Impossible Jewellery ( gan and glic)
Like all tools, AI becomes fetishised by those pushing it as a great disruptor . If we can only collect enough data points or images, essentially cannibalise the totality of all art made up until now and feed those back into our model we can create 'new' artworks that do away with those pesky artists and create something akin to a factory which can churn out New novels, films, filmstars like the machines used by the ministry of truth in 1984 to feed the masses glib and sugary media that satisfies a craving but never gives insight . Because the approach that a lot of data scientists use is to try and make something like deep fakes - art which convinces you it might have been made by human hands , imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery especially in the case of things like style transfer where essentially we are playing the game of one tune to the sound of another https://genekogan.com/works/style-transfer/
If AI art seeks to imitate that which has gone before it will fail, if it relies on aping human aesthetics it will fail. What to me is most interesting about AI and machine learning, training is mistraining or mislearning or failure - the parade of freakish faces or buildings which lead us into a new aesthetic unbounded by old paradigms of beauty or balance. I am not interested in faces which do not exist , whatever does not exist or any other fakery which will subsequently be used as an agent of control or obfuscation or state sponsored hacking or social engineering or the inherent faultiness of image recognition for example
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You can see the person in the image, I can see the person in the image, the algorithm cannot, and that says something quite important about the technology (though I can see applications for deliberate obfuscation exploits and glitch art in this).
Some of the most unique and interesting work being done with AI is by the artists themselves, training and subverting the technology.
Artists such as vadim epstein ( find words and pictures here https://cdm.link/2019/08/ai-mirror-vadim-epstein/ )
Or applications such as gan breeder or art breeder https://artbreeder.com/
Or groups on facebook such as https://www.facebook.com/groups/pseudofigurativeart/
My argument as an artist is very simple; as in economics those who see advantage in using a technology to corner a market will seek to do so. This is not necessarily a good thing, especially if those doing the cornering are those who set the agenda already leading to a moribund aesthetic and the exclusion and impoverishment of large swathes of society - their agenda is not ours lets not get caught up in it.
