Machines have learned how to be creative. What does that mean for art?

Partrick Tresset’s Painting Robot, Paul, sketching the author, 2017. (Photograph by the author, 2017.)

Go grandmaster Lee Sedol recently announced he was retiring from the game because “there is an entity that can never be defeated”: AI. As readers likely remember, an artificial intelligence known as AlphaGo defeated Lee in 2016. The grandmaster later commented that AlphaGo had displayed “human intuition.”

AI is in the news regularly these days, but one area is still hugely underreported: its potential to be creative. Machines such as AlphaGo are unquestionably displaying clear glimmerings of creativity. There are AIs that can improvise music, jam with jazz musicians, create surreal art and write bizarre screenplays, novels and poetry. But what comes next? Will we develop machines that are yet more creative? […]

Read full article: Machines have learned how to be creative. What does that mean for art?, published in Salon on February 1, 2020

Photo credit: Partrick Tresset’s Painting Robot, Paul, sketching Arthur I. Miller, 2017. (Photograph by the author, 2017.)