As I have been interested in using AI generated voices as part of my piece, I’m well aware of the current controversy surrounding artificial intelligence and art, particularly around plagiarism and the concern that it will take away artists’ jobs in the future. For a while I haven’t been sure about where I stand on this debate – at first I was quite excited when I saw projects like Night Cafe start to spring up, as I had seen some friends use them to good effect for their album/single covers, and I did actually like the style of a lot of the works that were generated. However, I can obviously see the implications of this – my friends would use this art, and then one of the designers they previously used for the covers missed out on work. It does cause concern for me about my future as an artist as well. There are instances of it being used in a creative way though, such as the company PlantWave creating technology that allows the inner workings of a plant to be translated into sound and music. I have worked with a producer before who used this device, and he used it in a genuinely creative way, in the same way someone might use a loop to build a song on top of it – as a tool. If AI is used in this way, I don’t see as much of a problem with it and that’s why I’m happy to use it for my piece, even though I can see the moral wrongs of how the technology can be used.

In this blog post, I want to look at an older example of machines being used to make art and sound. In a recent lecture, we were shown the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition which was held at the ICA in 1968:

This was a revolutionary exhibition that included pieces of art where most of the main content was generated by machines. Of course, a lot of them may seem rudimentary now but at the time they would have been groundbreaking, and there are definitely some obvious precursors to AI generated art, for example the Harmonograph by Ivan Moscovich, which would took input from whoever had an idea to create an image – as curator Jaisa Reichardt says in the above video, “it enables people who can’t draw to make pretty pictures”. This is very similar to sites like Night Cafe which allow users to input any words or scenes they like, and the AI will come up with an often surreal, but interesting result.

Another is the machine by the Computer Technique Group, who took an image of John F. Kennedy and asked a machine to draw the picture in 6 different ways, with different pictures showing lines drawn towards the ear, or the eye.

I had not previously been aware of this exhibition, and I find it interesting to see all these pieces of computer-generated art and look at how they contrast to today’s AI generated works. These images are all quite simple, black and white – that may be due to the limitations of the technology at the time. Today’s AI generated visual art can be as complex and detailed as possible due to its near-unlimited access to the history of art, and the ability is has to copy styles.

I personally do find this a little scary, especially hearing recent examples of AI generated music. However, I think, and I hope, that people search for connections to other people through art and therefore art made by machines will not supersede art made by humans. Saying this, I can still see this technology taking away the jobs of certain types of creators in the future, for instance those that make foley or soundtrack for films. If an AI bot can make those sounds anyway, why pay for someone to do it? This also links back to what Rod Eley said in ‘The History of the Scratch Orchestra’ about the “machines and their machine-minders”. The machine-minders are still as intelligent as they ever were, but the machines are growing smarter and smarter.