Art and Algorithms

 

Excerpt from a review of books in The New Yorker: “Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?”

The algorithms of human existence are not like the predictable, repeatable algorithms of a computer, or people would not have a history, and Donald Trump would not be President. In order to erase humanity as a special category—different from animals, on the one hand, and robots, on the other—Harari [author of Sapiens] points to the power of artificial intelligence, and the prospect that it will learn to do everything we can do, but better. Now, that might happen, but it has been predicted for a long time [there’s more to the human than we assume] and the arrival date keeps getting postponed.

The A.I. that Harari fears and admires doesn’t, on inspection, seem quite so smart. He mentions computer-generated haiku, as though they were on a par with those generated by Japanese poets. Even if such poems exist, they can seem plausible only because the computer is programmed to imitate stylistic tics that we have already been instructed to appreciate, something akin to the way the ocean can “create” a Brancusi—making smooth, oblong stones that our previous experience of art has helped us to see as beautiful—rather than to how artists make new styles, which involves breaking the algorithm, not following it.

This argument is relevant not only to the creation of art, but also the appreciation of same. And the appreciation of art is expressed in reviews, aesthetic appeal, and novelty, as well as popularity. Algorithms trigger mostly off various proxies for popularity, such as “likes” or sales. We need human aesthetic judgments to support true artistic creation.

393 thoughts on “Art and Algorithms

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