Welcome to The Artist in the Machine website. Here you can see art in full colour, listen to AI-created music, read AI-created literature and explore some of the links yourself.
The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity is about creativity in the age of machines— our creativity and their creativity.
In it I explore a world in which machines produce bold new works of art and music, write stories, tell jokes, or function as the brain that operates a robot. I look into questions like these: Will computers ever think like us? Could they ever have flashes of inspiration or come up with mad ideas? Could they invent something no one ever thought of before and never thought was needed? Could they dream up the plays of Shakespeare? Or do they need to? Perhaps they will function in totally other ways, come up with ideas just as great or solutions just as effective but different from the ones we would come up with. What is the mental life of machines? Can machines be creative? Can machines have consciousness? And what do we mean when we talk about being creative? Are we going to have to rethink what we mean by thinking and what we mean by creativity? This book looks into all these questions and many more.
To find answers I’ve gone to the experts. I’ve interviewed scientists working on frontier problems in computer thinking to find out the latest developments, what might be possible in future, and what problems could arise. I have focused on key players who are developing AI that creates art, literature, and music. All of them are doing extraordinary work, pushing forward the frontiers. And all have insights to impart.
Join me on this journey into as yet unexplored territory, chock full of surprises.
To view and listen to works introduced with URLs in the book, and much else, go to Audios and Videos for the Website Keyed to The Artist in the Machine.
Artists whose work I could not fit into the book and others that I have recently discovered are included in this website on the page Additional AI Artists which I will continually update.
I Understanding Creativity
1 What Makes Us Creative?
Einstein, Bach, Picasso: What Makes These People Special?
2 Seven Hallmarks of Creativity and Two Marks of Genius
- The Need for Introspection
- Know Your Strengths
- Focus, Persevere, and Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
- Collaborate and Compete
- Beg, Borrow, or Steal Great Ideas
- Thrive on Ambiguity
- The Need for Experience and Suffering
The Two Marks of Genius
Intent, Imagination, and Unpredictability
3 Margaret Boden’s Three Types of Creativity
4 Unconscious Thought: The Key Ingredient
The Four Stages of Creativity
The Importance of Taking Time off
Unconscious Thought and Computers
5 The Birth of Artificial Intelligence
The First Inklings of Computer Creativity
Computers That Mimic the Brain
6 Games Computers Play
Deep Blue Defeats Garry Kasparov
IBM Watson Becomes Jeopardy! Champion
AlphaGo Defeats the Reigning World Go Champion
II Portrait of the Computer as an Artist
7 DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer’s Hidden Layers
Mike Tyka Takes the Dream Deeper
8 Blaise Agüera y Arcas Brings Together Artists and Machine Intelligence
Memo Akten Educates a Neural Network
9 What Came after DeepDream?
Damien Henry and a Machine That Dreams a Landscape
Mario Klingemann and His X Degrees of Separation
Angelo Semeraro’s Recognition: Intertwining Past and Present
Leon Gatys’s Style Transfer: Photography “In the Style Of”
10 Ian Goodfellow’s Generative Adversarial Networks: AI Learns to Imagine
Mike Tyka’s Portraits of Imaginary People
Refik Anadol Creates a Dreaming Archive
Theresa Reimann-Dubbers’s AI Looks at the Messiah
Jake Elwes’s Dreams of Latent Space
11 Phillip Isola’s Pix2Pix: Filling in the Picture
Mario Klingemann Changes Faces with Pix2Pix
Anna Ridler’s Fall of the House of Usher
12 Jun-Yan Zhu’s CycleGAN Turns Horses into Zebras
Mario Klingemann Plays with CycleGAN
13 Ahmed Elgammal’s Creative Adversarial Networks
14 “But Is It Art?”: GANs Enter the Art Market
15 Simon Colton’s The Painting Fool
16 Hod Lipson and Patrick Tresset’s Artist Robots
III Machines That Make Music: Putting the “Rhythm” into “Algorithm”
17 Project Magenta: AI Creates Its Own Music
18 From WaveNet and NSynth to Coconet: Adventures in Music Making
WaveNet: From Voice to Music 145
NSynth—Creating
Sounds Never Heard Before 146
Coconet: Filling in the Gaps 147
19 François Pachet and His Computers That Improvise and Compose Songs
The Flow Machine
20 Gil Weinberg and Mason Bretan and Their Robot Jazz Band
21 David Cope Makes Music That Is “More Bach than Bach”
22 “The Drunken Pint” and Other Folk Music Composed by Bob Sturm and Oded Ben-Tal’s AI
23 Rebecca Fiebrink Uses Movement to Generate Sound
24 Marwaread Mary Farbood Sketches Music
25 Eduardo Miranda and His Improvising Slime Mold
IV Once Upon a Time: Computers That Weave Magic with Words
26 The Pinocchio Effect
27 The Final Frontier: Computers with a Sense of Humor
28 AI and Poetry
Pablo Gervás and His Poetic Algorithms
29 Rafael Pérez y Pérez and the Problems of Creating Rounded Stories
30 Nick Montfort Makes Poetry with Pi
31 Allison Parrish Sends Probes into Semantic Space
32 Ross Goodwin and the First AI-Scripted Movie
33 Sarah Harmon Uses AI to Create Illuminating Metaphors
34 Tony Veale and His Metaphor-and Story-Generating Programs
35 Hannah Davis Turns Words into Music
36 Simon Colton’s Poetic Fool
V Staged by Android Lloyd Webber and Friends
37 The World’s First Computer-Composed Musical: Beyond the Fence
VI Can Computers Be Creative?
38 A Glimpse of the Future?
Creativity in Humans and Machines
39 What Goes On in the Computer’s Brain?
Jason Yosinski and the Puzzle of What Machines See
Mark Riedl on Teaching Neural Networks to Communicate
40 What Drives Creativity?
Margaret Boden and Computer Creativity
41 Evaluating Creativity in Computers
Geraint Wiggins and the Mind’s Chorus
Graeme Ritchie’s Mathematical Criteria for Measuring the Creativity of a Computer Program
Anna Jordanous’s Fourteen Components of Creativity
42 Computers with Feelings
Rosalind Picard on Developing Machines That Feel
Machines Gaining Experience of the World
Machines That Suffer
43 The Question of Consciousness
John Searle’s Chinese Room and the Question of Whether Computers Can Actually Think
Reducing Consciousness to the Sum of Its Parts
44 Michael Graziano: Developing Conscious Computers
Awareness and Attention
Self-Awareness, Introspection, and Perseverance in Computers
Giving Computers Consciousness
45 Two Dissenting Voices
Douglas Hofstadter and the Horrors of a Future Controlled by Creative Machines
Pat Langley and Machines That Work More like People
46 Can We Apply the Hallmarks of Creativity to Computers?
The Need to Know Your Strengths
The Need to Beg, Borrow, or Steal Great Ideas, and the Need for Collaboration and Competition
The Need to Focus and Not Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
The Need to Thrive on Ambiguity and the Need for Experience and Suffering
The Ability to Discover the Key Problem and to Spot Connections
47 The Future
Where We Are Now
Where We Are Going
And into the Future …