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Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - The Inspiration Behind Creative AIs

The idea of machines being creative may seem futuristic, but creative AIs are already here. What inspired researchers to try to replicate human creativity in machines? The dream began decades ago, but only recently has the available data and computing power made it achievable.

Early pioneers were inspired by human intelligence. Alan Turing, father of artificial intelligence, was fascinated by how the human mind works. He proposed the Turing test to assess if a machine could demonstrate intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human. Creative thinking has long been considered a pinnacle of human intelligence. Making art requires fluid imagination, symbolic reasoning, and predicting how viewers will interpret artwork. If AIs could create original, emotionally compelling art, it would represent a major milestone in AI capabilities.

Another source of inspiration was realizing the limitations of programs focused solely on optimization and logic. While these logical AIs can beat humans at games like chess and Go, they lack the fluid, unpredictable nature of creativity. Researchers wondered if integrating randomness and unstructured data could lead to more human-like ingenuity. Mimicking the messy, associative ways humans think might enable AIs to make mental leaps instead of just calculations.

Of course, scientists were also driven by the sheer difficulty of the challenge. Creativity remains mysterious even in people. Having AIs create art from scratch pushes the boundaries of what machines can do. It also raises philosophical questions about technology and humanity's unique abilities. For those excited by the limitless potential of AI, making art is another mountain to climb on the long road toward artificial general intelligence.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - Giving AIs an Artistic Eye

Giving AIs the ability to see the world like an artist is key to generating creative visual content. While logical AI programs can identify objects in images, artistic seeing requires detecting styles, emotions, and abstract concepts. Teaching computers to perceive and interpret visual information has been a persistent challenge.

Early image recognition AIs could classify pictures into broad categories like “cat” or “car” but lacked human-like understanding. They might recognize a furry animal as a cat, but not understand that it is sleeping, cute, or resembling a cartoon. Recent advances allow modern convolutional neural networks to label images with much more detail.

However, identifying objectives elements is only part of artistic vision. Making art means going beyond the concrete details and eliciting subjective emotions. Computational creativity researchers must find ways to translate subjective human concepts into machine-readable data.

Progress has been made by training AIs on large datasets of artwork annotated with human feedback. Machine learning algorithms can then infer qualities like “surreal” or “inspiring” by generalizing from examples. Data has included emotional keywords, artist biographies, and neural patterns from people viewing art. This leverage's people's subjective opinions to categorize and generate artwork stylistically.

An exciting milestone was the DeepDream program which used neural networks to “see” patterns and objects within natural images. The resulting psychedelic imagery demonstrated how AIs can hallucinate their own interpretations from data. However, DeepDream lacked control and intentionality in its kaleidoscopic distortions.

More recent systems like DeepArt can blend artwork in recognizable styles. This relies on training on vast collections of paintings grouped by artist or genre. The AI learns which visual features match impressionism versus cubism, then applies these patterns to photos. The results emulate human artistry within a defined style.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - Can AIs Be Truly Creative?

The question of whether artificial intelligence can be truly creative has fascinated researchers and the public alike. At its core, this question probes at the very meaning of creativity and humanity's place in the world. If machines can introspect, imagine, and originate works as innovative as people can, what remains uniquely human?

AI has achieved superhuman proficiency at specific, bounded tasks like playing chess and Go. But creativity is unbounded, flowing from intangible sources. Machines that mimic human styles miss the spontaneous essence of imagination. For instance, the paintings generated by DeepArt's neural style transfer look ripped from specific artists. But the avant garde erupts from rebelling against established styles. Can artificial creativity transcend existing genres?

Mimicking human creativity risks losing what makes us human. Some theorists argue creativity arises from our lived experiences as embodied, social, and mortal beings. The poet draws from personal memories; the designer empathizes with user needs. Machines lack life stories, aspirations, and empathy. Without such subjective experiences, AI cannot reflect human nature or motivations.

However, others note creativity also requires skills acquirable by machines - pattern recognition, knowledge integration, and learning from feedback. Machines need not replicate human processes, as long as their output fulfills creative goals. For example, variants of neural networks called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) pit two AIs against each other to generate new content. The generator creates content judged by the discriminator as real or fake. This adversarial dynamic pushes the generator to create increasingly original and imaginative work.

Early GAN art resembled abstract painting or psychedelic patterns. But Jukebox, an initiative by OpenAI, used GANs and extensive musical data to generate songs iteratively as audio waveforms. Unlike pastiche compositions from AIs, these songs sounded diverse, contemporary, and ended coherently. Human listeners could not reliably distinguish the AI tracks from human-made music. Jukebox's ability to originate compositions convinced some critics artificial creativity had arrived.

But Jukebox's songs also lacked deeper meaning. Lyrics were disjointed, failing to establish compelling themes. Creativity is not just novelty but resonating with an audience by evoking concepts that speak to the human experience. Machines able to stir people's hearts as well as their senses remain on the horizon.

Bridging this gap requires integrating human wisdom into the creative process, not just maximizing autonomous output. Interactive machine learning systems allow people to guide AI creativity through feedback and example. Hybrid human-AI collaboration leverages both parties' strengths - artificial imagination and human intent. With the right symbiotic relationship, AI could expand human expression beyond our limited perspectives.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - The Challenges of Unstructured Data

A key challenge in training creative AIs is dealing with unstructured data. Structured data has consistent formatting and relationships, like numbers in a spreadsheet. This tidy data is easy for machines to analyze using logical rules. In contrast, unstructured data has no predefined model. Examples include raw text, images, audio, and video. Humans excel at finding patterns in messy unstructured data through intuition. But cluing AIs into the significance behind pixels, words, or notes remains an obstacle.

Unstructured data lacks the unambiguous labels that power most AI training. With images, limited tags like “cat” or “happy” fail to capture artistic essence. Natural language is even more enigmatic, full of idioms, metaphors, and double meanings. The same words can convey entirely different sentiments depending on context. Historical attempts to extract meaning from text using straightforward rules proved woefully inadequate.

Statistical machine learning brought breakthroughs by inferring patterns from mass data instead of relying on hard-coded rules. Given sufficient examples, algorithms can interpolate how linguistic patterns relate to semantic meaning or artistic qualities. However, these models struggle to extrapolate beyond their training distribution. Novel combinations of words, colors, or notes tend to get classified as meaningless noise. This disadvantages AIs in creative domains which prize novelty, rule-breaking, and imaginative leaps into unexplored territory.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - Finding the Right Training Datasets

Gathering appropriate training data is crucial yet challenging when developing creative AIs. Without exposing algorithms to proper examples, they will not acquire the skills needed to generate quality novel content. Researchers face the twin difficulties of finding sufficiently large datasets while also assuring the data represents human creativity well.

Image recognition algorithms demand vast training sets to learn how objects appear in all possible lighting conditions, angles, backgrounds, etc. Photographs of real-world scenes provide this variability. For creative AIs though, simply having lots of artwork is not enough. The selected works must demonstrate diverse styles, subject matter, composition techniques, use of color, and more. Dumping an algorithm with every painting ever made would fail if certain genres predominated. The AI needs balanced representation to flexibly generalize across the spectrum of artistic expression.

Music generation has benefited from the large MIDI collections available. These contain digital notation data for melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and structure. However, not all music makes good training material. Songs need to come from different eras, composers, and genres to avoid narrow stylistic scope. Relying solely on pop hits yields AIs that generate generic earworms lacking deeper artistry. Curating musical selection requires expertise - what composers exemplify Romanticism or minimalism? What tracks display jazz chord changes versus modal scales? Thoughtfully filtering data prevents skewed creative output.

Natural language processing faces even greater dataset challenges. Words alone cannot capture literary creativity - sequences only gain meaning in context. Small text snippets miss the logic, characters, themes, wit, and nuances built across writing. Entire books provide that richness but require processing algorithms to integrate plot, motifs, and high-level patterns. Research projects have used subsets of e-books, Wikipedia, or news articles for training. However, these generic corpora lack artistic flair. More customized content like movie scripts or poetry anthologies better reflects creative language use, albeit at smaller data scales.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - Balancing Logic and Intuition

Training creative AIs requires balancing logical algorithms with intuitive judgements. Logic alone fails to replicate human creativity flowing from subjective experiences. Yet total randomness also does not equate to human inspiration. The key lies in blending structure and creativity.

Logical systems like chess AIs maximize efficiency based on rules. Given x input, they calculate the optimal y output. But for art, there is no singular best choice - creativity thrives on breaking conventions. Wholly unconstrained systems that ignore logical objectives also fail. Without any selection pressures, generated content resembles nonsensical noise instead of purposeful art.

Ideally, creative AIs integrate some logic to orient output while leaving room for unpredictable intuition. This echoes how people operate. Our rational faculties focus expressions, while our instincts provide creative flourishes. We do not calculate poems mechanically.

An example is Google's PoemPortraits, which generates stylized text artwork resembling famous poets and artists. It balances skillful mimicry of syntactic and visual styles from its training corpus with novel word arrangements. The AI models poetic constraints like rhyme, rhythm, and shape to ensure coherence. But it goes beyond recombining existing lines by predicting new plausible word associations within those guardrails. The output adheres to logical poetic conventions yet still surprises.

Melomics takes a similar hybrid approach for music composition. The team programmed melodic and harmonic rules derived from music theory to prevent random notes. But they also used generative algorithms and neural networks to foster unforeseen directions within this musical framework. This balances the logic of phrasing, keys, and transitions with freely imagined motifs and progressions.

Dali Meets Data: The Art and Science of Training Creative AIs - Human-AI Collaboration - The Best of Both Worlds

Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human creativity, the most exciting possibility is combining human and machine capabilities in collaboration. This symbiotic approach draws on the complementary strengths of each to achieve artistic innovation that neither could alone. Human-AI partnership leverages innate human talents like imagination and empathy while benefiting from AI’s untiring processing speed and ability to analyze gigantic datasets.

Humans remain the source of intent and meaning. We establish creative goals, define problems requiring inventive solutions, and recognize resonance with an audience. Machines lack life experience and emotional wisdom to ground their output in lived truths. Without human guidance, AIs generate novel content randomly without purpose. People provide the intentionality to direct AI creativity toward meaningful expression.

Conversely, AIs expand human creativity by transcending our cognitive constraints. Humans are limited by slow serial cognition, forgetfulness, lack of encyclopedic knowledge, and tendency toward habitual patterns. We iterate creations gradually through trial-and-error. But massive neural networks can incorporate broad influences and generate endless permutations and combinations far faster. AIs also never “forget” anything in their training data.

This symbiosis combines inclusive human insight with expansive machine imagination. Rather than autonomous AI generators, the most successful systems enable collaborative co-creation between human and machine. Google’s Project Magenta built the Polyphonic Piano app where users can give the AI musical suggestions and react to its improvised responses, gradually shaping an original song together. The PaintsChainer system by Pixiv similarly allows artists to guide an AI “apprentice” by painting rough sketches the algorithm completes in various styles. These interactions leverage AI’s instant generation powered by human evaluative feedback.

Research by computer scientist Rafael Pérez y Pérez explored collaborative human-AI storytelling using symbolic reasoning to balance logical plot generation with user creativity. Short stories emerged through alternating human-written passages and AI plot twists. The contrasting contributions produced innovative narratives neither author could construct independently. Blending human creativity with AI led to more original, coherent stories than unaided human efforts.

Taking collaboration even further, researcher Ani Liu’s Algorave performances connect AI music generation to human DJs for improvised concerts. The human DJ inputs source samples while simultaneously shaping the machine’s stream-of-consciousness mixes through further inputs. The audience dances to the emerging hybrid music. Liu described Algorave as making the human-AI interplay tangible - "participants can feel the kinetic power of dancing with algorithms”. The art arises from dynamic conversation between the human and AI capabilities.