist fields, especially machine learning and neural networks, are shown to have
skyrocketed, while every field remotely linked to symbolist AI (fuzzy systems, NLP and Knowledge
Representation and Planning and Decision Making) has been stagnating.

Secondly, Moore’s law played a crucial role – stating that the number of transistors in a dense
integrated circuit doubles about every two years, what it meant for the AI field was ever-growing
computing power and memory in machines. This allowed to diversify implementable methods, eventually
kickstarting the connectionist progress of the last decade. Today, AI could even be said to be one of the
main illustrations of Moore’s law: indeed, more processing power enables more demanding algorithms,

14
which in turn drive a higher demand for data, itself requiring more processing power17, in a virtuous circle
that fuels more powerful machines and pushes the whole AI field constantly forward.

Another factor which helped to bring AI research in the public spotlight, enhancing its visibility and
attractivity not only to the scientific community but also to the corporate and general public, was the
achievement of several feats of strength such as the victory of IBM Deep Blue vs. chess legend Kasparov
in 1997, of IBM Watson in Jeopardy in 2011 and finally of Google DeepMind Alphago vs. the Go game
world champion in 2016. In 2017, Google presented Alphazero, capable of mastering at a world-champion
level Go, chess and shogi, defeating all previous record-holding programs 18 . Because everyone either
knows how to play at least one of these games, or is capable of understanding how spectacularly complex
they are, especially at a grandmaster level, this kind of achievements – along with the vocal media
coverage they often get – helped, and continues helping, to raise awareness and awe about AI research
and its extraordinary potential.

The creation of Internet and its diffusion in the mass market also played a crucial role by bringing
forward new needs – for instance search engines – which required AI to be efficiently tackled. This later
gave birth to the GAFAs, now joined by the Chinese BATX, which are all very active in the field of AI. Internet
also led to the open source culture, now accepted as a standard for AI development tools and associated
databases. Not only does open source encourage collaborative research and development for software, it
also pushes researchers to publish examples of their source codes online, to be verified by different
communities – this process allows for a reliable and nimble diffusion of algorithmic innovations, especially
concerning neural networks and deep learning.

The collect and availability of massive amounts of data, through Internet, mobiles, connected
objects, genomics, as well as Universities’ contribution to the creation of open data in text (WordNet) and
image (ImageNet) recognition also greatly encouraged the development of machine learning and deep
learning. The accelerating rate at which data is being created today is absolutely mind-blowing: as IBM
famously pointed out, 90% of the data today has been created over the last 2 years.19

17
Azeem (2017), If We Want To Get To Real Time AI, We’ve Got To Build Another iPhone Industry. Five Times Over,
https://medium.com/s/ai-and-the-future-of-computing/when-moores-law-met-ai-f572585da1b7
18
https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand-games-chess-shogi-and-go/
19
IBM Watson Marketing (2017), 10 Keys Marketing Trends and Ideas for exceeding customer expectations
15
 To end this non-exhaustive list of drivers, one could cite the rising interest in neighboring fields
such as robotics, space exploration, self-driving cars, cybersecurity and antifraud fighting, which all benefit
from various AI innovations.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that the very diverse commercial applications of AI solutions,
especially for machine learning, connected objects, mobility and big data, led key sectors such as
healthcare, finance, e-commerce and marketing to put pressure on the field of AI both in terms of
innovation and concrete applications.

3.3 THE MAIN BLOCKS OF MODERN AI

We now have a clearer idea of where AI comes from, and why it seems to explode just today.
However, machine learning, neural networks, expert systems – these are still just abstract names for us.
In order to study their relationship with art creation, a field which involves a high degree of technicality,
we will need to understand exactly how these different fields of AI work from a technical standpoint.
Only then will we be able to assess the degree of their participation in the creation of a piece of art, as
well as their potential authorship.

Let us therefore review the fundamental blocks of AI today, making sure we understand the basic
technical implications of each of them.

3.3.1 A visual overview

The way AI is organized today could be schematically seen as below:

16
 Figure 3: Visual overview of AI today

On one side, connectionist AI relies on machine learning, itself heavily dependent on neural
networks, which in turn are the pillar of deep learning; on the other, symbolic AI develops automated
reasoning. The division is however not so clear because not only does deep learning feed the automated
reasoning block (indeed, the analysis of great amounts of data by deep learning algorithms leads to the
creation of rules which feed the expert systems), but both sides are equally used in order to set up agent
networks, which represent the endgame AI solutions used in everyday life. Let us now delve a bit deeper
into the technical implications of each of these bricks.

3.3.2 Machine learning

Coined by its founder Arthur Samuel in 1959, the term “machine learning” refers to a field of AI
which uses probabilistic methods to give machines the ability to learn without being explicitly
programmed. Using a set of training data, the main objectives for the machine include identifying trends,
predicting data, discovering correlations between data and events, segmenting data sets, recognizing
objects… These processes have many commercial applications such as virus detection, customer
segmentation and behavior prediction, medical prognosis, and speech-and-vision recognition, to cite a
few. It is important to remember that machine learning under this definition remains an ideal: in
practice, human intervention remains critical in order to choose from methods of learning and carry out
manual arbitrages.

17
 How does it work? Machine learning starts from an existing dataset called the training dataset,
on which it will make observations, leading to generalizations which can then be translated into
predictions, segmentations or labels. Here we need to break down machine learning into three
subcategories, depending on the learning method. Deep learning scientist Sébastien Collet represents
them as follows:

Figure 4: The three subcategories of machine learning

Supervised learning uses a labelled dataset, which will serve as examples to be generalized when
tackling new data. For instance, the machine may be given a large dataset consisting of images of cats and
dogs, each labelled as such. It will then determine what features seem to impact most the given label (ears,
muzzle, whiskers, fur…). Upon being presented a new image without label, the machine should then be
able to conclude whether it is a cat or a dog.20 The mathematical notions in play here are classification
(regarding the labels) and regression (for predictions). The applications include virus identification, electric
consumption prediction, seasonal sales…

Unsupervised learning gets rid of the labels in the training dataset, and attempts instead to find
structure within the data, whatever it may be. No names, no labels will be given, but outliers will be singled

20
Collet (2017), Machine Learning for grandmas, https://www.saagie.com/blog/machine-learning-for-grandmas/
18
out, for instance detecting a black cat within a multitude of white cats – this is known as clustering, which
is understandably useful for customer segmentation among other applications. This structure-finding
behavior also allows to find out correlations in datasets, leading to the identification of relevant
dimensions and eventually to dimensional reduction in order to simplify the model. In the era of big data
and the explosion of dimension, this is very useful.

Lastly, reinforcement learning refers to a form of incremental supervised learning where a system
reacts to new data coming from its environment and modifies its behavior accordingly. The field of robotics
uses reinforcement learning to teach its robots motor skills; chatbots also do by taking into account user
reactions in order to improve its interactions.

3.3.3 Neural networks

Neural networks refer to a technique popularly used in machine learning – they are also the
foundation of its more advanced version, deep learning, which we will review further below. Neural
networks aim at reproducing approximately the way biological neurons work in a human brain: this is an
idea known as biomimetics.

So, to start with, how does a biological neuron work? It has three main components: the dendrites,
the cell body, and the axon – below a simplified schematic of their organization:21

Figure 5: Simplified schematic of the organization of a biological neuron

21
Swain, Ali, Weller (2006), Estimation of mixed-layer depth from surface parameters,
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-A-Biological-Neuron-and-b-An-Artificial-Neuron-Source-Gurney-
1997_fig1_33548480
19
 Bio-electric information is received through the dendrites, which transmit it to the cell body; the
cell body then operates an unknown activation function which in turn generates bio-electric information
to be transmitted to the next neuron through the axon; synapses merely refer to the connecting point
between axons and dendrites.

An artificial neuron aims to imitate this way of functioning in a simplified manner. The idea is to
gather different numeric variables in input (x1…,xn), each associated to a specific weight (w1,…,wn), then
sum them, add a bias b, and apply an activation function f generally of the sigmoid type, in order to get
an output value. These artificial neurons will then be connected in different layers, each output
becoming an input for another, in a manner analogic to how the neurons in our brains interact through
transmission and transformation of information. Here is a schematic of an artificial neuron, put side-by-
side with the previous schematic of a biological neuron22:

Figure 6: Simplified schematics of the organization of a biological neuron (left) and of an artificial neuron (right)

A neural network learns through a process where the weight of each interconnection is adjusted
until the output information makes sense as regards the input information, which is known. For instance,
the output may be the descriptive tag of an object figuring in an input image. After repeated adjustment
of each connection weight, the neural network will be able to give appropriate tags to the input images
with a satisfying success rate. It will then be able to tackle data which does not belong to its training set

22
ibid
20
(for instance, recognizing objects within images it has never seen before). As such, a neural network’s
knowledge is purely probabilistic – it cannot explain why it comes to a certain result or give any meaning
to it.

Neural networks come in many colors and forms: from the first of them all in 1957 – Frank
Rosenblatt’s Perceptron, a simple monolayer neuron – to recent deep convolutional networks featuring
several different layers of complex neuron connections, dozens of types of neural networks have been put
forward. Most of them are represented on Fjodor Van Veen’s well-known “cheat sheet” published in 2016,
shown on the following page.

21
22
 Figure 7: A mostly complete chart of neural networks

3.3.4 Deep learning

Now that we’ve gone over the basics of machine learning and neural networks, deep learning will
not pose any problem for our understanding. Indeed, deep learning merely refers to a subfield of machine
learning based on the use of multiple layers of neurons – often called hidden layers. The learning process
is broken down into the same three categories as previously described: supervised, unsupervised and
reinforcement learning.

The most common types of neural networks used for deep learning as well as their applications
are fully connected networks (classification and predictions), convolutional networks (image recognition),
recurrent networks (medical fields, finance), Long Short-Term Memory (translation, dialogue, research),
transfer networks (domain switch) and generative networks (image and text modification). We will see
later that some of them are increasingly used in the creation of art. Please refer yourself to Van Veen’s
aforementioned diagram to understand visually how most of these neural networks are organized.

3.3.5 Automated reasoning

Referring to our initial diagram, we have reviewed the connectionist side of modern AI: machine
learning, neural networks and deep learning. Let us now give a brief technical overview of automated
reasoning to do justice to the symbolic side of AI, which remains essential to the field, even if less
prominent in current times.

The main solution of symbolic AI comes in the form of expert systems. These rely on two key
components: a knowledge base, generated either through interaction with human experts, or through the
exploitation of an existing knowledge base, and a rule engine based on pure logic and automatic inference.
Here it is summed up:23

23
https://www.igcseict.info/theory/7_2/expert/
23
 Figure 8: Simplified organization of symbolic AI

These expert systems have obvious applications in the medical field (diagnosis), but also in banking
(loan evaluation and financial planning), logistics (optimization) and multiple other corporate sectors.

Another aspect of automated reasoning is fuzzy logic, which manipulates information neither true
nor false in order to mimic human decisions often based on imprecise and non-numerical information –
its applications are multiple, from traffic engineering to construction planning.

The tendency lately has shown an increasing proximity between automated reasoning and
connectionist solutions – both through the phenomenon described earlier where deep learning feeds
symbolic rules, but also via the introduction of rule sets in machine learning and deep learning, hence a
phenomenon of mutual reinforcement between the two fields.

3.3.6 Agents and multi-agent systems

The last block of our diagram that remains to be clarified refers to agent networks. This is
simultaneously the most sophisticated level of AI and the simplest to understand. Conceptually, an agent
(or intelligent agent in formal terms) is simply an autonomous entity which, upon receiving information
from its environment, decides to achieve a goal and undertakes actions to maximize his chances of
reaching that goal. 24 Below an example of a simple agent called a reflex agent25:

24
Russell, Norvig (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.)
25
Roche, Lauri, Blunier, Koukam (2013), Multi-Agent Technology for Power System Control,
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Structure-of-a-simple-reflex-agent_fig5_235909546
24
 Figure 9: Simplified organization of an agent

Humans, animals, robots, chatbots, AI systems, are all agents. As for multi-agent systems, they
refer to networks in which autonomous intelligent agents are linked and collaborate among each other.
Most AI solutions are therefore multi-agent systems.

Take a chatbot: one agent will be responsible for text recognition, then another one for semantic
intent extraction, a third one will address the question by searching in a database or a knowledge base,
and the last will formulate an answer and send it to the user! Overall, many blocks will have been used,
from neural networks to rule engines, distributed among several intelligent agents, and the whole
constitutes a multi-agent system – and this is the case for most AI solutions, from autonomous robots to
automatic translators. Hence why this block towers over the previously mentioned blocks in the initial
diagram.

25
4 AI AND ART TODAY: WHERE WE STAND
Having given an overview of what exactly AI is, where it comes from, and why it is a matter of
importance today, we can now tackle the second part of the question: creating art. Let’s start by breaking
down the meaning of the different terms of the question, before moving on to elements of answer.

Can AI create art?

• For AI, we will retain Russell & Norvig’s (2003)26 well-accepted definition of “the designing and
building of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and take actions that
affect that environment.” In this definition, the term AI of course refers as much to the field of
research as to the intelligent agents themselves – the latter use which we will prioritize over the
following pages.

• For art, judging by the incredibly diverse and contrasting definitions which can be found online as
well as in the academic literature, this could very well be the object of another thesis – however,
we will try to disarm this debate, which is not our priority today, by focusing mainly on three
commonly-recognized and easily understandable fields of art: visual arts (namely painting and
video), music and literature.

• For the ability to create (Can… create…?), the purpose of this paper is obviously not to wonder
whether AI can physically craft a work of art, as not only has this already been verified in several
domains, but it would be missing the point. The purpose is to determine to what extent AI can
be credited in the creation of a work of art – is it a tool? Is it a creative partner? Is it an author?
(Is he an author?)

Now that we have a clearer understanding of the question, let us set out the method which will be
used to reach elements of answer.

26
Russell, Norvig (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.)
26
4.1 THE METHOD
The method which we suggest here, and which seems both the simplest and the most rigorous, is
broken down into two steps:

1. Firstly, an in-depth review of AI’s current contributions to the creation of art across the three
disciplines we have singled out (visual arts, music and literature). This will give us a precise
overview of what exactly we are trying to judge.

2. Secondly, an attempt to define the essence of an artist – in other words, sketching out the
conditions for someone to be considered an artist – followed by a conclusion on whether any
current AI qualifies as such through the contributions previously discussed.

4.2 AN OVERVIEW OF AI’S CURRENT CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE CREATION OF ART

Despite our attempts at synthesis, tackling the vast field of AI’s current contributions to the
creation of art might be a lengthy process – fleshing out a structure would be most welcome. This leads
us wondering whether we could classify these types of contribution. Can we draw out any
subcategories?

This is the question that IBM head of design Jennifer Sukis set out to answer in her enlightening
article “The Relationship Between Art and AI” (2018)27. According to her, AI today takes on three
different roles in art creation, which she sorts out by ascending levels of contribution: AI as an
impersonator, AI as a collaborator and AI as a creator.

We will structure this first step of our research along these three categories. For each of them, we
will start by specifying the conditions for an AI to belong to that category, then give current examples of
AI taking on that role in each of the three aforementioned art domains (visual arts, music and literature).

4.2.1 AI as an impersonator

4.2.1.1 Conditions
What we will regroup here are the instances in which AI participates in imitating and/or mixing
together existing human artworks – an idea known as style transfer. Technologies used in order to achieve

27
Sukis (2018), The Relationship between Art and AI, https://medium.com/design-ibm/the-role-of-art-in-ai-
31033ad7c54e
27
this range from convolutional neural networks to Markov chains, and gave birth over the last few years to
a great variety of artworks in the three fields we focus on.

4.2.1.2 Visual arts

In the visual arts, style transfer first came to life in 2015 28 through neural style transfer, a
technique which relies on convolutional neural networks and a process of optimization – in simple terms,
it consists in “starting off with a random noise image and making it more and more desirable with every
“training” iteration of the neural network.”29 Eventually, the target image – which is often referred to as a
“pastiche” – ends up with the style of the initial artwork. However, because of the necessary iterations,
this process is quite slow: it was revolutionized a few months later in 2016 30 with the introduction of
feedforward style transfer, which “trains a network to do the stylizations for a given painting beforehand
so that it can produce stylized images instantly”31. This resulted in much quicker style transfers, leading to
an explosion of such artworks in the following years. Here is an example of neural style transfer of Picasso’s
Figure dans un Fauteuil onto a dancer32:

28
Gatys, Ecker, Bethge (2015), A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf
29
Desai (2017), Neural Artistic Style Transfer: A Comprehensive Look, https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-
intelligence/neural-artistic-style-transfer-a-comprehensive-look-f54d8649c199
30
Johnson, Alahi, Fei-Fei (2016), Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.08155.pdf
31
Desai (2017)
32
ibid
28
 The very same researchers who gave birth to neural style transfer in 2015 even created an online
tool called Deepart.io, where anyone can upload his own picture in order to have it stylized for free in the
way of a famous artist:33

One of the drawback of the feedforward algorithm was that because it had already learnt the style
it wanted to transfer beforehand, it could only stick to one single style, allowing no flexibility – as Google
Brain Team put it in 2016, “this means that to build a style transfer system capable of modeling 100
paintings, one has to train and store 100 separate style transfer networks.”34

This same Google Brain Team therefore came up in the same year with a method to teach a deep
convolutional neural network multiple styles at the same time 35. Firstly, this allowed the algorithm to
generalize the style it learnt from a single painting to a collection of paintings from a single author, or even
to a whole movement: for instance, the algorithm was fed a great amount of Monet paintings, in order to
adopt his general style, and not just one of his painting’s – he was also trained to replicate what
impressionism as a movement looked like, being trained with paintings from multiple key painters of the
movement. The other innovation this method allowed for was the mash-up of different art styles
originating from various paintings onto the same pastiche – and because Google’s algorithm retained the
feedforward’s algorithm instantaneity, this could be done in real time. Here is an example of the
combination of four styles (Rouault, Munch, Van Gogh, Roy) onto a photograph of Tübingen:

33
https://deepart.io/
34
Dumoulin, Shlens, Kudlur (2016), Supercharging Style Transfer,
https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/10/supercharging-style-transfer.html
35
Dumoulin, Shlens, Kudlur (2016), A Learned Representation for Artistic Style, https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07629
29
 Because style transfer can be applied to images, it can also be applied to videos: this led to the
creation of many fascinating pieces such as Bhautik Joshi’s “2001: A Picasso Odyssey”36, which renders
Kubrick’s masterpiece through the style of a Picasso painting, or Gene Kogan’s “Why is a Raven Like a
Writing Desk”37 presenting Alice in Wonderland’s tea party & riddle scene restyled through 17 paintings.

4.2.1.3 Music
Neural style transfer has also given birth to many intriguing works in the field of music. This
works best with musical genres which are consistently structured or follow patterns, in order to be easily
replicated by AI, such as Bach’s classical music or modern genres such as black metal and math rock.38

Dadabots is one example of a collective which was able to generate several albums of black
metal and math rock thanks to recurrent neural networks.39 Their album Aeternal Reborous was
generated after listening to metal group Aepoch’s album Awakening Inception 28 times – the machine
then attempted to replicate what it had been fed, generating hundreds of minutes of audio with
SampleRNN, a model of neural network based on recurrent layers, audio which was then cherrypicked by
Dadabots and assembled into an album. Although “new” sound was generated, unlike previous visual

36
https://vimeo.com/169187915
37
https://vimeo.com/139123754
38
Sukis (2018)
39
Carr, Zukowski (2017), Generating Black Metal and Math Rock: Beyond Bach, Beethoven, and Beatles,
https://dadabots.com/nips2017/generating-black-metal-and-math-rock.pdf
30
style transfers which were really just elaborate mashups, the objective here remained purely to imitate a
particular group, hence why this type of contribution still falls under the category of impersonation and
not collaboration just yet.

The same logic applies to Flow Machines’ famous Beatles impersonation “Daddy’s car”: after
listening to a selection of 45 tubes from the iconic British boy’s band, the neural network-based
algorithm produced three minutes of almost convincing music. As science columnist Lucy Jordan puts it:
“the song is tuneful, but undeniably a pastiche”40. Flow Machine also aimed its efforts at developing a
model able to learn to compose chorales in the style of Bach. This initiative features an algorithm
dubbed DeepBach whose training data is no more than 400 chorale sheets by Bach. Unlike previous style
transfer models, this one is based on pseudo-Gibbs sampling, a form of Markov chain Monte Carlo
(MCMC) method owing to Bayesian statistics.41 DeepBach boasts the ability to integrate constraints in its
compositions, namely regarding the melody, the bass, the rhythm and the cadences. This allows for the
reharmonization of well-known melodies in the style of Bach chorales – a process which reminds us
strongly of style transfer in visual arts, with an original artwork, a target image and a resulting pastiche.

Just like it had launched its style transfer grid for visual arts, Google introduced a style transfer
grid for music, in the form of the Beat Blender by Project Magenta.42 This experiment based on machine
learning integrates neural networks trained on over 3.8 million drum beats to provide the possibility to
blend 4 different types of beats live. In each corner of the grid, the user randomizes a beat or selects one
genre among 10 suggestions – then is able to drag a cursor or draw a line on the grid to blend selectively
the various beats in real-time. See below the interface.

40
Jordan (2017), Inside the Lab That's Producing the First AI-Generated Pop Album,
https://www.seeker.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/inside-flow-machines-the-lab-thats-composing-the-first-ai-
generated-pop-album
41
Hadjeres, Pachet, Nielsen (2017), DeepBach: a Steerable Model for Bach Chorales Generation,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.01010.pdf
42
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/beat-blender/view/
31
 It is worth noting that regarding Google Beat Blender, AI can be considered both an imitator
and/or a collaborator, depending on the case of figure. Imitator if you consider the beat itself as a final
product, that is a standard blend of beats achievable by any human being, and merely automated.
Collaborator if you consider that the beat will be used afterwards by a human being in order to compose
a larger artwork, in which case the result will be novel, and Google Beat Blender a part of the creative
process. Previously mentioned style transfers did not call for this nuance, as they were all presented and
judged as final products, hence becoming imitations or blends of imitations.

4.2.1.4 Written art?

Style transfer has not spared literature. In August 2017, software engineer Zack Thoutt decided
that he was tired of waiting for George R.R. Martin to release the next season of Game of Thrones, and
had the brilliant idea of training a recurrent neural network (RNN) to predict the events of the unfinished
sixth novel and write whole chapters out of it.43 Similarly to neural transfer as seen in previous disciplines,
resemblance with the original piece of art was ensured as “the neural network compares the data it
outputs with the targets and updates [what] the network learns to better mimic the targets.”44 In the case
of books however, another important factor comes into play: plot progression. Indeed, simply trying to
mimic the original style might result in text which in itself makes sense and has similarities with the original,

43
Hill (2017), A Neural Network Wrote the Next 'Game of Thrones' Book Because George R.R. Martin Hasn't,
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evvq3n/game-of-thrones-winds-of-winter-neural-network
44
Ibid.
32
but which over several pages reveals serious plot holes or incoherencies as the AI does not “remember”
what happened earlier. In this particular initiative by Thoutt, that issue was partly overcome through the
recourse to a “long short-term memory” (LSTM) neural network. Simply put, LSTMs contain in their
architecture some layers made of “memory cells”, themselves composed of three “gates”: one “entry
gate” deciding what information to retain from the neuron of the previous layer, one “exit gate” managing
the content which will be transferred to the next layer, and one “memory gate” filtering the information
passing between the two other gates.45 Integrating this system in his RNN allowed Thoutt’s algorithm to
avoid repeating events and give an overall sense of plot progression which best mimicked a real Game of
Thrones novel. While the resulting piece is worlds below R. R. Martin standards, it remains understandable
and almost readable, with a distinct Game of Thrones feel to it:46

We have mentioned some paragraphs above the use of a Markov-chain-derived algorithm to train
DeepBach – while this particular one was excessively complex to develop, those used in the field of
literature are found in a much simpler form and can be easily understood and used to produce interesting
results. Essentially, “a Markov chain looks at a word, a word pair or word triple and picks a likely next word
based on a corpus of source text. For example, if I’d supplied it with a whole bunch of fairy stories and
started it with the word triple of “Once upon a”, then there’s a good chance it’ll pick the word “time”
next”47 – as such, it is an entirely probabilistic approach to text generation. The order of the Markov chain
refers to the number of characters, or words, we wish it to take into account in order to generate the next

45
Peterschmitt (2018), IA et création littéraire
46
Thoutt (2017), Me, My Neural Network, and Game of Thrones, https://blog.udacity.com/2017/08/neural-
network-game-of-thrones.html
47
Rev Dan Catt (2017), Markov Chaining Trump, https://chatbotslife.com/markov-chaining-trump-3e0a8acca80a
33
ones. Therefore, the whole challenge of Markov chain writing is finding the balance between orders that
are too low, which produce nonsensical juxtaposition of letters, and orders that are too high, which
produce perfectly reasonable but unoriginal sentences, sometimes even near-copies of the source text.
An experiment of Markov chain text generation applied exclusively to Trump tweets gave birth to an
“Automatic Donald Trump” tweet generator 48 , which upon trial comes up with impressively realistic
material:

4.2.2 AI as a collaborator

4.2.2.1 Conditions
We will regroup here instances in which AI contributes to the creation of a novel piece of art.
Unlike imitation, which seeks to be as close as possible to the original, the goal here is for AI to create
something different, new – to break the rules. However, because a human being is still heavily involved
in the process, we will refer to this process as a collaboration.

4.2.2.2 Visual arts

How can we mention AI in visual arts without thinking of the recent coup by Obvious, a French
collective of three students that succeeded in propelling one of their “AI-generated” painting Edmond de
Belamy to a Christie’s auction – in itself an achievement as no AI artworks had ever been exhibited in the
past by any New York or London top galleries – and most importantly, selling it off at $432,500 when it
was initially estimated around $7000? This was nothing short of a thunderclap in the clear sky of AI art,
and hundreds of articles flowered over the following week about what was mistakenly publicized as an
entirely AI-generated portrait.

48
“Automatic Donald Trump”: https://filiph.github.io/markov/
34
 Of course, closer inspection reveals that Edmond de Belamy was merely a collaboration between
human and machine. The idea is based on an increasingly popular type of neural network in the world of
AI art called Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Introduced by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, GANs consist
of two algorithms: a generator, tasked on producing novel content following some characteristics of a
specific set of input content, and a discriminator, whose role is to differentiate the originals from the new
sample. As long as the latter can make the difference, the former tweaks its data to improve its generations
– at last, the discriminator is trumped, and the generated content is validated. In the case of Obvious, input
data was more than 15 000 classical portraits, and the validated output was assembled into the fictitious
Belamy family, available online.49 Where this becomes interesting is that the GANs understand and copy
basic localized visual patterns, but have no idea of how they fit together in the bigger picture – this results
in “imagery in which boundaries are indistinct, figures melt into one another, and rules of anatomy go out
the window”50. What starts as imitation therefore ends up creating a distinct aesthetic which some have
already dubbed GANism, a fruitful collaboration between human input, AI unintentional creation and
human curation. It is important to note that although it is Obvious’ portrait that happened to garner public
attention in 2018, the idea of using GANs in art largely predates them with artists such as Tom White,

49
https://obvious-art.com/
50
Vincent (2018), How three French students used borrowed code to put the first AI portrait in Christie’s,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-
gans
35
Mario Klingemann, Anna Ridler or Robbie Barrat, most of whom had produced portraits very similar to
those of the Belamy family over a year before Obvious’ rise to fame.51

Mentioned just above, Mario Klingemann is a central actor in this new AI-powered school of
artists. Calling himself a “neurographer”, he draws from machine learning to generate novel and surprising
art. “A photographer goes out into the world and frames good spots, I go inside these neural networks,
which are like their own multidimensional worlds, and say ‘Tell me how it looks at this coordinate, now
how about over here?”52 The results are Francis Bacon-esque portraits straight out of the uncanny valley,
see below on the left:

On the right can be seen his installation “Memories of Passersby”, first AI artwork to auction in a
major art gallery – here Sotheby’s – in Europe: displaying perpetually evolving human faces in a classical
painting style, it goes one step further in the collaboration between humans and AI by theatricalizing the
exploration of these previously mentioned “coordinates” by a neural network, elevating the GAN’s
“creative” efforts into an object of art.

Lastly, one could mention Trevor Paglen’s recent Sight Machine performance, whose goal was to
apply actual AI surveillance technology to a live video of a musical performance by the Kronos Quartet in
order to expose to the public the way AI perceived the different musicians, both visually and in terms of

51
Elgammal (2018), What the Art World Is Failing to Grasp about Christie’s AI Portrait Coup,
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-art-failing-grasp-christies-ai-portrait-coup
52
Simonite (2017), A “neurographer“ puts the art in artificial intelligence,
https://www.wired.com/story/neurographer-puts-the-art-in-artificial-intelligence/
36
emotional insights. This created a very peculiar and novel meta-experience at the crossroad of music,
video, emotions and analysis, engaging both human and AI perceptions, and somehow offering us a
glimpse into other ways of interpreting reality.

4.2.2.3 Music
Musical collaborations between AI and artists have exploded in the recent years, with the advent
of “an entire industry built around AI services for creating music, including […] Flow Machines, IBM Watson
Beat, Google Magenta’s NSynth Super, Jukedeck, Melodrive, Spotify’s Creator Technology Research Lab,
and Amper Music” according to reporter and musician Dani Deahl53. Let us take a look at some of these
tools.

Amper Music is an online tool described as a music compositor for content creators54: it relies on
deep learning to produce audio, based on a number of human-chosen parameters such as instruments,
style and tempo. The result is then royalty-free and ready to use, often as one element in a larger
production such as a full-blown song, or even an advertisement or a trailer – as such, Amper Music is
entirely viewed as a collaborator in the eyes of the end customer. Singer-songwriter Taryn Southern
illustrates this dynamic through her work on “I Am AI”, an album she is collaboratively creating with Amper
Music. The percussion, melodies and chords generated by the algorithm according to her predefined
criteria serves as inspiration – some parts being largely kept intact – on which she then adds her own vocal
melodies and lyrics. Comparison between the original extract from Amper Music55 and the final musical
piece56 for a particular song reveals how heavily AI influenced the artwork and legitimates the idea of a
collaboration between human and AI – as Amper co-founder Michael Hobe puts it, “You’re collaborating
and working with the AI to achieve your goal. It’s not that the AI is just doing its own little thing. It’s all
about the process between it and you to achieve that final artistic vision.”57

Alex Da Kid is another artist who understood the potential of AI in the creation of a musical hit.
His 2016 single “Not Easy” reached number four in the iTunes Hot Tracks chart and number six in the

53
Deahl (2018), How AI-generated music is changing the way hits are made,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17777008/artificial-intelligence-taryn-southern-amper-music
54
https://www.ampermusic.com/#score
55
https://soundcloud.com/tarynsouthern
56
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUs6CznN8pw
57
Deahl (2018)
37
alternative chart within 48 hours of its release58– and guess what? It was inspired both conceptually and
technically by IBM Watson, the very same AI which came first versus the two legendary Jeopardy!
Champions in 2011. IBM Watson analyzed “the composition of five years’ worth of Billboard songs, as well
as cultural artefacts such as newspaper articles, film scripts and social media commentary” in order to
“understand the “emotional temperature” of the time period and use this to inform Alex’s creative
process.”59 This allowed him to pick a topic – heartbreak – which resonated with his audience at that
specific time, directly reinforcing the emotional impact of his art and propelling the song to popularity.
Not only was IBM Watson responsible for this fundamental insight, but it also extended the collaboration
to helping Alex Da Kid on a technical level, diving “deep into individual tracks to collect data on pitch, time
and key signatures and note sequences to work out what a listener might want to hear – or an artist may
be inspired by”60.

Beyond helping musicians producing better content within an already existing set of rules, as in
the two previous examples, AI also contributes in breaking these rules and entering completely novel
spaces of artistic expression. One example is NSynth Super, a Google Magenta experiment using machine
learning to generate unprecedented sounds – not mere mashups of existing sounds, but completely new
sounds. NSynth uses deep neural networks to break down the fundamental characteristics of input sounds
– up to 16 defining temporal features from each input – then interpolates them to create new
mathematical combinations which are then decoded into an entirely novel output sound.61 The following
scheme sums up the 6 main steps of the process, from input to output, through encoding, feature learning,
interpolations and decoding:

58
Marr (2017), Grammy-Nominee Alex Da Kid Creates Hit Record Using Machine Learning,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/30/grammy-nominee-alex-da-kid-creates-hit-record-using-
machine-learning/#201a21432cf9
59
ibid
60
ibid
61
https://nsynthsuper.withgoogle.com/
38
 Musicians can then tinker with more than 100,000 new sounds via an interface especially designed
for exploration – each corner of the device regroups several input sounds, and dragging one’s finger across
the touchscreen will combine the acoustic qualities of the source sounds proportionally, giving birth to
unique tracks.62

Another example of this exploration of entirely new spaces of expression can be found in algoraves
– short for “algorithmic raves”, this type of events started popping up in the 2010s and have since then
grown into an international movement. The idea is to generate music live through the improvised writing
and modifying of code by a musician/coder – more often than not, this same source code will be projected
on a screen for the dancing crowd to witness the process of creation. At the intersection of visual, musical
and performance arts, algoraves strive to put the spotlight on AI, as a central actor and collaborator in the
creation of the artwork.

4.2.2.4 Written art

Direct collaboration between human and AI can be observed in numerous instances in the field of
literature. The deep learning algorithm “Shelley” created by the MIT Media Lab is a striking example: based
on a database of more than 140 000 horror stories, it co-creates stories with internet users on Twitter,

62
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PMoEP1MKoo
39
alternating between generating its own text and inserting human contributions. Here is an example of a
horror stories – in bold the passages written by Shelley.63

“I started to breath again. The chains in my ankle twitched and the shadow continued to stare. A silent
cry and a few signs of life began to form. I had no idea. I raised it. I had to do something. I had to see to
it. I had to. I was going to find out. I was going to get away from this thing. I couldn't let it get me. My
adrenaline was kicking in and I couldn't stop myself. But the chains! The chains! How was I to get myself
free? I was losing my mind! I couldn't move. The creature was there with me. What was it doing? Then I
something. The beast was chained also. We were both prisoners in this place. But why? Who was
responsible for this? As we stood there in silence I heard a loud noise. Metallic creaks and shuffling. I was
frozen in place. All of a sudden the creature had the power to force itself out of the opening and into the
hallway. I heard something hit. A loud thud. Looked like chains being dragged on the floor, coming toward
us behind the door. What was it? What was it? What was I doing? The creature then pointed towards
the door. The things hand was still dragging it. I screamed for what seemed like hours. I was screaming
and the creature was screaming in agony. I could now see the figure rummaging "You are not alone.
Together we can escape," it whispered in my ear, his hand holding mine. As we stumbled into the hall, in
the light I could finally see the face of what I previously called a creature. It had no nose, it had a huge
teeth and a long hooved finger. It had a human like face. It was glistening. I couldn't speak, I was
screaming now. I was speechless.”64

Although grammar and spelling mistakes are still pervasive, the story is not far from being
legitimately enjoyable as Shelley actively takes into account human input, resulting in a true progression
of the plot – something which AIs tend to lack in writing.

In 2016, another impressive collaboration took place in Japan and shocked the whole world when
“The Day a Computer Wrote a Novel”, an AI-generated book, nearly won a literary competition against
humans. Although human involvement in the project was finally determined to be around 80 percent, thus
eliminating the idea of AI as an author as it tended to be initially reported, this remains an instance of
collaboration where “far from replacing humans, AI is actually working with them, potentially

63
Inspired by Peterschmitt (2018)
64
https://twitter.com/shelley_ai/status/927958029844320256
40
complementing the creative process but not yet changing it outright”65. The last sentence of the novel, in
a probably voluntary attempt at provocation, reads as follows:66

“I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The
day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working
for humans.”

4.2.3 AI as a creator

4.2.3.1 Conditions
We have broadly seen two ascending levels of AI contribution to art: how it can be used to imitate
what already exists, and how it can be used to help humans create something novel. In each of these cases,
AI has been a little more involved in the creative process. Can we push further? Following this logic, the
next step would be near-total involvement of the AI in the creative process, i.e. ideally instances in which
AI creates art independently from any human influence. After extensive research, it appears that visual arts
are – as of now – the field in which this idea has been approached in the closest manner, and as such we
will focus our analysis on this domain only, avoiding what would be pure speculation in music or written
arts.

4.2.3.2 Visual arts: how close can we get?

Reducing human involvement in the creation of art to the learning process of an AI, leaving it as
free as possible afterwards to create its own art: this is the motto and objective of Rutger’s Art and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, led by Professor of Computer Science Ahmed Elgammal. “If we teach the machine
about art and art styles and force it to generate novel images that do not follow established styles, what
would it generate? […] Would that be considered “art”?” reads their website67. Testing this hypothesis is
exactly what they did, publishing the results in a June 2017 paper named “CAN: Creative Adversarial

65
Brogan (2016), An A.I. Competed for a Literary Prize, but Humans Still Did the Real Work,
https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/a-i-written-novel-competes-for-japanese-literary-award-but-humans-are-
doing-the-work.html
66
Schaub (2016), Is the future award-winning novelist a writing robot?,
https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-novel-computer-writing-japan-20160322-story.html
67
https://sites.google.com/site/digihumanlab/research
41
Networks – Generating “Art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms”68 which influential
online art platform Artsy called "the biggest artistic achievement of the year"69.

The starting point is simple: Elgammal observes that the GAN system (presented above through
the work of Obvious and consisting of two sub-networks called the generator and the discriminator) is
fundamentally emulative and not creative. Indeed, since the generator’s sole objective is to fool the
discriminator into believing the generated image belongs to the initial training set (existing art), the
generator is logically encouraged to produce images which end up looking as much as possible like existing
art. The only novel aspect of GAN art came from its imperfections, in that even when progressing towards
validation, it did not understand the relationship between basic localized features, thus generating
disjointed, random patterns which were interpreted by unaccustomed humans as uncanny or dream-like
– in other words, the creative component was not the goal of GANs, but merely a side-effect of their
incompleteness. This means that more competent GANs were bound to fail at creating anything novel.

Having said that, Elgammal wondered how to lead AI to the creation of something novel. This
required clarifying what “novel” art meant. Here, he referred to psychologist Colin Martindale (1943-2008)
who suggests that creative artists at any point in time attempt to increase the arousal potential of their
art to push against habituation70, while simultaneously staying below a certain threshold after which a
negative hedonic response is activated. This subtle equilibrium between too little arousal – causing
indifference – and too much – causing pain – is what Martindale calls the “principle of least effort”, and
corresponds to Wundt’s and Berlyne’s hedonic curve seen below:71

68
Elgammal (2017), CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating “Art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating
from Style Norms, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.07068.pdf
69
Chun (2017), It’s Getting Hard to Tell If a Painting Was Made by a Computer or a Human,
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-hard-painting-made-computer-human
70
Martindale (1993), The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change
71
Berlyne (1974), Studies in the new experimental aesthetics
42
 Figure 10: Wundt's and Berlyne's hedonic curve

Creativity, and the resulting novel art, is therefore to be found at the peak of this curve. How could
AI reach it? Elgammal tackles this question through a clever reworking of the GAN system into what he
names the CAN system: Creative Adversarial Network. Similarly to GAN, a generator and a discriminator
are used. However, the discriminator is trained to recognize the style of an artwork (labels include
Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Expressionism, etc.). As for the generator, it has no access to any
art. What happens is that the generator starts producing random art and receives two signals as a response
from the discriminator: one stating whether the discriminator qualifies it as art or not art in comparison
with his large training set, and another one signaling how easily the discriminator can classify the
generated art into established styles. The generator is rewarded for fooling the discriminator into
qualifying it as art, but heftily penalized the easier the latter can classify it into an existing style; therefore,
the generator is put under contradictory pressure to generate something that corresponds to what
humans call art, but that is not easily classifiable within an established style.

43
 Figure 11: Visual representation of a CAN

Overall, “these two signals together should push the generator to explore parts of the creative
space that lay close to the distribution of art (to maximize the first objective), and at the same time
maximize the ambiguity of the generated art with respect to how it fits in the realm of standard art
styles.”72 This exactly corresponds to the idea of raising the arousal level just to the equilibrium according
to Martindale’s principle of least effort.

So, what came out of it? What lurks in the mind of an AI forced to style break? The results far
surpassed Elgammal’s expectations. Indeed, he chose to assess the results through a visual Turing-like test,
asking humans to distinguish between human-made and computer-made art. Because the objective was
to evaluate the creativity of the generated artworks, and not their resemblance to any existing movement,
human counterparts had to be drawn from movements considered modern and novel to this day: as such,
the two chosen sets were a collection of Abstract Expressionist masters made between 1945-2007 and a
collection of contemporary paintings shown in Art Basel 2016, a reference in its field. Two questions were
then asked: the first one, to distinguish between AI-made and human-made art. The results were more
than encouraging: although Abstract Expressionist paintings were the most recognized as human-made
85% of the time, AI-generated artworks came second with 75% of human subjects thinking they were
made by an artist, far above the Art Basel collection which scored a puzzling 48%.

72
Elgammal (2017)
44
 The second question was the degree to which the subjects found the works of art to be
“intentional, having visual structure, communicative, and inspirational.”73 The results were flabbergasting:
AI-generated artworks came first, suggesting that these images were on average more considered art than
human-made art…

However, before jumping to the conclusion that AIs are better artists than humans, or even that
they are artists at all, we need to be careful with several concepts. Firstly, this experiment includes an
infinitesimal fraction of human art versus a similarly infinitesimal fraction of AI art, judged by an
infinitesimal fraction of humanity, thus there is the issue of representativity. Secondly, and most
importantly, this only serves to show that content generated through the CAN method can be considered
art, not that the CAN algorithm has any credit as an artist. This second issue is what we will now attempt

73
Elgammal (2017), Generating “art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms,
https://medium.com/@ahmed_elgammal/generating-art-by-learning-about-styles-and-deviating-from-style-
norms-8037a13ae027
45
to clarify by laying out the conditions associated with claiming a piece of art as one’s own, in order to
determine if they apply to any kind of AI contribution previously discussed.

4.3 DOES AI CREATE ART?

4.3.1 What is an artist?

A question that has occupied philosophers, artists and art historians for millennia, “what is an
artist?” summons as many different definitions as there are dictionaries. Distinguished institutions such as
Cambridge, Oxford and Merriam-Webster seem to prioritize the practice of fine arts as a defining
characteristic of the artist, respectively considering him as “someone who paints, draws, or makes
sculptures”74, “a person who creates paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby” 75 and “a person
skilled in one of the fine arts”76; other versions of the definition in the same dictionaries extend the concept
to “someone who creates things with great skill and imagination” for Cambridge or “one who professes
and practices an imaginative art” for Merriam-Webster. More modern dictionaries such as Wiktionary
avoid these inter-discipline skirmishes by taking a step back and defining artists by their essence – that is,
“a person who creates art”. The latter definition, broader and undeniable by the very extent of its
broadness, is the one we will retain.

4.3.2 Is AI an artist?
An artist is a person who creates art. Because the very purpose of this work is to challenge the
monopoly of humans in this definition, we will discard the term “person” for now and modify this
definition to “an entity that creates art”. We have already concluded in the previous part that AI can
produce what is considered by humans as art. Therefore, the last obstacle between AIs and the status of
artist is the word “create”.

Can AIs create? British computer scientist Simon Colton argues that all creative systems must
possess three necessary traits he refers to as the “creativity tripod”: skill, appreciation and imagination.77
Skill refers to the ability to produce something of quality, appreciation to the ability to self-assess the value
of the work, and imagination the ability to produce something novel. Taking the example of Rutger’s CAN

74
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/artist
75
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/artist
76
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artist
77
Colton (2008), Creativity Versus the Perception of Creativity in Computational Systems,
http://www.thepaintingfool.com/papers/colton_aaai08symp.pdf
46
algorithm, which is undoubtedly the best candidate we have, Elgammal himself argues that it ticks off
every box of the creative tripod: “our proposed system possesses the ability to produce novel artifacts
because the interaction between the two signals that derive the generation process is designed to force
the system to explore creative space to find solutions that deviate from established styles but stay close
enough to the boundary of art to be recognized as art. This interaction also provides a way for the system
to self-assess its products. The quality of the artifacts is verified by the human subject experiments, which
showed that subjects not only thought these artifacts were created by artists, but also rated them higher
on some scales than human art”78. Given this, CAN is definitely a creative system.

We end up, therefore, with a creative system producing art – which, according to our above
definition, qualifies as an artist. However, something seems off – is it really the AI we are talking about?

4.3.3 The case for intention

Going back to the creative tripod, is it really CAN creating something novel – or is it Rutger’s
Laboratory, through an elaborate tool? Is CAN itself producing and assessing something of quality, or is it
Elgammal’s team through clever coding?

The key notion here is intention. Although it is clear that Rutger’s team intended to create art, it is
also clear that CAN never intended anything, as it is merely a more-than-average complex set of man-
written lines of code. As much as we would not credit a primate with a selfie taken in a situation
engineered by a human being – as the US appeals court settled in April 2018 following nearly a decade of
suspense79 – we should not credit a manmade program with an artwork it was engineered to produce.
Neither had any intention of creating art, and one very practical proof of this is that neither claimed the
artwork.

Therefore, although CAN certainly produces art, it does so following the intent of a human being
– and therefore does not create art.

4.3.4 Generalizing the sentence

Unfortunately for our artificial friends, what applies to CAN – which possesses, as observed above,
the highest level of contribution in art creation relative to men – applies a fortiori to all weaker types of
AI contributions. From imitators to collaborators, however complex or opaque their process of producing

78
Elgammal (2017)
79
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute#Expert_opinions
47
art is, none of them display the slightest trace of intention at any stage, and as such can all be discarded
as non-artists, i.e. unable to create art.

5 AI AND ART TOMORROW: WHERE WE COULD GO

The conclusion of our last chapter made it clear that for AI to ever be credited with the art it produces,
it will need the intention to create that art. So how far are we from this?

Let us start by clarifying what is implied in the concept of intention. Merriam-Webster mentions “a
determination to act in a certain way”80, Cambridge “something that you want and plan to do”81. Browsing
through further dictionaries and looking up for synonyms, we quickly realize that two central notions
revolve around intention: forethought and will. In other words, there needs to be a preliminary thought
resulting in a desire to do something in a particular manner. And because these thoughts and desires need
to come from somewhere, be based on something, and act on something, this definition also entails
notions such as perception, knowledge and awareness of our surroundings. Thought, desire, will,
perception, knowledge, awareness – this is starting to sound like something familiar: consciousness.

Therefore, intention seems to be an inextricable cog of the larger system which is consciousness.
Attempting to reproduce it as an independent trait in AI would not only be impossible – it would be
inherently nonsensical. As such, it seems that our best bet to create intentional AI would be granting it
consciousness similar to ours.

Combining on the one hand the need for consciousness in order to attain intention, and on the other
the need for a large set of cognitive skills through which to express this intention – such as decision making
and problem solving, comprehension and production of language, learning through reading or experience,
memory, vision and the use of other senses – this leaves us with a hypothetical AI whose level of
intelligence would be conceptually equivalent to that of a human being.

This type of AI has a name: Artificial General Intelligence.

In short, if we attempt to retrace our train of thought so far: in order for AI to be credited with the
creation of art, it must possess intention; the latter stems from – or is currently indistinguishable from –
consciousness, therefore AI must be conscious in order to create art; once added the set of cognitive

80
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intention
81
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/intention
48
skills which are indissociable from the production of said art, we deduce that in order to create art, AI
must be Artificial General Intelligence.

Therefore, the question “Can AI create art?” now boils down to “When will Artificial General
Intelligence be achieved?”. Let us briefly clarify what we mean by AGI, before reviewing the state of
current research in that field and finally concluding on what may happen when it is achieved.

5.1 DEFINING AND CONTEXTUALIZING AGI

AGI is generally understood as part of a three-level classification consisting of Artificial Narrow
Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superior Intelligence (ASI), a scale
popularized by writer Tim Urban in his 2015 much-debated blog post “The AI Revolution: The Road to
Superintelligence” 82 – another frequent classification used by high-level researchers is weak AI versus
strong AI, corresponding respectively to ANI versus AGI and ASI. Here is an overview of what the hierarchy
looks like:83

Figure 12: Popular classification of AI

Let us take a closer look at the characteristics of these three levels of AI.

5.1.1 Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

82
Urban (2015), The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence, https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-
intelligence-revolution-1.html
83
https://www.slideshare.net/SomoGlobal/somo-ai-breakfast-briefing
49
 ANI corresponds to the current state of the art, with machines capable of solving problems in very
precise domains thanks to techniques ranging from machine and deep learning to rule-based systems.
Examples include search engines, fraud detection, credit rating, assisted driving, medical imagery
interpretation, vocal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana; in the domain of art, this is basically every AI
we have covered in our paper so far. Although such AI cannot emulate all components of human
intelligence, it can – and already does – surpass us in their specific domains of application: think of the
computing power and speed of computers, or their massive memory capacities.84

5.1.2 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

As mentioned earlier, AGI corresponds to a level of intelligence conceptually equivalent to that of
a human being. It includes – although definitions differ – all human cognitive functions such as the ability
to think, represent knowledge, analyze data, solve complex and varied problems, as well as
aforementioned skills such as language, memory and use of senses, and most importantly the ability to
integrate all these components towards a common goal.85

Traditional tests used to determine whether an AI has reached the stage of AGI include the following:

▪ The Turing test (Alan Turing): a human being converses with two
entities he does not see, one being another human and the other
the AI. The goal for the test subject is to determine which of the two
is the AI – if he fails a significant proportion of the time, then the AI
passes the test. While Turing does not claim this equates to
intelligence, it certainly disqualifies the AI’s pretention to it in case
of failure.
Figure 13: Visual representation of the Turing test

▪ The Coffee Test (Stephen Wozniak): the AI is expected to enter a

typical home and figure out how to make coffee, including finding the coffee machine, the mug, the
coffee, adding water, brewing the coffee…

84
Ezratty (2018)
85
ibid
50
▪ The Robot College Student Test (Ben Goertzel): an AI must enroll in a university and successfully take
and pass classes, obtaining its degree just like a human being would. A variant is Nils Nilsson’s
employment test based on the same principles – just applied for a professional activity.

One might observe that although these experiments certainly put to test certain cognitive skills
mentioned above, they say nothing of consciousness – which we have singled out as the other requirement
for AI to create art, and which we were hoping to include in the notion of AGI. It turns out that whether
AGI should necessarily be conscious is an internal debate in this research field – although most scientists
argue it is a vital component.86 This might explain why the most popular AGI tests are not – as of now –
calibrated to test consciousness.

5.1.3 Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)

ASI refers to a level of intelligence vastly superior to that of a human being every possible aspect,
tending towards infinity given the exponential returns suggested by Moore’s law. It is nothing but a logical
extension of the previous step, with AGI’s computing power and memory skyrocketing meanwhile sensors
could be deployed throughout the entire world, monitoring the environment as well as people’s activities,
movements and states of mind. At this stage, we are getting dangerously close to science-fiction, as this is
a step so far removed from the actual progress of AI that it is based on quasi-pure speculation.

5.2 WHEN WILL AGI BE ACHIEVED?

Predictions in the field of AI have a historical tendency to be completely off the mark: we have
already mentioned in the first chapters the wild statements of Minsky and Newell regarding AGI being
achieved by the 80s, which obviously turned out ludicrous.

Our era’s prophet seems to be popular inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil: in his 2005 book “The
Singularity is Near”87, he argues in favor of a timeline between 2015 and 2045 for the emergence of AGI
based on the law of accelerating returns – he even holds a $20,000 bet with entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor
regarding whether or not the Turing test will be passed within 2029:88

86
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (2002), Levels of Organization in General Intelligence, https://intelligence.org/files/LOGI.pdf
87
Ray Kurzweil (2005), The Singularity is Near
88
http://longbets.org/1/
51
 Kurzweil’s optimistic predictions were slightly nuanced by a 2017 survey among 352 AI experts and
conference publishers who estimated that there was a 50% chance that AGI would occur within 2060.89

On the other side of the spectrum, detractors include Tim Dettmers who attempts to laminate
Kurzweil’s blind trust in exponential returns and goes as far as to claim that no machine will surpass the
human brain in the current century90.

Rather than discuss speculations, let us take a look at the state of the research in AGI currently. In
2017, a survey counted 45 R&D projects focusing on AGI, with the 3 largest being DeepMind, the Human
Brain Project and OpenAI91:

▪ DeepMind: acquired by Google in 2014, DeepMind made the headlines when its AlphaGo program
beat the world Go champion in 2016, a feat which was soon followed by the release of AlphaZero,
a more general algorithm based on reinforcement learning capable of learning games at a world-
champion level in a few days. Last year, DeepMind gave us a glimpse of the AGI it was working on
by communicating the progress of Impala, “a single algorithm that can learn 30 different
challenging tasks requiring various aspects of learning, memory, and navigation”92 – this was made
possible by new techniques of transfer learning based on improved actor-critic algorithms whose
functioning remind us of GAN. Other paths DeepMind is exploring include neuro-symbolic
learning, a fusion of deep learning and knowledge representation. 93 An interesting – and

89
Grace (2018), When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf
90
Dettmers (2015), The Brain vs Deep Learning Part I: Computational Complexity — Or Why the Singularity Is
Nowhere Near
91
Baum, Seth (2017), A Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy, Global
Catastrophic Risk Institute Working Paper 17-1.
92
Krumins (2018), Artificial General Intelligence Is Here, and Impala Is Its Name,
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/275768-artificial-general-intelligence-is-here-and-impala-is-its-name
93
D’Avila Garcez (2017), Neurosymbolic Computation Thinking beyond Deep Learning
52
 unsettling – fact is that DeepMind’s ethics board has recently legally obtained the right to entirely
control AGI should they create it, “no matter how valuable or dangerous it becomes.”94

▪ Human Brain Project: major flagship project of the European Union launched in 2005, the Human
Brain Project aims at reproducing a human brain thanks to nanotechnology and quantum
computing. However, not only is the enterprise otherworldly ambitious, but the method itself has
been criticized as physically copying the human brain is widely considered not to be an optimal
solution to reach AGI.95

▪ OpenAI: co-founded by Elon Musk, OpenAI aims at promoting and developing AI in a way that
benefits humanity as a whole – at least on paper. Indeed, it has recently notoriously refused to
release its advanced language-processing algorithm GPT-2, deeming it too dangerous for society96,
which appears slightly contradictory as regards their mission. A few days ago, OpenAI decided to
split into the two entities Open AI Nonprofit and Open AI LP, the latter of which seems no different
from any other intensive AGI Lab.

It remains unclear whether any of these efforts will result in conscious AGI, as merely attaining
cognitive AGI is hard enough as it is. For this, we would have to investigate the state of the research in the
field of Artificial Consciousness (AC). A quick overview reveals the incredible complexity of the matter,
both theoretically – it is not known exactly neither what consciousness is nor how it works, and how it
relates to neighboring concepts such as awareness, sentience and sapience – and technically – it is unclear
to what extent consciousness is linked to the same components found in cognition, and how to even
recognize it correctly as it is an eminently subjective experience.

All in all, it is safe to say that conscious AGI has a good probability of not happening before 2060.

94
Shead (2019), DeepMind's Mysterious Ethics Board Will Reportedly 'Control' AGI If It's Ever Created,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/14/deepminds-mysterious-ethics-board-will-reportedly-
control-agi-if-its-ever-created/#7d32b45752a9
95
Ezratty (2018)
96
Quach (2019), Nonprofit OpenAI looks at the bill to craft a Holy Grail AGI, gulps, spawns commercial arm to bag
investors' mega-bucks, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/13/openai_nonprofit_status/
53
5.3 WHAT WILL AGI MEAN TO ART?
Let us consider what would happen in the event of conscious AGI being achieved. Because this is too
vast of a subject to be covered briefly, and for the sake of circling back to our initial question, we will focus
here on AGI’s hypothetical impact on the domain of art.

Two sub-questions seem worthy of exploration:

▪ What will AI art mean? The first occurrence of human art can be traced back to drawings on the walls
of caves. Although their meaning is lost in time, it probably revolved around a desire from the
Paleolithic man to represent the world he lived in and to understand and communicate how he related
to it. Therefore, as Jennifer Sukis beautifully puts it97: “when the first “AI caveman uses a burnt stick
to make art”, why will it do it? What will it be trying to understand about itself? Communicate about
its culture? Express about its…emotions?” We have no way of conceptualizing or imagining what AI
art could look like without resorting to human-centric references – but one thing seems sure, it will
blow our minds.

▪ What impact will it have on human beings? The advent of AI art will certainly shake the field to its
core. Historically, technical progress has often been viewed as a threat to human contribution – for
instance, French painter Paul Delaroche famously exclaimed “From now on, painting is dead!” upon
seeing the first successful daguerreotype. He was evidently proven wrong afterwards as painters,
rather than let themselves be replaced by photography, reacted by exploring new means of expression
beyond simple imitation of reality, eventually leading to a frenetically creative period and to the
foundation of several modern art movements we know today. This constructive competition will
probably be one aspect of our relationship with AI art – the other one is dialogue. Indeed, it is very
unlikely that we will be able to reproduce AI exactly similar to us; what this means is that both human
beings and AI will have their strengths and weaknesses, hence the added value of collaborating to
achieve more than the added product of our individual efforts. Going further into speculation,
progress in nanotechnology could also open the door to a deeper kind of dialogue through a physical
union between AI and human brains: this is notably explored by Elon Musk’s Neuralink initiative aiming
at developing implantable brain-computer interfaces – in which case the very idea of a distinction
between human and AI art would probably lose any meaning.

97
Sukis (2018)
54
6 CONCLUSION
While AI does not create art just yet, there is a good chance it will within the span of our century.
What happens next will be somewhere between dialogue and fusion, although the complexity of the
matters involved – both on a theoretical and technical level – as well as the length of the prediction render
it hard to tell.

It seems fundamental to note that in order for AI to create art, Artificial General Intelligence will
have to be achieved. What this means is that conscious, cognizant machines will be a part of our reality
– this constitutes so much of a revolution in itself that art creation will most likely not be the chief of
our concerns.

55
7 BIBLIOGRAPHY

7.1 REPORTS, BOOKS AND RESEARCH PAPERS

- Baum, Seth (2017), A Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy,
Global Catastrophic Risk Institute Working Paper 17-1

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Beatles, https://dadabots.com/nips2017/generating-black-metal-and-math-rock.pdf

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http://www.thepaintingfool.com/papers/colton_aaai08symp.pdf

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ISBN 0-465-02997-3

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- Dumoulin, Shlens, Kudlur (2016), A Learned Representation for Artistic Style,

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07629

- Elgammal (2017), CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating “Art” by Learning About Styles
and Deviating from Style Norms, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.07068.pdf

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- Gatys, Ecker, Bethge (2015), A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style,

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576.pdf

- Grace (2018), When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.01010.pdf

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 - Martindale (1993), The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change

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7.2 PRESS ARTICLES

- Azeem (2017), If We Want To Get To Real Time AI, We’ve Got To Build Another iPhone Industry.
Five Times Over, https://medium.com/s/ai-and-the-future-of-computing/when-moores-law-
met-ai-f572585da1b7

- Brogan (2016), An A.I. Competed for a Literary Prize, but Humans Still Did the Real Work,
https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/a-i-written-novel-competes-for-japanese-literary-award-
but-humans-are-doing-the-work.html

- Chun (2017), It’s Getting Hard to Tell If a Painting Was Made by a Computer or a Human,
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-hard-painting-made-computer-human

- Collet (2017), Machine Learning for grandmas, https://www.saagie.com/blog/machine-learning-

for-grandmas/

57
- D’Avila Garcez (2017), Neurosymbolic Computation Thinking beyond Deep Learning,
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~aag/talks/Imperial2017.pdf

- Deahl (2018), How AI-generated music is changing the way hits are made,
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17777008/artificial-intelligence-taryn-southern-amper-
music

- Desai (2017), Neural Artistic Style Transfer: A Comprehensive Look, https://medium.com/artists-

and-machine-intelligence/neural-artistic-style-transfer-a-comprehensive-look-f54d8649c199

- Dumoulin, Shlens, Kudlur (2016), Supercharging Style Transfer,

https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/10/supercharging-style-transfer.html

- Elgammal (2017), Generating “art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms,
https://medium.com/@ahmed_elgammal/generating-art-by-learning-about-styles-and-
deviating-from-style-norms-8037a13ae027

- Elgammal (2018), What the Art World Is Failing to Grasp about Christie’s AI Portrait Coup,
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-art-failing-grasp-christies-ai-portrait-coup

- Hill (2017), A Neural Network Wrote the Next 'Game of Thrones' Book Because George R.R.
Martin Hasn't, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evvq3n/game-of-thrones-winds-of-
winter-neural-network

- Jordan (2017), Inside the Lab That's Producing the First AI-Generated Pop Album,
https://www.seeker.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/inside-flow-machines-the-lab-thats-
composing-the-first-ai-generated-pop-album

- Krumins (2018), Artificial General Intelligence Is Here, and Impala Is Its Name,
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/275768-artificial-general-intelligence-is-here-and-
impala-is-its-name

- Marr (2017), Grammy-Nominee Alex Da Kid Creates Hit Record Using Machine Learning,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/30/grammy-nominee-alex-da-kid-creates-
hit-record-using-machine-learning/#201a21432cf9

- Quach (2019), Nonprofit OpenAI looks at the bill to craft a Holy Grail AGI, gulps, spawns
commercial arm to bag investors' mega-bucks,
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/13/openai_nonprofit_status/

- Rev Dan Catt (2017), Markov Chaining Trump, https://chatbotslife.com/markov-chaining-trump-

3e0a8acca80a

- Sample (2018), World's 'oldest figurative painting' discovered in Borneo cave,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/07/worlds-oldest-figurative-painting-
discovered-in-borneo-cave

58
 - Schaub (2016), Is the future award-winning novelist a writing robot?,
https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-novel-computer-writing-japan-20160322-
story.html

- Shead (2019), DeepMind's Mysterious Ethics Board Will Reportedly 'Control' AGI If It's Ever
Created, https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/14/deepminds-mysterious-ethics-
board-will-reportedly-control-agi-if-its-ever-created/#7d32b45752a9

- Simonite (2017), A “neurographer“ puts the art in artificial intelligence,

https://www.wired.com/story/neurographer-puts-the-art-in-artificial-intelligence/

- Sukis (2018), The Relationship between Art and AI, https://medium.com/design-ibm/the-role-of-

art-in-ai-31033ad7c54e

- Thoutt (2017), Me, My Neural Network, and Game of Thrones,

https://blog.udacity.com/2017/08/neural-network-game-of-thrones.html

- Urban (2015), The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence,

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

- Vincent (2018), How three French students used borrowed code to put the first AI portrait in
Christie’s, https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-
belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans

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- https://www.slideshare.net/SomoGlobal/somo-ai-breakfast-briefing

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