ROBOT ART

[Commentary on this post.]

Ok, so no one seems to like the videos. But I think that’s rather uncritical. Lets look at this more carefully.

The first important thing to notice is that it is the robot making this art. It is making aesthetic choices about the material and integrating those choices in novel ways to createthe final product. Its decisions are its– no one determines which decisions it will make, and its even incorrect to say this is a decision procedure: neural nets are trained, in this case on impressionists paintings, but no one has any priviledged access to the internal structure on the net, except the robot itself. The robot is in this special position because it can use the network.

We don’t know the internal structure, but that doesn’t mean we are entirely blind to its evaluative criteria. In particular, we know the input/output dimensions, and what features or properties those dimensions code for. We can call this the machine’s understanding of the art work. Notice that what it understands about the images is radically unlike our own understanding. It doesn’t see cars or roads or traffic, like we do. It sees colors at places. It sees composition. I’m inclined to say that we can’t really evaluate the art here, because we lack the machine’s understanding of its film. I’m not claiming that we need to know the artist’s intentions and understanding in order to evaluate a piece of art, but just that what the machine sees is so radically different from what we see, that our gut reactions to the work doesn’t say much about its merit.

Its important, then, to describe the machine’s relation to the art as a kind of understanding. Notice that this is different from attributing mental states to the neural net. We don’t have to attribute mental states to the machine, or talk about its beliefs and intentions, in order to distinguish its understanding of the images from ours. But it is that difference of understanding that makes the evaluative difference. This difference in understanding follows directly from the claim that the machine is making the art, and the machine alone is using its evaluative criteria. This is different from saying, for instance, that the machine is merely collaborating in the project. It is the artist, and to the machine the credit goes. Now that doesn’t make the art especially interesting, or give the machine that much credit. It is severely limited, for instance, by the fact that it is strapped on a bus and can only really encounter cars and roads and street lights. Once I’ve seen the kinds of films this bot makes, I’m not really interested in seeing more examples of the project. But its still a great example for my purposes.