DailyDirt: Creative Bots Generating An Art Overload
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Some folks are worried that robots are poised to take over too many jobs, leaving a path of unemployed destruction in their wake. Usually, this fear is limited to jobs related to manual labor and manufacturing, but programmers aren't content to make software that will harvest crops or 3D print car parts. Here are a few projects where bots are creating works of art.- E-David is a welding robot programmed to paint forgeries of human-made art. It only paints with acrylics, so it's not going to fool any experts, but with a few more software upgrades, it might churn out some nice originals someday. [url]
- Computer generated poetry has been around for about as long as computers have existed, and one poetry software project produced at least a few poems that were a bit quirky and sometimes oddly dark. In 2003, the Darwinian Poetry website attracted the attention of a human audience willing to rate a few thousand poems, but that website is gone now. All those... moments... will be lost in time, like... tears... in... rain. [url]
- Emily Howell isn't a person -- UC Santa Cruz professor David Cope used that name for his software that composes music, a successor to his previous project called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (aka EMI or "Emmy"). EMI produced music that mimicked the styles of human composers, but Emily has developed her (its) own style and can modify her compositions based on audience feedback. [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: algorithms, art, artificial intelligence, automation, computer generated art, david cope, emi, emily howell, music composition, painting, poetry, robot, software
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Bots will break copyright...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Bots will break copyright...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Where is this preserved?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
As long as it's not Vogon poetry...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The Difference Between Literature and Art.
Art and music schools work. They produce good artists and musicians. There's a lot of technique in art and music, and this technique can be learned in a systematic course of instruction, or, possibly, programmed into a computer. MFA English programs do not work. They don't produce very much in the way of good fiction writers or poets. Imaginative writing does not rely heavily on technique-- rather, it relies on using the powers of abstraction inherent in language. If someone finds an occupation which involves writing non-fiction matter regularly, that will be enough to qualify him in the matter of technique to be a good imaginative writer. Walt Whitman was a printer and newspaperman. Edgar Lee Masters was one of the many writers and poets who were lawyers.
Of course, there is a penalty for literature's non-technique. Literature tends to be on the intellectual side, emotionally remote. The writer of literature has persistent difficulty in engaging a potential audience which is not very intellectual. Art and music have a much greater capacity to carry emotional power, and to engage people whose response is primarily emotional.
By contrast with literature, about 1800, the United States produced what are called "primitive painters." These were men who made their livings painting portraits, and a certain type of landscape, typically a picture of the customer's house or farm. These men never made enough money to be able to stake themselves to a trip to Europe, which meant that they were never able to plug into the European art school system, and learn the body of technique which an ordinary professional European painter possessed. Primitive paintings have a kind of cartoon-like appearance.
There is one kind of art which is not very technique-driven-- photography. The camera does most of what is necessary to make a picture. Good photographers possess what one might call, a way of seeing.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Where is this preserved?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]