Artificial Intelligence as an Artist
Poetry
The members of the Brentano Society were astonished. They had just accepted a new poem for inclusion in their annual journal when they found out that a machine was the author of the piece. The lyrical work?“Glimpses of Sun on the Run” , which was accepted into the Frankfurt Library, was attributable solely to an artificial intelligence.
The human work on this piece was limited only to the programming and the data input: numerous poems provided study material for the algorithm. What came out of that could absolutely be measured against poetry produced by man. Even experts at the renowned cultural institution in Frankfurt am Main couldn’t tell the difference.
So, artificial intelligence can write poetry. But AI cannot only write verse, but also prose. One example of this is Botnik – a project by authors, artists and programmers. Together with a computer program, Botnik developed a fairy tale. This is how the cooperation between human and machine worked:
? The self-learning algorithm received Grimm’s Fairy Tales as the data pool
? On that basis, the program suggested individual new sentences in the style of the well-known works
? Based on these machine suggestions, the authors assembled a new self-contained story.
Out of that came the fairy tale?“The Princess and the Fox” ?– the newest work by the Brothers Grimm, written at the beginning of the 21st century. In style and content, a familiar fairy tale, but in the end only a literary clone.
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Songwriting?
Using computers to make music is nothing new, but computers making music on their own is something else altogether. Imagine finding out that AI wrote the song you’ve been listening to on repeat all week? Seems impossible? It shouldn’t because it has already happened (well, kind of anyway).
If you remember, Alex Da Kid’s?single “Not Easy ’’ was a chart-topper a few years ago. This song was written in collaboration with IBM’s Watson. In this case, Watson scanned and analyzed hits from the previous five years, news media, social media, and other related material. Then it helped form the general structure of the song based on what people were responding to at the time.
If that didn’t sound a little far out, we also have an AI rapper called?DeepBeat . Deep Beat uses machine learning (ML) to understand and reuse existing lyrics to create new rap songs. However, as this project is still in its infancy, don’t expect any freestyle rap battles with the likes of Eminem any time soon.
But AI’s most unusual use case is probably creating new music for dead musicians. For example, the?Lost Tapes of the 27 Club ?features new songs written and performed mainly by machines. These songs all follow the songwriting styles of several?musicians who passed away at the age of 27. ?These include stars of yesteryear like:
Each song on the album is the result of unleashing an AI program to analyze up to 30 songs from each artist. Smart algorithms looked for styles and patterns in melodies, chord changes, guitar riffs, and so on to create a new composition.