How AI is changing Art

“Machine Intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make” - Nick Bostrom

Artificial intelligence and its impact on art has been in the news recently, primarily as a result of several incidents where we saw books written by AI being published in the name of some other author or many distorted versions of original works being generated by AI. Most, if not all artists are apprehensive about the impact of AI on art. I believe that it is true that it will have a negative impact on the artist community as a whole as people would question their credibility and would be doubtful whether the piece of art has been created by a real human or is it just AI generated work. Yet, I am of the opinion that AI can significantly change the way we perceive art. Art would be less about expressing one's emotions and more about imagination. This imagination can help us get a look of how the future might look and at the same time remind us of our past mistakes. It will take art to a whole new dimension. As we know imagination leads us to innovation and innovation leads us to invention. Similarly when AI imagines some entity which did not exist till now and allows us to view its representation through means of art, it can potentially spark the idea of a new invention. An invention, whose idea perhaps might have not come in mind of anyone else before. Another way AI can be impactful is that it can help us to generate images of objects which we could have only imagined so far and not express it, perhaps because it was too tough. For example if a non artist is told to draw the picture of a cat playing football, it would perhaps be too difficult for him/her to express even if he/she imagines it. This is where AI comes in as it can generate infinite images of a cat playing football in a few seconds. This is an extremely powerful tool which will allow us to see what we only could have imagined till now. When the transition from the Early Vedic to Later Vedic Age took place in India, the most important change was the use of Iron which led to emergence of many new forms of art. Similarly the use of AI can lead to many new forms of Art, For example, DeepDream, released by Google in 2015, is one of the more well-known AI art tools. Initially, it was invented to help scientists and engineers to visualize patterns learned by a neural network, a type of machine learning algorithm. Later the algorithm has become a new form of abstract art due to the dream-like psychedelic appearance of the deliberately over-processed images. Thus in this way AI can completely change our conventional ways to see art and take us to another dimension through the powers of imagination.