I would like, without going into technical details, to touch a little on the question of whether neural networks can achieve anything significant in art, literature, and whether this is creativity. Technical information is easy to find, and there are well-known applications, for example. Here is just an attempt to understand the very essence of the phenomenon, everything that is written here is far from new, but I will only try to formalize some thoughts a little. I will use the term neural networks here in a general sense, as a synonym for AI, inseparably with machine learning and selection algorithms.
In my opinion, the issue of creativity of neural networks should be considered not only in line with computer science and art history, but also in philosophy and psychology. To begin with, it is necessary to define what creativity is, how something absolutely new is created; and in principle, all this rests on the problem of cognition, in that part - how new knowledge, discovery, this or that symbol, image appears. In art, after all, just as in pure science, novelty has true value.
Art and literature (probably also music) suggest that maybe not now they are equal, but the methods of cognition are the same as in science. All of them constantly influence each other and are closely intertwined. In some epochs, the knowledge of the world just happened through the means of art or literature, and earlier - in general, in line with the religious tradition. So, in Russia in the 19th century, powerful literature actually replaced philosophical anthropology and social philosophy for us, indirectly, through the artistic, reflecting on the problems of society and man. And as a structuring landmark that put on the agenda a rather topical issue of human existence, later developed by well-known philosophical trends, it is still highly valued. Or at the beginning of the 20th century, the artistic modernist and avant-garde movements that arose, which cannot be considered in isolation from their ideological content, and which foreshadowed the scrapping of tradition, the emergence of a new world and a new person. After all, we cannot admit that the fundamental value of art is only aesthetic. In this case, perhaps, we would still live only in the environment of some aesthetic system of the past, pupated in its self-completion. All the great creators, geniuses in art and literature just earned this βtitleβ not so much because of the aesthetic value of their works, but because of the discovery of new directions by them, doing what no one had done before them and did not even imagine that it is possible to do so.
Whether a work resulting from a previously unseen combination, some kind of shuffling of already existing, known parts, will be considered new - grids can handle this quite well - based on a predetermined limited number of data, for example, when styling images or generating new ones. Or it will be the ultimate breakthrough, a previously unknown quality that reveals something to which nothing previously observed can be compared - although, of course, any incredible, unparalleled breakthrough is nothing more than the result of well-prepared work that is simply carried out latently, not everything that is manifested and visible to the uninitiated and even to the creator himself - so far, in my opinion, only a person can act.
Roughly speaking, the first type of cognition and creativity can be compared with a very slow, gradual development as a result of evolution, and the second - with spasmodic development as a result of positive mutations. Neural networks, in their "creative" activities, in my opinion, now gravitate somewhere towards the first type. Or, rather, to a situation that is described as the absence of a qualitatively new development in the near future, in the conditions of a system that allegedly approached the limit of complexity at this stage, to the βend of historyβ, when new meanings are formed as a result of changes in combinations - or inserts in an unusual context - already existing samples. Just as new unusual patterns are created in a kaleidoscope, each time from the same set of colored glass. But, I think, not in vain, because, as it was mentioned, the structure of networks in general terms repeats the structure of the nervous system: neurons-knots, axons-connections. Perhaps this is like the beginnings of the first cells, only now, the process of evolution will be accelerated by human hands, that is, it will become its tool, thus overcoming the slowness of nature. Including on his own example, if we proceed from the ideas of transhumanism.
Asking myself if it would be interesting for me to look at the paintings created by the grid at this stage, I can answer that here it is probably necessary to distinguish between something applied like design and pure art. What is good for design and will free a person from the routine, secondary processes of developing wallpapers, prints and draperies, is not suitable for art, which, generally speaking, is not only always on the cutting edge, at the peak of relevance, but should express the personality in its search. The artist, in a broad sense, living through his experience and "absorbing" the spirit of the era, consciously or not, processes them into an artistic image. Thus, some ideas, messages can be read from his work, they can strongly influence feelings. The neural network also receives some set of data as input and transforms them, but so far this is too flat, one-dimensional processing and the βsurplusβ value of the information obtained at the output is not great, and the result can only entertain for a while. The same applies to experiments with neural networks in journalism, which make more progress where writing dry financial news is required, rather than creating software works with the author's point of view. In experiments with music, especially with electronic music, things may be somewhat better. In general, he noted such a thing that contemporary literature and painting, for about a century, has been deliberately producing such abstract and minimalist forms that they seem to be created to be easily processed by neural networks and passed off as human art. Maybe a premonition of the end of an era?
They say that the intellect is not equal to the whole personality. Although, with personality, the question is, of course, philosophical - after all, in the GAN network, for example, the generator creates new data from nothing, partially just guided by the discriminator's verdict under the influence of the weight of the decisions. You can, after all, ask the question this way: is the creator in his cognitive activity, so to speak, a generator and a discriminator in one person, somewhat pre-trained by the very information background that βis in the airβ of the era and implicitly vote for this or that choice internal weights, and he builds a new world, a new work out of the bricks (pixels) of being known in this way? In this case, are we not some kind of super-complex analogue of the grid, with colossal, but still limited input data. Maybe personality is such an advanced selection algorithm, with the presence of implicitly necessary functionality that indirectly affects the quality of pre-learning?
In any case, I will go to the first exhibition of works of art created by the so-called AI, when it acquires a personality with all its attributes, consciousness and self-awareness. Perhaps even the time will come when, like the character of the 14th series of the animated series "Love, death and robots", AI in search of meaning realizes that art should be inseparable from life and then the time will come to abandon the frightening, bottomless, never satisfied, complexity, where in fact simplification is a metaphor for death. So far, one can often observe in films that AI acquires self-awareness and, naturally, gets out of control as a result of some kind of software failure, which is probably thought by the scriptwriters as an analogue of some kind of accident that triggers new positive (and for some not so) transformations, as it was with positive mutations for the natural evolutionary path of development.
Source: habr.com