Artificial Creativity on the Rise
Sony recently released two songs composed by AI and French composer Benoît Carré arranged, produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics. You can listen to both the songs below:
Sony has also announced a full album made by their AI to be released in 2017.
Earlier, AI had written the screenplay for a short film (though it doesnt make too much sense, for now). You can watch the film below:
It is already known that many media sources, including Yahoo, have been using AI to write articles for their websites.
AI at Google has attempted its hand at poetry and with good result. AI written Novella almost win a literary prize.
AI can take a picture and can convert it into a painting, in the styles of Picasso or other great artists.
Given that we are already seeing Artificial intelligence take on every sphere of arts (fiction & non-fiction writing, poetry, music composition, painting, etc) & sciences (meta learning, run experiments, diagnose diseases), the question that remains to be asked is will AI also be able to start and run a business by itself.
While that seems to be a long way away (maybe no long enough), the question that remains to be answered is the following:
What is the Future of Creativity
While the ability of AI to create art of any kind and be creative is still in its nascency, I am sure that the gap between the art created by most people and the art created by AI will equal soon and AI created art will soon surpass the art created by common folks.
This also means that we need to think about our own creative process and maybe incorporate certain elements of AI creativity within our creative process. Just like chess player teams (AI + Humans) trump just AI teams or just human teams, I would assume that the art created by the combination of AI and human creativity will trump art created by AI’s or purely humans, in all dimensions.
What follows is that we need to be able to not only understand the creative process of AI but also need to understand our own creative process as well and learn to play with the AI as a team.
What does this mean for Us?
For creative artists:
- We need to up our game and push boundaries with our creativity, just to continue to remain relevant.
- We need to experiment a lot more with new and complex arts and genres.
- We need to also learn to appreciate art much better than we have done so far as a race.
For Doctors, Lawyers, accountants, software engineers and kind:
- Most white collar jobs can be and will be replaced by AI systems.
- We need a way to up-skill millions of people and do that at scale and at a speed unheard of in our history.
- As a society, we need to be able to learn to interact and live with AI systems (which is already happening to some extent with AI systems like Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa already becoming common place).
For our Children and their education:
- We need to fundamentally change the what we teach our kids and how we teach them
- We need to be able to help them master the skills of working with AI systems and creating new AI systems. This means that we need completely new kinds of education systems.
We need to evolve as a race to a much more advanced state of cognition, which allows us to not only work with AI systems but also control and create new AI systems.
Usually, this scale of human evolutions would take hundreds of thousands of years, but as with everything else surrounding us, this is a change that is happening around us and at a pace that will necessitate that we evolve in decades rather than in centuries or more.
If for some reason, we are unable to evolve, we will see unprecedented scale of unemployment, unprecedented scale of economic and intellectual divide and thereby a lot of unrest in the world, leading to unprecedented protests, political and socio-economic unrests.
Conclusion:
All said and done, I am sure that the next few decades will see the kind of changes that no one in any of our preceding generation has seen in a single life time.
My generation is already the first generation that has seen technology evolve from a fixed line telephone to AI created arts and science and I am sure that I will see a lot more before i bid adieu to this life.
Exciting and troubling times ahead.
