As new technology arises in our modern society, people are always looking for ways to make jobs easier and even save money in the long run. According to Taryn Southern from Quora and Forbes, there are multiple areas where computers and technology have replaced humans in creative professions. Areas such as advertisement design, visual arts, graphic design, and even photographers to name a few (Southern 1). There would be no reason why innovators would not want to take it the step further with replacing more professions with computers in order to streamline processes, bring cost down, and overall make the job easier with more yield. I, personally, as a student in a creative professional field, do not think it would be wise to replace a lot of the human properties that go into the creative process in these professions. Although, there are many ways that AI can replicate the process and create something like generating information and interpreting information, there are numerous areas that a computer would not be able to carry out, such as genuine emotion, sympathy, empathy, and interpretation. In the creative process of an advertisement, there is a sense of sympathy and an understanding of how a situation will affect a demographic of people. An ad that shows how it feels to fall in love and how it would hurt if that special someone ended up not being around anymore, would have profound effect on the viewer, because the creator has probably felt that feeling at one point or another throughout his/her life. A computer would be able to generate these feelings, but it would not be nearly as natural as a real human feeling. In the future as well, there will be advancements in ways to interpret information in creative ways, specifically in auditory display and sonification. In these interpretations, graphs of data, let us say that it is a graph of weather patterns, a researcher could compose an audio track and assign it for a specific aspect, like windspeed or temperature fluctuation. These creative professions that marry the areas of data analysis and audio production would be innovative and this way, there would be more viewers of the information, and with the help of auditory display, impaired reviewers of this research will be able to understand the data being presented.
Will Computers Ever Replace Humans In Creative Professions?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/10/01/will-computers-ever-replace-humans-in-creative-professions/#1588b45b5140
I find this article especially relevant for me, as I am pursuing academic interests in both creative and technological fields (IST and Digital Design). Though it may seem that STEM and creative fields are on completely different sides of the spectrum, much of the technologies we have today are reliant on combining both disciplines. With this in mind, I feel the need to emphasize creativity’s role in technological environments, and how Artificial Intelligence needs people as much as people need it.
A particularly relevant creative career that is at the forefront of just about every single piece of technology we use, is that of industrial or product design. According to The National Endowment for the Arts (Giffort, 2013), industrial design takes principles of the arts, STEM, and business (whether that be physical or digital) in order to improve the various products people use daily. Though engineers or back-end developers are responsible for developing how the product functions, designers find importance through articulating that function into a human-friendly package.
At the core of making a product human-friendly is the human experience, which relies on psychology, emotion, and expression. AI lacks the ability to feel and relate to the human experience, but has the ability to expedite the product design process. In a previous comment on an article, I mentioned how the band YACHT fed their back catalogue into an AI in order to generate a library of common motifs to write new music. In a medium article through Design at IBM, similar ideas are discussed with respect to art and design. One experiment that stands out in particular is conducted by Google AI, which takes “four original pieces of artwork” and “[combines them] in gradients of proportions to a new photograph.” (Design at IBM). Through the expressions of people of various cultures and lifestyles, AI was able to create a combination of their human experiences into an image. This is especially interesting for designing products for certain cultures. A designer could create a general version of the product, and place design and behavioral languages of other countries into an AI in order to create a more culturally-friendly version of their product.
Though AI is capable of generating original works, it takes a library of meaningful design and art from humans to create it. I believe that product designers and AI can form a productive relationship, but it is ultimately symbiotic. Where designers are tasked with making the core function of a product accessible and simple to the human experience, AI can refine the details that humans can’t relate to.
Sources:
https://www.arts.gov/news/2013/industrial-designers-play-critical-role-manufacturing-technology-and-innovation
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping-is-a-new-landmark-for-ai-music-an-album-that-doesnt-suck/
https://medium.com/design-ibm/the-role-of-art-in-ai-31033ad7c54e
Instead of considering how we can remove humans from any creative process, we should be looking into ways to communicate these human ideas in ways that are new and innovative. I think the second part of what you wrote really begins to address this. “7 Ways Technology is Changing How Art is Made” describes one art installation as “creative thought transforms into something larger than the original idea” which never would have been possible without the technology involved in each of the seven pieces in the article. Human wonder and curiosity truly shine through many of these high-tech mediums. Interactive digital animals, enormous laser light shows, and wall art that is intended to be a work in progress forever, all bring us closer to physical representation of the spectacular feelings of the human experience, which you pointed out are hard for intelligent AI to replicate. I personally doubt that AI will get much closer to replicating human emotion, but technology as a whole will get better and better for creating art that illicits emotional response–when in creative enough hands, of course. In the future, we might even see people using AI in the same kind of way.
Reference: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/7-ways-technology-is-changing-how-art-is-made-180952472/#Uxth0i1xPtQiSQtP.99
I don’t believe that replacing creative professions with technology and machines should even be a discussion. However, in the world we live in, people seem to be constantly looking for technological replacements for human jobs. It’s “progress” for progress’s sake. A professor by the name of Geraint Wiggins believes that “computational creativity” could aid us in solving problems. He believes that a computer can solve problems that humans cannot, as long as he can “teach” them to think creatively. But here’s the thing…creativity cannot be taught. In my opinion, creativity is something we are born with. Creativity comes from emotion. A machine has no emotion, and they never will. Even if a machine is programmed to replicate some kind of emotion in response to a stimuli, and perhaps form a solution or answer based on this replication, it is still NOT a real emotion.
Professor Wiggins believes that “machines can use creative thinking to find solutions to human problems that ordinary people can’t even imagine.” Personally, I think that he is greatly underestimating the human race. The things that we have invented and engineered even over the past century would never have crossed the minds of humans living hundreds of years ago. Who are we to assume that innovation will come to a halt without the assistance of technology?
Wiggins acknowledged that in order for a machine to become creative, they must first learn to be reflective. The machine must understand the reason behind the things they do. His method for doing this is called computational creativity. He and his colleague Simon Colton define this subset of AI as “the philosophy, science and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative.”
Wiggins, with the help of a man named Marcus Pearce, have been turning to music to try and teach computers how humans feel. They have developed systems that can identify structure in language in music without training. With the use of these systems, autonomous composers can predict which notes should be played next in a sequence, and therefore create new pieces of music. Wiggins claims that these machines are “imagining” when generating this music.
While this is impressive, I believe it is an extremely small step along the path of teaching a machine to be creative. I don’t believe that a machine can be taught to think and problem solve in the complex, creative, emotion driven ways that a human can.
Source:
https://www.techworld.com/tech-innovation/if-computers-can-be-creative-what-does-that-mean-for-art-3676821/