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Stephen Ornes, has been writing for Science News for Students since 2008 explains, Some people have challenged the idea that artificial intelligence can be creative.
Increasingly, artists are teaming up with computers. Some look for inspiration. Others might ask a computer to create a melody for their lyrics. Several computer programs even design paintings from scratch. Such programs are raising questions about whether computer are only assistants or might be considered true equals.
Photo: damircudic/E+/Getty Images
But new software can provide inspiration to artists or fully
partner with them in the creative process.
Maya Ackerman just wanted to write a song.
She tried for years — song after song. In the end, she didn’t like any of the tunes she wrote. “I didn’t have the gift, if you will,” she says. “All the melodies that came into my mind were so boring that I couldn’t imagine wasting time performing them.”
Maybe, she thought, a computer could help. Computer programs already are useful for recording songs that people come up with. Ackerman now wondered if a computer could be more — a songwriting partner.
It was a flash of inspiration. “I knew in an instant that it would be possible for a machine to give me ideas,” she says. That inspiration led to the creation of ALYSIA. This computer program can generate brand-new melodies, based on a user’s lyrics.
As a computer scientist at Santa Clara University in California, Ackerman has a lot of experience using algorithms (AL-goh-rith-ums)...
In 1950, a British computer-science pioneer named Alan Turing introduced the Turing Test. A computer program that can pass the Turing Test is one that can convince a person that it (the program), is human. Elgammal’s experiment functioned as a kind of Turing Test.
“From a viewer point of view, these works passed the Turing Test of art,” he now argues.
His group’s AI algorithm uses an approach known as machine learning. First, the researchers feed tens of thousands of images of art into the algorithm. This is to train it. Explains Elgammal, “It learns by itself the rules of what makes art.”
Source: Science News for Students
