[AI by our side] Does artificial intelligence dream of artists (1)

2024-07-04

Recently, I feel the limits of human abilities while looking at artificial intelligence that surpasses the position of humans in various fields. Go, driving, translation... and even creation, which I now believed was a domain unique to humans. Watching the performance of artificial intelligence like this makes me feel a complicated feeling mixed with hope and despair as a human being.

And there are artificial intelligences that have already surpassed the position of artists. I write poetry and novels, draw pictures, and compose music. At this point, ask yourself a question. How far are the limits of artificial intelligence? Can artificial intelligence be recognized as an artist? So should humans get their hands off art now?

I would like to look at the current state of artificial intelligence technology in the field of art and think about the above questions together. First, let's take a look at artificial intelligences that have written literary works that seem close to the “Twig Farm Language Processing Engine LETR,” which focuses on text languages.

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Novels and poems written by artificial intelligence

If artificial intelligence writes news articles such as weather, sports match results, and incidents, I can understand it to some extent. Due to the nature of media articles where promptness, objectivity, and reliability are important, I think they are a better fit for artificial intelligence.

However, it happened that a novel written by artificial intelligence in 2016 passed the first round of a literary competition. At a science fiction literature contest hosted by Japan's Nihon Keiza Shimbun, they deceived the judges who were experts and proudly competed with novels written by humans to pass the screening.

It is a first-person short story titled “The Day a Computer Writes Novels*,” with artificial intelligence himself as the main character. Furthermore, when I actually read it, it feels a bit eerie, because the novel ends with the following verse: “... The day the computer wrote the novel. The computer prioritized its own pursuit of fun and stopped serving humans.**”

Then, in 2017, artificial intelligence published a collection of letters. A collection of poems written by Microsoft's artificial intelligence “Xiao Ice (Xiao Bing)” has been published in China. Xiao Yi studied thousands of works by contemporary poets on her own, and wrote emotional expressions such as “Rain crosses the sea breeze and falls sparsely” and “When the sun leaves to the west, I am abandoned.” Furthermore, it <햇살은 유리창을 잃고> is said that the title of the collection of poems was created by artificial intelligence. ***

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<햇살은 유리창을 뚫고>A collection of poems, Image source

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Scenario written by artificial intelligence

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<선스프링>A film based on a scenario written by AI Benjamin, Image source

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<선스프링 (Sunspring) *****>A short film called “Sci-Fi Londonfilm Festival (Sci-Fi Londonfilm Festival) ****” held in the UK in 2016 attracted attention. That's because it was a movie with an artificial intelligence screenplay rather than a human being. This new screenwriter named “Benjamin” learned hundreds of sci-fi movies like “Star Wars” through machine learning and wrote the screenplay for this film himself.

However, it was not well received due to scenes and lines that were somewhat irrelevant. However, thanks to this trial and error, Benjamin showed further development through his second work. Due to the screenwriters' strike, I made a short film called <IT's no game> with a more robust scenario where artificial intelligence takes over as a screenwriter. This is an impressive development considering that it is difficult even for a human artist to write a good work from the beginning.

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Co-creation between humans and artificial intelligence?

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Artificial intelligence horror novel writer Shelly, Image source

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<프랑켄슈타인>The artificial intelligence 'Shelly' named after Mary Shelley******, famous as the writer of, wrote a horror novel. MIT developers collected ghost stories from the Internet and trained Shelley, and Shelly began writing ghost stories on Twitter*******.

However, what is different from before is that Shelly interacted with Twitter users and did a kind of co-creation. When Shelly or a Twitter user started a story by writing a sentence or two, humans and artificial intelligence alternately continued the story. In other words, Shelly wasn't 100% creative, but it was a step forward in another sense because she co-created with people.

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We looked at artificial intelligences that have written poetry, novels, and screenplays so far. Next, we'll continue to learn more about artificial intelligence activities in other creative fields such as art and music.

We will also consider the role of humans in the creative field and how to coexist with artificial intelligence in the coming era of artificial intelligence.

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