At the PAIR Symposium, Golan Levin of CMU is talking about ML and art.

The use of computers for serendipitous creativity has been a theme of computer science since its beginning, Golan says. The job of AI should be serendipity and creativity. He gives examples of his projects.

Put your hand up to a scanner and it shows you hand with an extra finger. Or with extra hands at the end of your fingers.

Augmented Hand Series (v.2), Live Screen Recordings from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

[He talks very very quickly. I’ll have to let the project videos talk for themselves. Sorry.]

Terrapattern provides orbital info about us. It’s an open source neural network tool which offers similar-image search for satellite imagery. It’s especially good at finding “soft” structures often not noted on maps. E.g., click on a tennis court and it will find you all of them in the area. Click on crossroads, same thing.

Terrapattern (Overview & Demo) from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

This is, he says, an absurdist tool of serendipity. But it also democratizes satellite intelligence. His favorite example: finding all the rusty boats floating in NYC harbor.

Next he talks about our obsession with “masterpieces.” Will a computer ever be able to create masterpiece, he keeps getting asked. But artworks are not in-themselves. They exist in relationship to their audience. (He recommends When the Machine Made Art by Grant D. Taylor.)

Optical illusions get us to see things that aren’t there. “Print on paper beats brain.” We see faces in faucets and life in tree trunks. “This is us deep dreaming.” The people who understand this best are animators. See The illusion of Life, a Disney book about how to make things seem alive.

The observer is not separate from the object observed. Artificial intelligence occurs in the mind as well as in the machine.

He announces a digression: “Some of the best AI-enabled art is being made by engineers,” as computer art was made by early computer engineers.

He points to the color names ML-generated by Janelle Shane. And Gabriel Goh’s synthetic porn. It uses Yahoo’s porn detector and basically runs it in reverse starting with white noise. “This is conceptual art of the highest order.”

“I’m frankly worried, y’all,” he says. People use awful things using imaging technology. E.g., face tracking can be abused by governments and others. These apps are developed to make decisions. And those are the thoughtless explicit abuses, not to mention implicit biases like HP’s face scanning software that doesn’t recognize black faces. He references Zeynep Tufecki’s warnings.

A partial, tiny, and cost-effective solution: integrate artists into your research community. [He lists sensible reasons too fast for me to type.]

Categories: ai, liveblog dw