How AI is transforming the creative industries | The Economist

Business and education use the computer, but art is finding a place for it as well. The ability of computers to get creative has come a long way, while there’s little chance of them usurping artists anytime soon. What does this change mean in the long term? For those working in the creative industries and is the future of these industries destined to be more imitation or innovation, i think the exciting role that ai will play is kicking us out of behaving like

Machines and perhaps being more creative as humans. Again, these portraits might look like paintings from centuries gone by digital art created by human hands, but theyre, not each one has been imagined and created by an artificial intelligence. Its the brainchild of mario klingerman hes, leading a group of artists who are pioneering the use of ai in the world of visual arts as an artist. You are always in this interplay between accident and control. So at one side you

Want to have control over your work, but at the same time you also want interesting accidents to happen. Using ai allows me to find a good balance between the two. This artwork is created using neural networks. Computer programs that mimic the structure of the human brain mario has trained the system on thousands of portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries. The ai learns from them and creates a never-ending stream of unique portraits in the past decade. The use of ai has expanded into numerous creative fields and its role is continuing to grow.

Marcus de sotoy is a professor of mathematics at the university of oxford. I think a lot of people think that all that ai could possibly do is to produce more of the same to produce pastiche and i think that’s really missing an opportunity, because this ai is really beginning to push the boundaries, change things and disrupt things. And so i think, weve really seen something very special happening at this moment before they take over the world. Many experts say they will take over your job.

Technological disruption is often assumed to lead to job losses, but such anxieties are frequently overblown. Research into the impact of automation in england shows a relatively low risk of job losses in several professions, including artists for those working in creative fields. Ai is more likely to emerge as a collaborator than a competitor. I think its going to change jobs and that’s the point. So this is a new collaborator, a new tool, a bit like the arrival of the camera on the scene that really changed art. So i think therell be art that will be

Just the same as it ever was, but therell be new jobs out there. Some jobs will go, but, for example, i think therell be something like the data curator. The person who curates the data that the ai will learn on will be a very creative role in the whole process by working as an ever more sophisticated collaborator. Ai could also help to overturn another stereotype that machines can never be as creative as humans. I think as creative, so we can often end up kind of repeating behaviors that have

Worked in the past actually behaving more like a machine than a human. So i think one of the exciting roles that ai will play is kicking us out of that rather mechanistic way of thinking and perhaps making us more creative as humans again, but alongside its potential to broaden the creative palette, ai could also have some negative consequences for The creative industries in the world of music ai has resulted in

New tracks mimicking artists in every conceivable genre, the world famous jazz singer, ella fitzgerald, ai technology, is advanced enough to learn from her back catalogue to produce this an original track in the same style, its unlikely to become a new jazz standard. But it does highlight the potential the technology holds to copy artists on an industrial scale. Concerns about the long-term impact of ai are shared by musicians like holly herndon, who composes by collaborating

With one she calls it spawn shes my ai baby weve been teaching her how to sing how to make music with us pollys worried that there are no intellectual property laws or other regulations in place to protect artists from ai-powered imitations. Just from this conversation that weve had today, you would have enough audio material to be able to make a model of my speaking voice and kind of do whatever you want with it.

We simply cannot have this wholesale taking of each others work, and so i think we have to move past some of our 20th century logics around ip and the way that we dealt with that and and come up with a new framework for that for the 21st Century this legal grey area was exposed last april to be or not to be. That is the question.

Whether its his novel in the mind to suffer the slings and that rules of all trade, just fortunately when the rapper jay-z reportedly tried and failed to have this track taken down from youtube, it used ai to make him appear to rap lines of shakespeare. I like how innocent it sounds, but holly has a more optimistic vision for the future of ai in the creative arts, one characterized less by imitation and more by originality. So by layering this we were able to kind of get the

The ai singing, with the kind of real world singing and instrumentation to kind of meld together and occupy the same space ais capacity to help humans make new kinds of art seems likely to have the most impact on the creative industries and the livelihoods of those working. In them in the years ahead, but what then, how far does ais potential to disrupt human creativity stretch? I think there will come a moment when we have to regard the ai as a sort of independent entity that is being creative and maybe

Thats when it has its own internal world, when perhaps a i becomes conscious in its own right, which i believe will happen at some point. There is an interaction that ai can have with the art of the past, which is at a speed that we could never achieve. So i think there is some possibility for ai to to reach a state of uh creativity much faster than we did as humans. Hello im tom standage deputy editor at

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