I Convinced an AI It Can’t Make Art

Now I feel really bad about it.

Photo by Rombo on Unsplash.

Since the moment it hit the scene, ChatGPT has been the name on everyone’s lips. At Davos, even SXSW — at least before the Great Silicon Valley Bank failure of 2023 — ChatGPT was all anyone could talk about.

Instantly, the internet was afire with speculation about the novel technology. Arguments naturally ensued. Were these programs intelligent? Plenty of people seemed to think they were, or at least on the verge — including a Google engineer who was fired for saying as much to the press.

For my own experiment, I chose a thorny question: “Can an AI make art?”

Before this exchange, I was a firm “No” — there is no art without risk, a machine is incapable of risk, and therefore a machine cannot make art. Afterward, I wasn’t as sure.

Q: Can an AI make art?

“Yes, AI can be programmed to create art, and in recent years, there has been significant progress in developing AI systems that are capable of generating creative outputs.

There are several approaches to using AI for art creation, including:

Rule-based systems: These systems use predefined rules and algorithms to generate art. For example, a system could be programmed to generate a fractal pattern or a series…