We know that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a clever helper. For example, it guides us in navigation apps, tells us whether planes and trains are on time and, in the role of smart speaker, gives us answers to many different kinds of questions.
We know that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a clever helper. For example, it guides us in navigation apps, tells us whether planes and trains are on time and, in the role of smart speaker, gives us answers to many different kinds of questions.
Many people even believe that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us solve the pressing problems of our time, throughout a spectrum from cancer and Alzheimer's disease to climate change.
But can it do more than simply look for patterns in great mountains of data? Can it really be creative? Or is creativity something that only humans are capable of?
We set out to find examples of creative AI, and our search was definitely successful! Here is a small selection of the examples we found:
"Edmond de Belamy"
"Edmond de Belamy" is probably the best-known example of creative AI. A portrait painting, it is the first AI-generated work of art ever to be put on the block in a Christie's auction. That happened in 2018, and it went for 432,500 dollars.
"Edmond de Belamy" is also part of a series of eleven portraits, entitled "La Famille de Belamy" ("The Belamy Family," referring to a fictive family), that were created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective of artists, using artificial intelligence. To produce the works, they trained their AI system on a database of portraits spanning the 14th through the 20th centuries.
Another example from the field of painting is "The next Rembrandt". An AI was fed with Rembrandt's more than 340 paintings and based on that created a portrait painting in the style of the master. A man with a beard, hat and collar (www.nextrembrandt.com). And in 2021, "Operation Night Watch" added the missing margins to Rembrandt's famous Night Watch. These were in fact unceremoniously cut off in 1715 when the painting was to be hung in Amsterdam's City Hall and was unfortunately too large for the available space. The newly completed painting can now be admired in the Gallery of Honor of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
AI systems' ideas for the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) and Harry Potter series
When fans can't wait to find out how the story continues, they sometimes take matters into their own hands. Programmer Zack Thoutt is that kind of fan. In 2017, he got impatient waiting for the sixth volume in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (on which the Game of Thrones TV show is based) to appear. So, he trained an AI system on the first five volumes, to enable the system to continue the story. He then published a few of the resulting chapters on the internet platform Github (here). Many fans of the series were impressed, and found the system's character development quite plausible, even if they didn't think that the system's language compared to that of author George R. R. Martin.
Botnik, a machine entertainment company, did a similar "number" on Harry Potter at the end of 2017. It had an AI system write a few new chapters in the series, on the basis of the Harry Potter books that had appeared to date. The technology used in these efforts, known as "predictive writing," is similar to the autocomplete technology that smartphones apply to words.
Granted, these two examples are a few years old by now. But efforts in this direction keep improving. This past summer, for example, OpenAI, an AI research laboratory co-funded by Elon Musk, presented its GPT-3 text generator, which writes texts of "shockingly good" quality. In sum, it will be exciting to see what kinds of AI writing the future brings.
New songs from the Beatles, Amy Whinehouse, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix?
"Daddy’s Car" is a song that sounds like it was written by the Beatles. But rather than having been found in some sound studio's hidden archives, it was composed by Flow Machines, a music-composition program created by Sony. To judge for yourself whether the song is as good as the Fab Four's own work, go here.
With a thoroughly serious background, the project used artificial intelligence to create new songs in the style of, for example, Amy Whinehouse, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix. All musicians who died before their 27th birthday. The Canadian organization "Over The Bridge" is behind the campaign. It wants to sensitize creative people from the music business to mental health problems and make them less afraid to seek help.
Want to try a new recipe?
A digital creator of recipes already exists: "Chefkoch Watson" ("Chef Watson"). Experts at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, working in collaboration with IBM experts, programmed an algorithm to write a cookbook. For the venture, the AI system was "fed" with tens of thousands of real recipes, along with a database on the chemical composition of foods. As a result, it learned what ingredients go together especially well – apple and cinnamon, for example, or fish and tarragon. The system then came up with recipes such as apple-bratwurst pizza, and a chocolate bread pudding with black cherries and a salty beer-clementine-caramel sauce. Bon appétit!
