What Art Can Do For AI

Could art provide the stimuli for AIs to link complexity of thought with agency? A disembodied intelligence has no agency, as without bodily emotions and physical feedback, it can endlessly consider competing options but lacks (unprogrammed) motivation to choose one. (Some humans with neurological illnesses demonstrate a similarly pathologically indecisive condition). Most current approaches to AI ask "How can machines use massive amounts of data to solve complex problems?" But, as Wired writer Gary Marcus posits, "We could ask, how do children acquire language and come to understand the world, using less power and data than current AI systems do?” Surveying attempts to move in this direction such the European Union's iCub, a child-like "cognitive humanoid robotic platform," the paper considers if, in certain conditions, AIs with robotic bodies could develop their own experiences of embodiment through encounters with art. Looking beyond "deep learning" and drawing on work by artists such as Ian Cheng, Lynn Hershman, and Jenna Sutela, this paper envisions what art could do for AI--and what art can do for humans seeking to create the imagined state of "artificial intelligence."