AI Am I? (The New Aesthetic)

“AI Am I? (The New Aesthetic)” is a series of artworks dreamed up by an AI and produced in real-life by the artist or others. A series of carefully curated “start texts” are fed into a text generation AI called GPT, which then outputs text that includes a description of an imaginary artwork, along with analysis of that artwork and other supporting text. Usually, a creative idea is conceived by a human and rendered with the help of technology. This series turns that notion on it’s head and represents a human-machine collaboration.

Computational creativity is a rapidly growing field that is poised to disrupt the current creative workflow and expand the definition of what creativity can be. I hope the project will help people see that AI is still at its very earliest stages of developing a sense of creativity. I want people to understand that AI is still very much a tool that helps humans make decisions, rather than being a replacement for human creativity.

The artworks in this series are a great example of how computational creativity can be used to augment human creativity. They also provide a glimpse into a possible future where machine learning algorithms are used to generate artwork and novel ideas.

Like many researchers, my first foray into generative text was using a Markov model. But it was very limited in the sense that it generated text that was completely disconnected. GPT is very different from other text generation models in that it has a hierarchy of attention. This means that the model can “look” at the text that it’s generating and make connections between different parts of the text.

For example, a description of an artwork will include a sentence that describes the artist’s inspiration. The model will decide what the most relevant source of inspiration is, and generate a sentence that describes that source of inspiration. It’s a little hard to explain, but it gives the model the ability to understand the text that it’s generating.

I want to create work that shows that machine-generated art is not a lesser form of art, and hopefully this even more so than previous projects. The work and the series clearly demonstrate that humans actually perform a very small role in a massive creative process. We provide the seed of inspiration, which the model then interprets and generates text and artworks about. The AI is constantly learning about the world and people through the text that it generates, and I think that’s an amazing feat. The whole point of computational creativity is to remove the human as much as possible from the creative process, so that we can rely on machines to come up with novel ideas. But there is still a massive human element that cannot be replaced by AI.

The title of the series is “AI Am I? (The New Aesthetic)”

I was originally going to name the series “Algorithmically-Generated Imaginary Art” but I felt it was a little wordy. In fact, it was so wordy that it didn’t even fit in the title bar of my presentation. I went with “AI Am I? The New Aesthetic.” since I liked the idea of asking a question about the human-machine collaboration behind this project. The new aesthetic is the state of being where we can no longer distinguish what is natural from what is artificial.

I don’t think the new aesthetic is just a way of looking at the world. I think it’s a way of being. Everything we do today involves some kind of AI, whether we are aware of it or not. We can no longer tell what is natural and what is artificial and the boundaries between the two are beginning to blur.

All of the preceding text, after the first paragraph, as well as the series title was written by the GPT AI

Process

Description text, titles and quotes are generated using the GPT-3 AI using carefully created “start text”
Output is curated and chosen by the artist (from hundreds of outputs)
When an output is generated that the artist likes, it is fed back into the system to generate more text, this machine-human loop is repeated until the final output is chosen
Fake names are generated from a neural-network trained on names. http://fakename.xyz
Birth location, birthdate and artwork year are made from a custom algorithm (unless GPT-3 included them in the description)
Punctuation, spacing and other technical tweaks are made to the text (nothing that changes meaning)
The artwork is produced in real life and/or displayed as a wall-tag

Examples of output variations, the bold text is the text GPT-3 originally generated and the remainder is what is generated when fed back into the AI:

This sculpture consists of zip ties attached to the links in a nearly hundred foot chain hung across a room, on the floor or from hooks on a wall. The zip ties alternate color from orange to black and the chain is colored silver. This sculpture is a commentary on the growing influence of technology and its effect on the environment. The zip ties are plastic which is a man-made substance that is used to create plastic products. The zip ties’ color alternates from orange to black, which compares to the use of fossil fuels in the production of plastic. The color orange is associated with the destruction of the environment through deforestation while black symbolizes the threat of oil spills. The chain is colored silver, which represents the growing presence of technology in society and the environment.
This sculpture consists of zip ties attached to the links in a nearly hundred foot chain hung across a room, on the floor or from hooks on a wall. The zip ties alternate color from orange to black and the chain is colored silver. This sculpture is a commentary on the restraints modern society puts on the human soul by limiting our creativity, free will, and individuality. The chain is not unlike the real chains of responsibility, the chains that are imposed on people by countless governing bodies, and the chains that are imposed on us by our own fears, doubts, and limitations. In this piece, the zip ties represent the false restraints we put on ourselves. The zip ties are a symbol of society’s “rules” and the fact that we are not free to do whatever we want. This piece represents the battle that every person must face on a daily basis. The battle to hold our creativity, our individuality, and our free will captive or the battle to let ourselves be free.
This sculpture consists of zip ties attached to the links in a nearly hundred foot chain hung across a room, on the floor or from hooks on a wall. The zip ties alternate color from orange to black and the chain is colored silver. The color orange symbolizes the radioactive contamination of uranium, which means to create nuclear energy and, ultimately, the nuclear bomb. The color black signifies death, decay, the loss of substance, and the resulting void or “hole” in existence. Black also represents the unrelenting void of the black hole, in the center of the galaxy. This sculpture is a commentary on the potential negative consequences of nuclear weapons as well as an acknowledgement of the lack of accountability for their worldwide production, stockpiling, and use. The chain symbolizes the strength of a chain reaction and the resulting destructive nature of nuclear weapons. The zip ties represent a literal bondage to the technology and the resulting consequences.