They don’t seem to be dreaming of electric sheep, but for the moment they are painting pictures that sell at art auctions, writing poems, short stories and the odd novel, drawing illustrations, sculpting shapes and composing music… Are algorithms the artists of the future? The current state of progress in this field opens up the debate on a host of questions regarding authorship, rights, originality or creativity.
Artificial intelligence is already capable of generating texts autonomously following human input, as well as images. It does this with simple tools, and names like GPT-3, Dall-E 2, Stable Difussion or Midjourney are becoming increasingly familiar to those who write or draw.
Botto is one of the most sought-after artificial artists. He is an algorithm fed by the German Mario Klingemann, who has his AI earning more money than him as a human artist, as in less than a year it had already exceeded the million euros mark. There was an exhibition in different places around the world. Madrid, London or Venice were some of them where giant screens were installed to view his work. For his father, Klingemann, Botto is not a mere AI tool but a companion.
Artificial intelligence today
AI has always been present, mainly in the world of video games. One sector where artificial intelligence is making great progress is in the world of casinos. Leo Vegas, world-renowned and highly secure, attempts to reproduce the glamour of Las Vegas from the sofa in your home. The online casino has different categories of games such as slots, with games like Cleopatra; Jackpots, with Mega Moolah; or the classic table games like Poker or Roulette. In addition, for a better experience, you can always choose to play live with a Croupier. At the same time, the user can opt for benefits such as bonuses and promotions. The casino is much more than just games and bonuses as you can see in LeoVegas Casino reviews. That is why the casino has decided to integrate AI in its commitment to safe gaming.
However, time ago, at the CCCB, the Colectivo Estampa organized a public demonstration of AI applied to literature. It was clear that there were no problems in creating the back cover text of a novel, its title, drawing the cover image, inventing a face, a biography of its author and even interviewing him or her with questions improvised by the audience. What about the novel though?
AI is a tool that helps us perform a variety of tasks. We train it by inputting a lot of information and it is capable of sketching a plot that the author could then develop. It is already used to write short, strictly informative newspaper articles about second or third division football matches including line-ups, goals and the odd incident event, or stock market information, but without in-depth analysis or the author’s own bias. There are novels written but it is very difficult to sustain a plot and characters for many pages in a readable way, unless it narrates a psychotropic experience or it’s very human-driven. Even in short stories, he does better with the fantastic than the realistic.
The problems that Artificial Intelligence faces in this process
Although the romantic idea of the creator might seem to be in crisis, the truth is that the problems shown by writing AIs are several: the texts are not complex, they have to be brief, the sentences are simple and the structures are linear. They also reproduce the biases of those texts that have been fed to the algorithm and tend to repeat themselves.For many, an AI can help guide a person‘s imagination, since it has a quicker ability to combine and can provide directions. However, it can never create a new form of painting. We don’t understand how human creativity works in the brain and therefore we can’t reproduce it. We are only capable of reproducing rational thought, which in the end is an infinite universal. We won’t be able to do that because of the major differences between biological substrate and the mechanical substrate. Even in poems, even if they can be read, you can see that there is no genuine life experience behind them. The grace of literature is that there is a human gaze in it that allows you to connect emotionally, whereas the machine only reproduces patterns and imitates the real voice that is heard in human-written works.
