Artificial intelligence is being used both to advance creativity and also to advance humanity. The past sense of “fear and dread” seems to have been replaced by something much more powerful – optimism. The two thread lines that resonated with us most:
“Machines vs. humans” rhetoric has been replaced with a pragmatic middle ground: humans and machines are better together. Machines excel at analyzing reams of data, understanding patterns, and then making predictions. Humans excel at defining the problems, curating the data and shaping the algorithms to solve them, and applying emotional intelligence to refine the answers.
Bold creativity is needed to envisage how AI will create better experiences for more people, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Smart assistants attached to mailboxes, robots that can recognize and interpret sign language, and phone-based scanners that read out grocery store labels for blind people are a few of the current examples.
AI-Generated Creative Has a Poster Child. This year’s most newsworthy example is Portrait of Edmond Belamy (see below), an AI-generated painting that was so “real-life looking” that Christie’s Auction House sold it for $432,500. The algorithm that generated it was trained using a selected data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries. “If the artist is the one that creates the image, then that would be the machine. If the artist is the one that holds the vision and wants to share the message, then that would be us,” said one of the creators.
Source: YouTube
AI-Generated Creative is Driving Commercial Benefit. Amper Music uses AIs to compose custom scores that fit the exact style, length, and structure needed by a business. Using AI to get the exact right blend exemplifies AI’s potential for “business to business personalization at scale,” as well as what human-machine collaboration looks like at its best. While the composing is automated, humans are responsible for specifying the music’s goals, populating the AI training data (a library of millions of individual samples and thousands of purpose-built instruments), and refining the “tonality” and “interpretation” of the output.
The Ethical Imperative is Around the Corner. Betaworks is building a rich and diverse portfolio of tech companies working on Synthetic Media, where AI is being employed to create human audio and video in increasingly realistic ways - think Benjamin Button and Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War. While the promise for this technology is massive, so is the potential harm from fake news, slandering, and bullying. AIs do not have the emotional intelligence to make ethical choices. Human input will not only be critical, but a moral responsibility.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
We are in the very early days of gaining competency in technologies that will reshape creativity, and what’s possible for humanity. As we move from precision to prediction, entirely new skills will be required as creatives develop artistry in variable selection for predictive models, embrace their role as conductors, and leverage “evidence-based” vs. “gut-based” creativity.
Machine Learning: Living in the Age of AI | A WIRED Film, Wired
Synthetic Camp is Real, Betaworks
The Rise of AI Art and What it Means for Human Creativity, Singularity
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