Even when AI makes beautiful, awe-inspiring new artworks, people are understandably reluctant to call it creative. Why? It's because real creativity is an expression of agency, write Dustin Stokes and Elliot Samuel Paul.
An up-and-coming visual artist is gaining international fame for making images in response to prompts from curious fans. When asked for “a calm still life in ethereal blue”, the artist replied with this:
source: @advadnoun on Twitter
Check out the artist’s rendering of “Studio Ghibli landscape”:
The artist is prolific, offering numerous options for any given prompt, including these, inflected through the style of a fellow illustrator, for “a painting of climate change killing humanity, by Greg Rutkowski”:
source: @RiversHaveWings on Twitter
“A painting of humanity surviving artificial intelligence, by Greg Rutkowski”:
(source: @RiversHaveWings on Twitter)
Commissioned for an illustrated story called “Tour of the Sacred Library,” the artist drummed up an elaborate series of scenes, including these:
source: Ryan Moulton
If you’re like most people, you recognize these images as having notable aesthetic properties: they are variously intriguing, cool, balanced, trippy, captivating, impressionistic, abstract, lovely, serene, evocative, and more. Furthermore, you probably take these works to be expressions of creativity, at first.
But while you may acknowledge the creativity of the human beings involved – the programmers and perhaps the users who crafted the prompts – you may be reluctant to say the program itself is creative. Why?
But here’s the twist: the “artist” behind these artworks is a computer program. It involves a neural network called CLIP and you can try it out yourself.
Does learning the artist’s identity change your assessment of its work? Presumably you still see its images as having various aesthetic properties: they are still arresting or soothing, lively or mellow, and so on. But while you may acknowledge the creativity of the human beings involved – the programmers and perhaps the users who crafted the prompts – you may be reluctant to say the program itself is creative. Why?
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