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A.I. Will Enhance — Not End — Human Art
Increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence suggests that machines could unlock the secrets of human creativity. But have we been here before?
In a tiny third-floor apartment in central London, the artist Anna Ridler was hunched over her desk. Next to the desk was a black PC tower whirring noisily and in front of her was a keyboard and a screen covered with a dense thicket of black-and-white code. As Ridler tapped in a few keystrokes, a window sprang open. In it were 16 images of tulips in jewel-like hues, arranged neatly in rows, like a page from a botanical textbook. Ridler inspected them skeptically. “Getting there,” she muttered.
It might not resemble the romantic image of an artist’s studio, but machine learning technology — and the computers that wield it — is becoming an important, even essential tool for many artists in the 21st century. When I met Ridler last month, she was at work revising a project for the forthcoming exhibition AI: More than Human at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. She had fed the machine with a series of digital photographs of tulips she took last year, then instructed an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm to analyze and attempt to replicate them. Ridler’s aim was to make an infinite series of digital flowers —…
