Days of Machine Creativity?

The incursion of artificial intelligence into our lives has been anticipated for a long time now.

 There are those that welcome it as the arrival of a new age of prosperity and ease while others see it as a definitive sign that humanity as we know it is doomed.

However, in both cases, the underlying expectation has been that AI will translate into automation that will make human labour, whether physical or mental, increasingly irrelevant. There is a reason for that expectation—robots and algorithms have been pushing human effort out of the mix inexorably in a vast range of sectors.

Which is what makes the latest tools that AI is developing so interesting. There is an explosion of creative applications that use AI to generate a vast range of creative outputs. We have tools that allow us to generate art from text or the spoken word, that allow for a photograph to be rendered in the artistic style of various painters. We can generate music from the description of a mood, merge styles of different composers, both traditional and modern. We can turn a picture into cartoons, ‘breed’ new images by marrying several existing ones. And this is just the beginning—the possibilities going forward are endless.

The meaning of the content generated by AI is often debated. Some people believe that AI-generated content is meaningless and lacks the depth of human-created content. Others argue that AI is capable of creating meaningful and valuable content, especially as it continues to learn and evolve. However, the jury is still out on whether or not AI-generated content is truly meaningful.