Art and creativity has been my exploratory space ever since childhood. Having loved painting, passed advanced level singing exam as well as a trained Bharatnatyam dancer; art will always remain special to me. I have always taken keen interest in what is new and upcoming trends in this arena. While one might think that art is something extremely human specific and quality differs from person to person, I was in for a huge surprise when I noticed that technology has made its entry over this space as well.
When I recently met my Bharatnatyam dance teacher after long, she made me realize that how choreography has become so easy these days, and you don’t need to put in hours behind synthesizing a beautiful dance. She mentioned that motion capture technology with generative AI is able to sense dancers’ movements, explore and generate completely unique sequences and assist in choreography. In fact, the world-famous British choreographer Wayne Mcgregor has created an AI powered tool in collaboration with Google which feeds on Mcgregor’s past dance performances to identify patterns and inspire new steps and sequences.
Since she knew my interest in music, and how I loved to dance on my own sung music. She told me about a new AI system named IBM Watson Beat which feeds on dance performances, analyzed the emotional content and generated appropriate music compositions for the dance. This really surprised me regarding the extent technology has reached.
When I went back home, I had to put my research glasses on and dive deep into how has generative AI disrupted art further. I came to realize craft was also not let alone. There is a generative AI application named DeepArt which can transform regular photos into artwork. It needs some reference artwork and can apply the style, precision and visual characteristics to an ordinary photograph submitted by the user.
This entire new piece of news took me by surprise and lead me to think whether generative AI can replace human talent. I still think not quite so, because the kind of uniqueness and creativity a human mind can bring on the table is quite impossible for AI since it ultimately feeds on reference work. But there is still a lot of time in the future to explore and probably a lot of surprises planned for us by emerging technology!
It is amazing how technology, particularly AI, is intertwining with art nowadays! Despite its advancement, I believe that there is something unique about human creativity. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to consider all the fresh ways in which artists can incorporate AI into their work. I am excited to witness what the future holds!
Dear Pallavi, thank you for this interesting blog post! Intriguing how nowadays AI can not only generate data or text, but creates art as well. I fully agree with the statement that it will never replace human creativity, since it needs some kind of data to base the ideas on. However, I believe that this form of AI would be interesting to people who are in art business and struggle with tight deadlines. They could use this tool to gain inspiration by generating different choreographies. Or they can deliver some kind of value for the client in case a deadline is too tight. Also, for people who are less creative but need to produce some kind of creative output (like entrepreneurs who want a creative business logo), these kind of tools would also be helpful. Furthermore, I believe that new creative ideas arise from these kind of art AI tools, like a performance of different choreographies created by AI. It could challenge the discussion to the audience, whether human creativity is better than AI (or not). To me, these are a lot of interesting ideas to explore in the future!