Early in 2018, a mysterious press release landed in the inboxes of journalists. Black and white, stylized like the “game over” screen from a computer game, it read: “CREATIVITY IS NOT ONLY FOR HUMANS.” The makers were a French art group known as Obvious, and they announced that their artificial intelligence (AI) had managed to “create” art. It was the first of a stream of publicity that announced the auction of a novel portrait. Christie’s had been expecting less than $10,000. In the end, it fetched $430,000.
The portrait was the first piece of AI art to have been sold at auction. Panicked questions began to sound throughout Internet media: Was this art? Who is the artist and the owner here? Are machines now creative too?
All valid questions — but premature. While the event laid bare how confused the public is concerning AI and what it is capable of, today’s technology is nowhere near as advanced as Obvious is implying it is.
In fact, the portrait was just one of numerous similar artworks the AI could produce. It was the team behind Obvious that chose this one because, for whatever reason, they believed it was appropriate. And they intervened at other steps in the process, too. They first programmed the AI, and then they chose 15,000 existing portraits to train it. Signing the painting with a algorithm was a clever bit of marketing, but in no sense did the AI produce the painting on its own. At least, it is not what is called artificial general intelligence-the kind of machine we see in science-fiction movies which is sentient, goal-driven and thinks for itself.
Dozens of artists are using the same techniques as Obvious, but none of the artists are worried about being replaced. They build the machine and work with it every day. They know how limited it is. What interests them is co-creation: the way an AI can allow for them to go beyond their native abilities.
Artists also laugh at the idea that AI is creative. It certainly creates things, sometimes in new and effective ways, but it does so with no intention and with no sense of what is relevant. It is the human who interprets and carefully examines its output. “You make a fire and it produces interesting shapes, but in the end the fire is not creative. AI is a glorified campfire,” said one of the pioneers of using AI in art.
Rather than ask whether a machine can be creative, perhaps we should ask: What would it take for us to believe in the creativity of a machine? The more the machines achieve, the more we understand human creativity. “In the end, competition always forces us to get better,” said the pioneer, “to see what still makes us special as humans.”
【小题1】What does the author think of the panicked questions that were being asked by Internet media?| A．They didn’t make any sense. | B．They were too general to be helpful. |
| C．They were too complicated to answer. | D．They might be meaningful in the future. |
| A．The auction house overestimated the worth of the portrait that was later sold at auction. |
| B．Some artists have long adopted AI technology to push the limits of their native abilities. |
| C．Obvious will soon produce an AI which is sentient, goal-driven and can think for itself. |
| D．Obvious chose just one artwork from among its 15,000 existing portraits to represent its first AI-created piece. |
| A．a glorified campfire is creative and so is AI |
| B．it is the human who makes a fire that is creative |
| C．AI is nowhere near creative because it has no intention when “creating” |
| D．we have to interpret and carefully examine AI’s output to decide whether it is creative or not |
| A．Whether machines can be creative remains to be seen. |
| B．Competition between machines and humans does good to both. |
| C．Creativity is exactly what makes humans different from machines. |
| D．Advancements of AI in art will help us to better understand human creativity. |
