#creativness

In a short article on Quartz http://qz.com/425662/picasso-genius Marc Bain, fashion commentator and declared expert on all things “design”, presents the experimental findings of Ahmed Elgammal and Babak Saleh, scientists at The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. The news item caught my attention because the Rutgers scientists efforts are another small piece of the puzzle in the declared vision of Raymond Kurzweil and other influential posthumanists to create technology based posthuman creatures that will far surpass mere mortals in power and intelligence through the confluence of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering; marking the point in human history which signifies of course the here discussed “Singularity”!

As an introduction Bain states:” Art is [generally] seen as unquantifiable. Great paintings are creative forces that transcend their brush strokes, colors, and compositions. They can’t be reduced to mere data, analyzed, and ranked by their creativity”. In this context it might be useful to remind our selves that art is not limited to the medium of painting, sculpture or drawing – art has always been a true multimedia field encompassing as diverse media as photography, film, digital platforms, music, dance, and any other imaginable form of performances. But not enough – art is intrinsically tied to culture (in all its manifestations). Looking at art in this context, cooking a meal may be as much a work of art as Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Nor is art to be classified (when looked at it for its own sake and not as an investment object) solely by the “amount” of creativity that might have been necessary for its creation – much of creating art is based on simple and plain skills – but as the term says, skills augmented to an art-form in a specific cultural context!

Can artificial intelligence eventually outperform artists by creating “more” creative art – or worse - be used to determine the “quality” of art? Yes, most likely (however we define creativeness) but this fact is of no real importance!