The Question of Intelligence — AI and the future of creativity

In the past few years artificial intelligence has moved to the center of technology discussions, and an increasing amount of exhibitions and symposia have been devoted to the subject. The term AI has become increasingly blurry, being applied to a vast range of approaches and applications. The scenarios playing out in popular culture oscillate between the dystopian fear of sentient machines taking over the world and the utopian desire for machine sentience that inspires us with as of yet unknown levels of creativity. The presentation will take my exhibition on AI in art (Kellen Gallery, The New School, February - April 2020) as starting point to give an overview of artistic AI projects addressing creativity. Artistic engagement with AI will be approached according to the different areas or 'senses' that are being automated, among them vision (image recognition); speech/voice (personality); language and knowledge (cognitive search) with an emphasis on issues of ethics and bias in machine learning. In his ongoing series "Learning to See," for example, the artist Memoakten uses machine learning algorithms to explore how AI learns and understands, thereby reflecting on the self-affirming cognitive biases of AI and humans. Artists from Lynn Hershman Leeson and Ken Feingold to Ian Cheng have created chatbots or used commercial bots to probe the potential of conversation, personality, and sentience. Also discussed will be artworks that explore the impact of automation on artistic creativity, from Harold Cohen's pioneering AI drawing software Aaron (1971-2016) to the current use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).