A new website even lets you try your hand at collaborating on art with AI. Artifly gets to know the user’s preferences and creates artwork based on what they like. Not everyone thinks this process makes Artifly an artist, however. “Creativity is an innately human characteristic with the power to help us cope, connect, and be inspired,” Scott Prevost, software firm Adobe’s vice president of engineering, who focuses on AI technology, told Lifewire in an email interview. “However, I believe that AI done right can augment and enhance (not replace) human creativity.”
Make My Art
Artifly lets users scroll through a selection of artwork and click the designs they like. Then, the user clicks a button reading “Make My Art,” and Artifly becomes familiar with your selections and creates personalized artwork. You can buy the art you have created. The AI art website is among several programs that let users experiment with using AI to create art. There’s Artbreeder, for example, which lets users select “the most interesting image to discover totally new images,” according to the website. “Infinitely new random ‘children’ are made from each image. Artbreeder turns the simple act of exploration into creativity.” Other websites let you use AI to create music. Jukebox is a “neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles,” according to the website. Some AI systems, known as generative models, learn patterns from existing data and generate new data with similar properties to what they’ve seen before, Tiago Ramalho, the CEO of AI consulting firm Recursive, told Lifewire in an email interview. The programs, he said, are not merely reproducing what they’ve seen before, but rather recombining the patterns they’ve seen into a new piece. “This is similar to what human artists do, taking inspiration from other pieces they’ve seen before and recombining them into something novel,” Ramalho said. “A big limitation of current AI programs, however, is that they are limited to only a certain modality (e.g., images, sound, etc.) and so cannot take as broad of inspiration as humans.”
Computer Artists?
While AI can generate unique images, whether that counts as art depends on who you talk to. Nisha Talagala, the CEO and founder of AIClub.World, an educational company, uses an online tool to teach kids how to create art with AI. But, he said, AI can make music and art by learning patterns and combining them. “True human creativity, creating something purely different from what exists, is still beyond AI’s reach,” he told Lifewire in an email interview. AI is ideal for identifying and following patterns, “while human creativity is all about breaking existing patterns and designing new ones,” Prevost said. While AI may not be creating art on its own, Prevost contends that AI can “democratize” human creativity. “AI can broaden the creative base by allowing those who don’t act as creative professionals to bring their creative inspiration to life on an ever-evolving digital canvas using intuitive tools that can automate historically complex processes—like replacing the sky in an image or changing the lighting in a video,” he said. For example, Prevost said, generative image filters and AI-powered visual search can allow artists to explore creative ideas in seconds, unlocking more creative possibilities. AI can train search algorithms to understand better images, including colors, composition, style, mood, and objects “so that these algorithms better understand the nuance and creative intent of an artist seeking inspiration, ultimately resulting in more meaningful results.” Imagine being able to prototype a creative idea five different ways instead of one “including an outlier that turns out to be pure genius—all because AI can assume some of the heavy lifting,” Prevost said. “AI is a game-changer for creatives, cutting out much of the busywork, so they have more time to develop and explore new ideas—something humans do best.”
