Artificial Intelligence and Art: The Evolution of the Cyborg Artist

Over the last 5-6 years, there has been a strong resurgence in artificial intelligence (AI) art. Through this talk, I want to talk about this new form of art. While artists and researchers have long tried to create art with autonomous systems (e.g. AARON [3]), I refer to this as a new form because of the use of certain specific techniques today for creating AI art, using algorithms relying on deep learning. I call this the evolution of the cyborg artist, because I agree with the argument of us being naturally born cyborgs [1], and I see the capabilities of deep learning to do ‘imaginative’ tasks by understanding patterns in large datasets as a direct evolution of how we will continue to think about and make art. With AI, I’m particularly interested in the creativity-continuum between humans and machines, where the human continuously adapts to how technology responds to their intentions, and for part of the art process, the creative agency is transferred to the machine.