Art is something that is unique to us humans. When we had what we needed to survive we started to create art in different forms such as music, stories or paintings. But there has currently been a big rise in the area of AI generated art, which has also created a big debate around copyright and the future of human artists' careers. This makes us think about what defines art and creativity. Is it something that only humans can do? If not, how can an artificial creature express independent creativity?
In this blog post I will focus on one aspect of art creation: painting. CloudPainter is an example of a robot painter, created by Pindar Van Arman. The robot can recreate reference images by physically painting on a canvas, but it is also able to choose reference images based on its own preferences and interpret them in a more abstract way. It works using AI algorithms, and can take feedback from a human instructor which it "remembers" even for future paintings it makes. In that sense, it is not very unlike a human art student who's learning to paint.
Another question arises from this: Does the human collaboration mean that the robot is not being creative itself, or does that aspect make it more creative since it's similar to our creative process as humans? One way to explore this could be building a creative robot that makes marks on paper in turn with a human or other robots. The robot first makes a mark, then waits for the other person/robot to make a mark, then makes another mark (perhaps based on the previous mark), and so on. The result would be a collaborative piece where the two artists (human-robot or robot-robot) inspire each other's creativity. It would be very interesting to see what artworks would come out of such an experience.