Culture

Novels, pop songs and artwork: AI is taking on culture

AI isn't just for data and science, it's turned its focus to contemporary culture too

This is how the Tales From the Tree page from the January issue of WIRED looks after running it through Google Deep Dream

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First the machines came for our jobs - next it's our culture. In 2017, Sony's CSL Research Laboratory will release an album of pop songs1, the melodies of which were composed by an AI.

Read more: How to make your own soundtrack in minutes, using AI

London-based JukeDeck and Google Brain's project Magenta are also experimenting with AI composition, and in March an AI-written novel2 made the shortlist of a Japanese literary competition.

Cheap, powerful hardware means anyone can download a predictive-text interface from GitHub, set it going, and maybe produce the next Moby-Dick. AI poetry bots - common on Twitter - are popular in part because poetry's abstraction hides the current clunkiness of AI-produced text.

AI is also infiltrating the visual arts3: Google's Deep Dream4 project inadvertently creates hallucinatory scenes reminiscent of Dali or Escher. And we could soon be entering the realm of software Scorseses: programmer Ross Goodwin and Oscar Sharp, a London-based film-maker, recently coded a neural network called Benjamin. Benjamin devoured The X-Files, Star Trek and Blade Runner, then produced Sunspring, a six-page sci-fi screenplay that human actors interpreted for film.

So, will AIs sweep the Oscars any time soon? Not yet, believes Goodwin. "The scale of quantitative operations happening in your brain is so much larger than one of these models we've created," he says. "It's sort of like we've taught an insect to speak English." Screenwriters can sleep easy for now - but what's that saying about monkeys and typewriters?

Trend decoder: AI artworks

****: 1. 1.2 million: YouTube views of AI-generated 
song "Daddy's Car", one of the first two tunes created by Sony's AI composer

****: 2. @magicrealismbot tweets out AI-generated short tales under 140 characters every two hours. An example story: "A spice merchant suddenly turns into a bat. He doesn't really mind"

****: 3. Aaron is a program designed by artist Harold Cohen that outputs inkjet prints. It 
has been creating art since 1973

****: 4. Deep Dream was originally designed to recognise, then classify, the component parts of a photograph. Google's engineers found that running it in reverse created abstract dreamscapes

This article was originally published by WIRED UK