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]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: algorithms, art, artificial intelligence, automation, computer generated art, david cope, emi, emily howell, music composition, painting, poetry, robot, software