Is Artificial Intelligence Threatening Creativity?

We have been showing a lot of VCs, art critics and design leaders our Urbancoolab's AI demo and discussed about how best to utilize this new creative machine. They were fascinated by how this machine can study the style of any artist, trying to visualize like that person. Not just replicating the same art but producing new things, carrying on their spirit as if they were still with us today.

The Jean Michel Basquiat inspired AI art collection demonstrates how the machine picked up some faces and created art around them using symbols and signs. Basquiat had a ferocious appetite for signs and symbols in everyday society and shown that there can be multiple meanings or allusions taken from those symbols. Like a visual anthropologist. On the another note, Jean Michel Basquiat gave people what they wanted as a powerfully political artist whose tableaux gathered up armloads of social and racial angst and, in doing so helped define American culture of his time, stretching mediums and genres. That’s part of what makes him so special. Urbancoolab’s resident robo-artist went through the same journeys studying those signs and symbols.

As artificial intelligence evolves and eventually reaches near-human levels of creative intelligence, what will this mean for human artists and the creative industries in general? We’re still a long way, but while this leaves many people worried and concerned about their creative careers in the future, I don’t think we should be. Algorithms have already created writing, painting, music and in their own way left virtual graffiti; are they merely mimicking rather than creating? It really depends a lot on how we define creativity. I will leave that to you to decide. But the future is here and Urbancoolab's robo-artist/designer/visual-anthropologist continues to study the world of art and design and perhaps one day its work here will be recognized as machine who invented Afro-machine futurism, abstract techno-expressionism, AI-expressionism or post-Basquiatism. Or it will always be just a machine.