Although this is a reassuring thought It is not necessarily true anymore. Ian Goodfellow Science Researcher at Google has conceptualized the Generative Adversarial Network. Which seems to provide AI with the potential for creativity and imagination. It is based on the idea of duelling networks which compete against each other until one loses.
Humans are so special or so it was thought. Until recently with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence we suddenly don’t feel so smart. It seems another ‘thing’ has taken over the seat at the top of the intelligence food chain. But wait, they (that is the things) cant create anything, they lack imagination and creativity.
But while deep-learning AIs can learn to recognize things, they have not been good at creating them. The goal of GANs is to give machines something akin to an imagination.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610253/the-ganfather-the-man-whos-given-machines-the-gift-of-imagination/
These networks seem to provide AI with the potential for creativity and imagination based on the idea of dueling networks which compete against each other until one loses. The idea is that the best way to teach AI to learn and improve is to set it against itself. I personally think this presented an insult to human creativity. Why should AI seek to learn creativity from AI? Is that even logical? Well the fact is that the data being used by the networks is human generated, AI just provides the processing speed and power to analyze and modify what already exists.
Both networks are trained on the same data set. The first one, known as the generator, is charged with producing artificial outputs, such as photos or handwriting, that are as realistic as possible. The second, known as the discriminator, compares these with genuine images from the original data set and tries to determine which are real and which are fake. On the basis of those results, the generator adjusts its parameters for creating new images. And so it goes, until the discriminator can no longer tell what’s genuine and what’s bogus.
But is this really creativity? The process of the GANs is compared to the battle between the forger and the fraud detective. The more efficient the detective the more the forger has to correct his mistakes. Does this make the forger creative. Is a work based on someone else’s work creative? I think this depends on how you look at it.
Is our creativity based or built on what already exists in nature. Does this mean that creativity is merely a forgery of what already exists? If this is so then the AI is creative. If however it means being able to make something that has no point of reference or something based on nothing already in existence then I’m afraid we still hold the creativity title. Do we?
For more information on GANs see the article below.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610253/the-ganfather-the-man-whos-given-machines-the-gift-of-imagination/
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