2024.Apr.24
REPORTSReport on the 28th B’AI Book Club:
Articles Exploring Creativity and AI though Artistic Use Cases of AI and Legal Discussion of Creative AI
Galina Shyndriayeva (Visiting Researcher, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo, and Researcher, Musashi University)
・Date: March 26, 2024 (Tuesday) 13:00-14:30
・Venue: On-site (B’AI Office) & Zoom Meeting
・Language: English
・Reviewer: Galina Shyndriayeva (Visiting Researcher, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo, and Researcher, Musashi University)
・Readings:
Main:
Burk, D. L. (2023). Cheap creativity and what it will do. Georgia Law Review, 57(4), 1669-1712.
Gioti, A. M., Einbond, A. & Born, G. (2023). Composing the Assemblage: Probing Aesthetic and Technical Dimensions of Artistic Creation with Machine Learning. Computer Music Journal, 46(4), pp. 1-43. doi: 10.1162/comj_a_00658
Additional:
Benabdallah, G. et al. (2022). Slanted Speculations: Material Encounters with Algorithmic Bias. In: Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Virtual Event, Australia) (DIS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 85-99. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533449
Donnarumma, M. (2023). Against the Norm: Othering and Otherness in AI Aesthetics. Digital Culture and Society, 8(2), pp. 39-65. doi: 10.14361/dcs-2022-0205
On March 23, 2024, the 28th meeting of the B’AI Book Club took place. This is a regular session wherein recent scholarly literature on AI is discussed, for project members and stakeholders of the B’AI Global Forum. During this meeting, Visiting Researcher Galina Shyndriayeva conducted a review of several articles related to issues surrounding creativity and AI.
Firstly, the article by Gioti, Einbond, and Born was presented. In this essay, the authors reported on two musical pieces which incorporated machine learning techniques, by Einbond and Gioti, respectively. The authors used theoretical frameworks from material engagement and critical data studies as well as autoethnography techniques to probe into questions of agency, authorship, and novelty. The two musical pieces described used machine learning techniques to allow computer input into the composition and performance, resulting in a “dance of agency” between the performers and the algorithms. The resulting discussion in the session focused on a few important issues. Firstly, there is the difficulty of clearly delineating what is novel with the use of AI in a field already reliant on a range of sophisticated techniques and electronic instruments and how these will change the experience of the audience. Secondly, for discussions of agency and the aesthetics of generative AI, it is important to include cases of human-machine interaction as exemplified here, which might be more representative of the actual use of AI in artistic creation rather than solely AI-generated. Additionally, it was pointed out that much attention is given to Western-centric music using machine learning, reflecting enduring challenges to combating Western-centrism.
The second article discussed, Burk 2023, focused on issues of intellectual property and generative AI. Burk’s argument was that in contrast to the intentions of intellectual property regimes such as patents, generative AI does not affect a great change in terms of cheap reproducibility but in terms of initial creation, inaugurating an age of synthetic creativity. For example, pharmaceuticals are relatively cheap to manufacture, but expensive in terms of research and development (creation), hence the solution provided by exclusive patents. Cheap creation via AI, in Burk’s conception, will result in valuing authenticity rather than originality. This paper provoked valuable commentary among book club members centering on the importance of social relationships to authenticity.
The additional readings (Benabdallah et al., 2022 and Donnarumma 2023) served to provide more cases of artistic involvement with AI and further reflections on the inequalities perpetuated by uses of generative AI for artistic purposes (a corporate AI aesthetics, in Donnarumma’s phrasing), respectively.
In summary, these readings introduced issues of agency, authenticity, and inequality in artistic and creation-focused uses of AI.
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