An AI discussion with visual artist Memo Akten
Memo Akten: “The day that I care about the internal state of that machine and what it has to say, that’s the day that I will have called that machine the artist.”
AI
Sean Dorrance Kelly argues that an AI can’t be an artist
MIT Technology Review “So too with art and music and philosophy and literature. If we allow ourselves to slip in this way, to treat machine “creativity” as a substitute for our own, then machines will indeed come to seem incomprehensibly superior to us. But that is because we will have lost track of the fundamental role that creativity plays in being human.”
Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Mario Klingemann
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction on March 6 features a unique creation by artist Mario Klingemann. Memories of Passersby I is a machine installation that uses neural networks to generate an infinite stream of portraits.
Sotheby’s Is Entering the AI Art Fray, Selling a Surreal Artwork by One of the Movement’s Pioneers This Spring
The technology used in the artwork heading to auction is cutting-edge, as no one else has been able to create a machine that can work to create portraits at such speed and at such a high resolution (and that can also fit into a small box to boot).
“I guess I have to thank everyone who plays computer games,” Klingemann says. “Thanks to the high demands of games, graphics cards have become extremely powerful and versatile.” He likens the power consumption of the system to the energy needed to run a fridge. That said, the real-time aspect and the high resolution took “quite some time” to perfect, according to the artist. All in all, he says, he spent about three months training the models, writing the code, and designing the installation.
