Is A.I. the Future of Photography?

You may have recently seen an article about a piece of art create by artificial intelligence that won an art competition. There’s a report on CNN about it here. The piece looks quite beautiful I think, but it’s also interesting that it still took many hours of human effort to complete.

I’m sure at some point A.I. will be able to win competitions in art and photography without significant human intervention. And I guess eventually in film too.

Which sounds depressing. Computers taking over the role of the artist. With a database of past winners for any given competition, a computer can analyze the features that are most likely to promote success and replicate them. Although that doesn’t seem to be the case in the CNN example, where to composition was dictated and modified by the entrant.

But if an A.I. were able to predict and compose successful art based on previous winners, maybe it’s more of an issue for the competitions that formulas might be used to predict success. But I guess there will always be certain standards and criteria (and personal preferences from the judges) that will govern any competition.

But it also means that, for now, the computer is basing it’s ‘creativity’ in the past. It is basing it’s ‘art’ (and maybe it is true art, but that’s another discussion) on what’s been done before. What works before. Which is unavoidably true for human creativity too, in that we can’t forget what we’ve seen before in order the avoid it’s influence. But we can attempt to make a leap into something new that might remain beyond a computer.

And that’s surely where the true art is, and ideally what competitions should recognize. The art work that makes a jump (or even a step) towards something new and unique. And, at least for now, I think we still have an advantage over AI. And if competition from computers inspires us to be better, then why not embrace it and allow it to push us forward.