After this auction, AI Art has seen an increase in artists from around the world participating. In the past two years, AI Art has seen a surge in online platforms like AIArtists.org, as well as exhibitions, conferences, contests, and discussion panels dedicated to AI Art.

In the extensive discussion on creating AI Art, one issue receives continuing dispute – on what level of computer autonomy in making art-generating decisions can be regarded as essential for the creative process? Are computational technologies still defined as mere tools, or do they exhibit independent “behavioral” properties?

Define AI

The concept of Artificial Intelligence adopted is based on Marvin Minsky’s most widely recognized definition: 

The performance of tasks, which, if performed by a human, would be deemed to require intelligence.

Geraint A Wiggins. 2006. A preliminary framework for description, analysis and
comparison of creative systems. Knowledge-Based Systems 19, 7 (2006), 449–458.

Simple cellular automata, an evolutionary algorithm, or any other computing system that meets the concept can be artificial intelligence. Through the way they interact with their physical or virtual surroundings, as well as themselves, these computational systems present a certain level of intelligence. When it comes to intelligence, learning is a major leap, and model-based reasoning is essential for an AI to elicit human-like learning, decision making, and most critically, autonomy.

Art Practise

Since at least the late 1950s, a group of engineers/ artists at Max Bense’s laboratory at the University of Stuttgart began experimenting with computer graphics. Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Manfred Mohr, and Vera Molnár investigated the use of mainframe computers, plotters, and algorithms in the manufacture of aesthetically appealing objects. A simple experiment to test some of the novel equipment in Max Bense’s laboratory rapidly evolved into an art movement.

This is only one illustration of how computer art evolved in the 1960s. Procedural, generative, or parametric” design is commonly used in the design and architecture sectors to describe the usage of algorithms.

Harold Cohen, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, has been using a self-designed program AARON, which is able to autonomously create original images, since 1973. Cohen began his research by exploring AI applications in the visual arts. He continued to develop AARON after its inception. The application could be used to make better choices, such as color or composition selection. Initially, AARON could only create black and white line drawings. It progressed to make digital prints of colored shapes like human figures and flora – the first examples of artificial intelligence art. Aaron once joked about how he could become the only artist to have a posthumous show of new works created solely after death because AARON could generate pictures on its own.

The drawing robot created by artist Patrick Tresset is yet another example of an intelligent tool. Its behavior and sketching style are both controlled by the algorithms that allow Paul’s drawings to be displayed, limiting the robot’s creative freedom. These systems are affected by studies of human behavior, specifically how artists depict behavior and how individuals interact with machines. Tresset creates robots and autonomous computational systems to manufacture a variety of products.

Sougwen Chung and her robots Drawing Operations Unit, Generation Four operated by a written AI system, alongside other robots in Chung’s performance-based artworks. She and the robots paint enormous canvases together as part of a cooperative effort and impromptu dancing.

Technological Landmark

Several significant technological advancements in recent years aided the growing interest in AI Art. Many rendering and texture synthesis methods have been created in recent decades in computer graphics and computer vision research, which are supposed to apply an “artistic style” to the input image. Academic results dated back to 2001 when the article ‘Image analogies’ was published, and 20 years later, such synthesis methods commonly applicated in image process applications become part of the modern-day ‘cannot live without mobile phone’ life. Nevertheless, deep neural networks have just lately been used to stylize photos and create new images. The quoted image illustrates key technology milestones influencing AI Art production.

GANs (Generative Adversarial Nets) are likely the most significant technological innovation that has contributed to the present growth of AI Art. Developed by Goodfellow and his colleagues, GAN marks a turning point in the use of machines to create visual content. A GAN operates by training two “competing” models: a generator and a discriminator. The generator is to figure out how the real examples in the input sample are spread out and make realistic images. The discriminator, on the other hand, is trained to tell the difference between fake images made by the generator and real images from the original sample. This framework produced convincing false variants of actual images for diverse image content kinds.

Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev introduced DeepDreams in 2015. This strategy was meant to improve DCNN (Deep Convolutional Neural Networks) interpretability by displaying patterns that increase neuron activation. The method later became a popular new kind of digital art production because of its psychedelic and hallucinogenic style.

NST (Neural Style Transfer) is one of the most well-known AI inventions. It sped up the use and development of AI technologies for art. This method was first described in a very important paper by Gatys which showed how CNNs can be used to create stylized images by separating and combining the “content” and “style” of an image. After this breakthrough, there were a lot of new research contributions and applications. The work of Jing gives a full overview of the existing NST techniques and the different ways they can be used. “Content” refers to recognizable objects and people in an image, while “style” refers to a deviation from a photorealistic depiction of “content” that is aesthetically pleasing or interesting. But in the context of art history, style is often seen as more than just the way lines and brushstrokes look. It is often seen as a more subtle and context-dependent idea. Also, stylized images made with NST methods are usually just a clear combination of images that already exist, not an original and unique piece of art. Even though NST could be used in a creative way to make digital art, it is important to be skeptical of the trend of calling anything with a painterly look to it “art.”

Elgammal made AICAN, take GAN one step further in its ability to generate content in a creative way. In their work, they say that if a GAN model is taught by looking at pictures of paintings, it will only learn how to make pictures that look like art that already exists. Like the NST method, this won’t make anything truly artistic or new. They suggest changes to the optimization criterion that would make it possible for the network to make creative art by getting as far away as possible from well-known styles while still staying within the art distribution. Through a series of exhibitions and experiments, the creators of the AICAN system showed that people often couldn’t tell the difference between images made by AICAN and artworks made by humans. In addition to the AICAN project, many other developers and artists have used GANs with different modifications and training settings to make digital art. It has become the most popular technology in the AI Art scene right now.

In 2021, CLIP and DALL-E, two amazing new OpenAI “multimodal” neural networks have already been released. The developers claim these are “steps towards systems with better comprehension of the world”.

Named after Salvador Dali, DALL-E, a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate graphics from a text description input. It employs the same transformer design as its predecessors. One way to look at it is that “it receives both the text and the image as a single stream of data containing up to 1280 tokens and is trained using maximum likelihood to generate all of the tokens, one after another”.

OpenAI’s DALL-E website has some incredible demo examples, one as follows:

By incorporating a basic pre-training job, OpenAI has shown that CLIP can perform well on a wide range of datasets. From a set of 32,768 randomly selected text snippets, predict which caption is connected with a given sample image. CLIP enables anybody to create their own classifiers and eliminates the requirement for task-specific training data and unlock certain niche tasks more easily because it doesn’t need task-specific training data.

Conclusion

Gaining attention is one of the most fundamental aspects of success in an age with too much information or art. In light of the current AI excitement, it is logical that presenting the story behind a certain artwork as something being created autonomously by an AI system seems to generate more curiosity than yet another human-made work. “Autonomous AI artist” narratives are mostly driven by marketing, and displays of AICAN-created art, like the Christie’s Belamy sale, use the concept of autonomy for publicity purposes. The application of anthropomorphic language in the instance of the Christie’s Belamy auction considerably raised the public interest in the art.

Nevertheless, as AI technologies are becoming more and more advanced, the distinction between employing an AI system as a tool or as a creator of content is becoming more blurry. The general public can hardly understand and interpret even a small subset of AI systems, since the topic’s complexities go beyond the scope of a single research subject, and scientists from a variety of fields are beginning to pay attention to it. A conceptual framework for philosophical thinking about machine art by Mark Coeckelbergh considering from several aspects the question if machines can generate art. Aesthetic theory, computational creativity, and the role of technology in the creation of art are all discussed in this paper, which also contributes to the fields of technology philosophy and philosophical anthropology as a whole. Perhaps we should adopt a more comprehensive understanding of what happens in creative perception and engagement as a hybrid human-technological and emergent or even poetic process, a model which leaves greater opportunity for allowing ourselves be surprised by creativity—human and possibly non-human.

Augmented reality (AR) is realized as one of the most revolutionary technologies in the 21st century. Based on the development of emergent display, tracking systems, and computing imaging, AR is no longer a sci-fi concept. Compared to the experience with virtual reality (VR), where we are dragged into a computer-generated world with few connections with our physical environment, AR, as the name suggests, is keeping our sense with a physical presence and overlays a digital world onto that.

What features make AR prevail？

AR is prevailing in our life. An increasing number of retail corporations, including IKEA, Nike, L’Oréal, have leveraged AR applications to enable customers to “try it on” before purchasing. AR has also been utilized in navigating systems, healthcare, education, construction, and other disciplines. Situated cognition theory implies that AR contains three main criteria that make customer experiences most realistic: being integrated with the immediate decision text in real-time, interacting with the product or service, and being given the opportunities to communicate with others, i.e., embedded embodied, and extended.

Why are AR applications inspiring art or museums?

Though many different devices can load AR technology, mobile phones, which are accessible to the majority of the public, have become the most popular device for launching AR. With this shift in machines, AR materials can be distributed and applied in various contexts, from VR-used heavy head-bounded video glasses to public platforms. This feature proves that AR is highly accessible thus the audience will not be limited to the ones owning the headset with VR.

After removing the virtual context from viewers’ eyesight but presenting them on handheld devices, the critical value to AR is establishing interactive and cognitive relationships between physical realities and digital environments. For museums, the exhibits want the audience to value and learn things from. Too much virtual information can be a severe interference. AR applications can help designers emphasize the relationship between physical space and virtual materials. Several independent studies have shown that visitors’ prior experience or training in art is an essential factor. However, AR benefits the audience, such as a longer memorable time towards the exhibits, increased curiosity, and a new perspective on the artwork as long as the experience with AR is not interrupted by other elements of the exhibition.

Another merit is for artists and creators. AR applications make it easy to distribute and showcase artworks throughout the Internet. Frankly speaking, making AR artworks is much easier than VR through newly released tools such as Artivive, Slide AR, Reality Composer, Adobe Aero, Spark AR, and so on. Artists are provided with easy-to-use software to create their AR artworks and share them on Instagram (the current leading sharing platform for AR art).

Additionally, museums are increasingly being transformed by employing modern methods of Interaction Design, Interactive Storytelling, and Artificial Intelligence into hybrid spaces, where virtual information is built around physical artifacts. As a relatively accessible and prevailing method, AR applications are utilized to start the first steps of museums’ transformation.

How to evaluate an AR application?

There’s much to play with AR applications for art. After digging into the store of AR applications, I have full hands-on and research experiences about them. Before starting depictions of those picked ones, there’s no harm to discuss the standards of making good AR applications.

1. UTAUT (The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology)

To issue the challenge of ensuring users’ acceptance of technology, the UTAUT was invented in 2003 based on other eight related theories and point out four core constructs (Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, and Facilitating Conditions) as direct determinants of users’ behavior. These constructs are moderated by gender, age, experience, and voluntariness of use. In a study on 120 museum visitors, which data collection was carried out in the People’s Museum, a three-story former municipal council building located along the Jalan Kota in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Melaka, the AR application APP “When History Comes Alive” is tested. The evaluation is based on the UTAUT theory (the element Facilitating Conditions is composed as Playfulness Expectancy and Content Relevance Expectancy). It turns out that the aesthetic dimension, fun, information need, more knowledge about the exhibits, and social influence (the weakest element) determine users’ intention and behaviors upon the program. (This study omits to evaluate the moderating effects, which I will not carry on for the cases.)

Case A – The Met Unframed

The Met Unframed is only available from Jan 12, 2021, to Feb 9, 2021, approximately five weeks. This is a total virtual pocket museum application, that Verizon sponsors. Since I cannot turn time back or have enough time to strive for my access (perhaps by writing emails to the MET), I only learn the case through advertisements, articles, and recorded videos. (Okay, it’s not even an actual “application”, but to scan a QR code on the website and have it displayed on your phone)

From the opinion of this Artnet critic, the app’s experience was depicted as “bemusement and irritation”. On Performance Expectancy, the Met Unframed presented about 50 pieces of the most famous work in a restructured, much smaller virtual version of the actual Met Museum. The edutainment level of the design is relatively low (at least for an art critic). And there existed incoherence of exhibits and audio recordings. Some presentations, such as underdrawings and hidden details of the famous paintings via infrared and XRF conservation documentation scans, should have been educational but failing in proper interpretations. The Effort Expectancy is not high, but it only allowed portrait mode, a narrow and upright view, which takes effort to put up with. What you should bear with is never stopping advertisements from the sponsor Verizon. There’s not much to complain about Content Relevance Expectancy, but Playfulness Expectancy may not satisfy enough. Putting the virtual version of the masterpieces in your home via AR technology can quickly get boring.

Case B – Acute Art

Acute art’s application interacts with leading contemporary artists’ digital versions of their work. The significant part about this app is that you can freely decorate your physical environment with many artworks from different artists as possible (only if your phone is capable). I think many of the works interact with me on Performance Expectancy quite well. After patience for loading the objects, you can experience the fluency of the moving figures interacting with the physical realities combined with sound effects. The user interface is straightforward, leaving no effort to struggle about how to play with it. I guess it’s easy to upload fun pictures and videos to social media and share them with friends on the social influence part. In all, I regard this application as a typically simple and fun one.

2. On Communicated Ideas

This is a subjective way to evaluate AR art applications, but my point is to share and appraise two great examples.

CASE C – ArtLens

ArtLens is the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection app, which provides several thousand objects on view and guidance through galleries via gallery-product tours or visitor-created ones. While in the museum, visitors scan the artwork from 14 feet away and read the additional interpretive content and digital investigation of the artwork from the phone screen. This app is also an organic part of its digital gallery, which can be connected to the collection wall in the ArtLens Gallery. it iterated in 2017 to be faster and more user-friendly, and the app download time has been reduced to 30 seconds. While in-home, you can still value the exhibits in high resolution and watch interpretation videos.

Calling it an AR application seems a downplay since ArtLens provides solutions to every detail you may imagine in your head. Do you want to learn more about the exhibits before even stepping into the museum? Sure. Do you want to create your tour routine? Why not. Share your moments with your friends? App has already been saved for you when you happily interact with the ArtLens Gallery.

CASE D – MoMAR

Finally, we are heading to the last case. The highlight, in this case, is that it showcases another perspective of presenting the relationship between virtual work and its physical surroundings. The project We AR in the MoMA, created by a group of artists, was to take over the gallery space of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) without permission of the museum. A free AR application is available to download from google play or the apple store. This art group is challenging the role of the museum’s authority of curating and presenting artworks commonly by covering the original physical “good” paintings with virtual “worse” ones. As they introduce themselves on the official website, “Welcome to MoMAR. An unauthorized gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, museums, and the curation of art within them. MoMAR is non-profit, non-owned, and exists in the absence of any privatized structures.” AR is utilized as a tool to reproduce and redesign the authority-occupied environment in their practice and enable the audience to redefine our relationship with the immediate surroundings.