A
s I walked to my art history class,
a poster hanging in the Diag read,
“What will you do when machines do
everything?” Carrying in my mind all of the
impressionist paintings I had to memorize
for this exam, I thought surely the visual
arts could never be done by a computer. The
level of emotion and resolve that goes into a
work of art seems incompatible with the idea
of computing. Computers are best at doing
rote tasks over and over again, freeing up
people to leverage the creative ingenuity of
the human mind. I thought there would be no
way for a computer to develop its own works
of art, since it required a level of thought and
deliberation unknown to an everyday laptop
computer.
Or so I thought. According to an article
I read in The Atlantic recently, artificial
intelligence is now capable of developing its
own works of art after being fed thousands
of images. These machines are able to
detect patterns in the works and make a
similar piece, albeit a blurry mass of color
attempting
to
resemble
a
Renaissance
portrait. That emotion and intelligence I
believed exclusive to humans may no longer
be ours exclusively, as computers are now
capable of taking in information in a way that
resembles human thinking. This
may allow them to eventually
develop works on their own
and possibly become the
new arbiters of art taste. If
art, the beacon of creativity,
could still fall prey to the
unrelenting
monster
of
computation, I feared
nothing would be safe
in its path.
But the knowledge
I
gained
from
taking
that
art
class on French
modernism
in
the 19th century
stopped
me
from
immediately
deploring
this
new
development. My professor
reminded us all of the time
that many of the artworks
we
studied
took
their
inspiration from paintings
that came before them. In
fact, some painters, like
Manet, literally copied
elements
from
old
paintings and pasted
them into his own,
something a computer could easily do.
For example, Manet, an admirer of the
Spanish masters such as Velázquez and Goya,
literally moved the crowd from one of Goya’s
bullfighting scenes to his own Execution
of Maximilien. But, instead of the crowd
peering over the ring, they were peering over
a wall while they watched the soldiers shoot
the prisoners. The presence of the faceless
soldiers standing in lockstep, away from the
viewer, is essentially taken from Goya’s The
Third of May 1808.
Many of the paintings we studied in
class either copied or transposed elements
from older paintings and made them into
something of their own, but with a new
style reflecting their own period. Put this
way, it does not sound at all far-fetched that
a computer could eventually do the same,
given it can already recognize patterns and
understand which paintings belong to which
period of art.
Creating a new style from old elements,
however, gives me pause as to how successful
artificial intelligence can be in replicating
new art. While it might be able to see trends
in data, I don’t think AI will be able to predict
the next trend in art. For example, I don’t
see the technology eventually gaining
enough human foresight to
make a leap equivalent
to the shift from realism
to impressionism in the
19th century. Nor will
I think a computer
will
be
able
to
know
which
elements it should take from another painting
in devising its own creation.
Manet, in painting his work Olympia, put his
model on the same bed with the same shade
of red as Titian’s Venus of Urbino, right down
to the same untucked sheet in the lower left-
hand corner. How would a computer know
that it wants to put its art on the same plane
as the renowned Renaissance painters and
so remind the viewer of a painting from that
period? If it somehow was sensitive to the
opinions of its human critics, how would it
know which elements to include and in what
form so as to make that connection in the
mind of the viewer? Given these difficulties,
I don’t believe computers could make the
same works of art that measure up to the
standards of humans. So, rest assured, I don’t
think machines are coming for the painters
anytime soon.
But what if there is a third path — neither
a
complete
replacement
of
artists
by
computers, or a Luddite-like destruction of
technology that is capable of making art?
What if art could instead be used to enhance
the creative process, making the idea of
looking
to
the past for inspiration
a lot easier with the
power of a computer?
A few days ago, my
sister sent me a link for an
art exhibition she was seeing
titled “Machine Hallucination”,
which uses machine learning to
process thousands of images of
New York City architecture and
thereby make connections between
different structures made in different
time periods. Instead of destroying art,
computers could instead enhance how we
view art and allow us to make insights we
could not make without it.
For me, someone who is looking to embrace
both a creative side of writing and a technical
field, this sounds like the perfect
harmony. I hope, like many other
tasks throughout human history,
machines make the process of
creating new content — such
as these articles — easier and,
possibly, even better.
3B
Wednesday, November 6, 2019 // The Statement 3B
BY ALEXANDER COTIGNOLA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Can art thrive in a
computer-dominated world?
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BY HANNAH BRAUER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
PHOTO BY DANYEL THARAKAN
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE