Curious as to how GPT-4 “thinks” about creativity I asked it two questions: What is creativity? How can we improve our creativity? Simple questions invite bland responses and some detail is necessary for GPT-4 to show its mettle. Its replies exhibit an uncanny understanding of both the process and end result of creative thinking. Perhaps there is more to GPT-4 than just probabilities and numbers? Just as there is more to our brains than probabilities and numbers, something that can give rise to such emergent properties as creativity.

Question 1: How can new ideas and artifacts be created from previous knowledge. How we can we go beyond given ideas and materials? To many this seems almost like magic. Some examples are Picasso going beyond the painting styles of his day to create Cubism. Einstein saw beyond the physics of his day to create relativity. Beethoven broke through the domain of music in his day to start the romantic era. What is the thing called creativity?

Question 2: Most people are capable of creativity at a low level. For example, finding a new way to drive to work, a new way to crochet, or a new way to repair the emission system of an automobile. Few others have the gift to create fantastic new science, art, literature and music which no one had dreamt of. These people come up with ideas that go way beyond what others can imagine. Many people sit between these two extremes. How can they improve their creativity?

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Based on my conversation with Ashfaq Ishaq – in ChildArt, The Magazine of the International Child Art Foundation, January/March 2022, pp. 24-25.

Most people agree that AIs can create art. But can they truly be artists? This question cuts right to the heart of AI because it raises the issue of whether AIs can possess attributes of living beings, even though they are alien life forms. If so their intelligence will no longer be ‘artificial’ but as real as ours. The archetypal Pygmalion myth is becoming reality. 

On March 11, 2021, the auction house Christie’s sold a work by an American graphic designer, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, for a colossal $69 million, making it the third most expensive work ever sold by a living artist.

The work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, is a nonfungible token, or NFT. It’s a computer file that cannot be exchanged, copied, or destroyed, which gives the purchaser proof of authenticity. It lives online in a virtual space—an immaterial space—in a blockchain, a secure digital public ledger. The file is a mint copy, an original, like the Mona Lisa that hangs in the Louvre. It’s also a work of art. […]

Read full article on Nautilus website, first published on August 18, 2021.

Image: Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Beeple. Fair use (critical commentary).

Today computers are creating an extraordinary new world of images, sounds and stories such as we have never experienced before…

George Zarkadakis (GZ): Your book centers around AI. Can you give me a brief overview of the angle of your book?

Arthur Miller (AM): My goal in this book is to explore machine creativity with focus on AI-created art, literature and music. I ask whether machines can have characteristics of human creativity and so be creative like us, such as competitiveness, unpredictability, and emotions and then evolve a creativity of their own. Artist in the Machine looks at the upside of AI, how it can inspire us, increase our own creativity, and so add to the quality of our lives.  […]

Read full article: Five Questions with Arthur I. Miller and George Zarkadakis Part I published in The Mit Press on December 2, 2020.

AM: Your book centers around AI. Can you give me a brief overview of the angle of your book?

GZ: In Cyber Republic I aim to respond to two big concerns about how intelligent machines are impacting our politics and economics. The first concern is how AI algorithms in social media platforms are manipulating public opinion, spread fake news, and exacerbate political polarization; in my book I suggest that we should develop a new type of AI algorithms that empower citizen deliberation and help drive consensus – and I describe how this could take place in the context of citizen assemblies. 

Read full article: Five Questions with Arthur I. Miller and George Zarkadakis Part II published in The Mit Press on December 9, 2020.

Arthur I. Miller reports on progress towards the Age of Superintelligence.

When I began researching my book The Artist in the Machine I knew a fair amount about AI-created art and music, but not so much about AI-created literature. From what I did know, I wondered whether I would have enough material to fill a chapter. It turned out that I had more than enough. It turned out, in fact, to be a fascinating and exciting topic, which many AI researchers consider the Final Frontier of AI, in that it involves so many dimensions of intelligence. I was eager to find out what machines themselves might be writing in these very early days – the infancy, one could call it, of computer literacy. […]

Read full article: Adventures in writing about creative machines published in Book Brunch on December 4, 2020.

Thrilled to receive first copies of the paperback of The Artist in the Machine hot off the presses.

Do feel free to pre-order: Amazon.co.uk · Amazon.com

Kindle Edition also available:

Early in the morning on May 18, 2015, Alexander Mordvintsev made an amazing discovery. He had been having trouble sleeping. Just after midnight, he awoke with a start. He was sure he’d heard a noise in the Zurich apartment where he lived with his wife and child. Afraid that he hadn’t locked the door to the terrace, he ran out of the bedroom to check if there was an intruder. All was fine; the terrace door was locked, and there was no intruder. But as he was standing in his living room, suddenly he “was surrounded by dozens of very beautiful ideas,” he tells me. “That beautiful moment occurred when one idea crystallizes to a point where you can start programming.” It all came together. In an instant he saw what everyone else had missed. He sat down straight away at his computer and began to type lines of code.

Up until then, artificial neural networks — designed to mimic the brain and recognize patterns — had been our servants, dutifully performing the tasks we asked them to perform, becoming steadily better at serving us. Mordvintsev’s adventure that night was to transform completely our conception of what computers were capable of. His great idea was to let them off the leash, see what happened when they were given a little freedom, allowed to dream a little. […]

Read full article: DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer’s Hidden Layers published in The Mit Press Reader on July 1, 2020.

Art and science have always influenced each other, but AI provides a medium for these spheres to fuse and create new forms of expression and discovery. Read more below:

Image: Bridgeman Images Artists Rights Society CC BY-SA 4.0