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Computers, as a Tool for Creativity, Can’t Replace the Artist.
Rachel Rose, a video artist who thinks about the questions posed by AI, employs computer technology in the creation of her works. Her films give the viewer an experience of materiality through the moving image. She uses collaging and layering of the material to manipulate sound and image, and the editing process is perhaps the most important aspect of her work.

She also talks about the importance of decision making in her work. For her, the artistic process does not follow a rational pattern. In a converation we had, together with the engineer Kenric McDowell, at the Google Cultural Institute, she explained this by citing a story from theater director Peter Brook’s 1968 book The Empty Space. When Brook designed the set for his production of The Tempest in the late 1960s, he started by making a Japanese garden, but then the design evolved, becoming a white box, a black box, a realistic set, and so on. And in the end, he returned to his original idea. Brook writes that he was shocked at having spent a month on his labors, only to end at the beginning. But this shows that the creative artistic process is a succession whose every step builds on the next and which eventually comes to an unpredictable conclusion. The process is not a logical or rational succession but has mostly to do with the artist’s feelings in reaction to the preceding result. Rose said, of her own artistic decision making:

It, to me, is distinctively different from machine learning, because at each decision there’s this core feeling that comes from a human being, which has to do with empathy, which has to do with communication, which has to do with questions about our own mortality that only a human could ask.

This point underlines the fundamental difference between any human artistic production and so-called computer creativity. Rose sees AI more as a possible way to create better tools for humans:

A place I can imagine machine learning working for an artist would be not in developing an independent subjectivity, like writing a poem or making an image, but actually in filling in gaps that are to do with labor, like the way that Photoshop works with different tools that you can use.

And though such tools may not seem spectacular, she says, “they might have a larger influence on art,” because they provide artists with further possibilities in their creative work.

McDowell added that he, too, believes there are false expectations around AI. “I’ve observed,” he said, “that there’s a sort of magical quality to the idea of a computer that does all the things that we do.” He continued: “There’s almost this kind of demonic mirror that we look into, and we want it to write a novel, we want it to write a film—we want to give that away somehow.” He is instead working on projects wherein humans collaborate with the machine. One of the current aims of AI research is to find new means of interaction between humans and software. And art, one could say, needs to play a key role in that enterprise, since it focuses on our subjectivity and on essential human aspects like empathy and mortality.

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