Can AI Replace Human Artistic Creativity?

Artificial intelligence surpasses humans in information processing and network building, but it has limitations when it comes to artistic creativity. It can imitate expressive styles, but only humans can be truly creative with their inner tendencies and emotions. AI artwork has been recognized, but it’s not the same as human creativity.

 

Computers process information much faster than the human brain, and they can build huge networks, unlike human information storage, which is limited to the size of the brain. And as research into artificial intelligence that mimics the brain’s neocortex continues, many computer scientists are predicting the rise of superintelligence, or intelligence beyond that of humans. AI expert Ray Kurzweil explains the pace of progress through the laws of singularity and harvest acceleration. According to his books The Singularity Comes and The Birth of Mind, the evolution of artificial intelligence is driven by positive feedback from past evolutionary processes that fuels future evolutionary processes. As it continues to be fueled by evolution, AI follows the law of harvest acceleration, which states that “technological progress accelerates exponentially”. As a result, AI will catch up to human intelligence by achieving exponential growth that human intelligence will never achieve, a point called the singularity. After the singularity, AI grows at an even faster rate and becomes superintelligent, far surpassing human intelligence.
Many people say that the development of AI will replace many human jobs and narrow the realm of unique human abilities. In fact, as one article notes, “dire predictions have been made by global research organizations, including a report by researchers at Oxford University in the U.K. that AI and automation technologies will replace 47% of current jobs in 10 to 20 years.” On the other side of the spectrum, creativity has been seen as an alternative to these concerns, and there is much debate about the future of art as a creative activity.
Indeed, Google’s Magenta project released a self-composed piano piece in June 2016, and in April 2016, Next Rembrandt, a collaboration between Microsoft, the Rembrandt Museum, and Delft University of Technology, completed a portrait of itself. In 2018, an AI-generated portrait of Edmond de Bellamy sold for $425,000 at Christie’s auction, and in 2021, an AI-generated artwork won first place in an international art competition. Other AIs developed by various companies have demonstrated their creativity in music, art, and cooking. However, their limitations are common and obvious. They are built using existing data. Magenta was inspired by existing works by Bach or the Beatles, and Next Rembrandt analyzed 346 of Rembrandt’s works to create a Rembrandt-like style. But just as we don’t take away all the creativity of inspired or motif-based works by humans, we can’t deny the creativity of an AI’s work just because it’s related to something else. Optimistic AI scientists also predict that a superintelligence far superior to the AI of 2016 will be able to overcome this limitation with associative abilities that cannot be expected from linear human growth.
However, I believe that even with highly developed AI, only humans are capable of artistic creativity. In this article, the necessary and sufficient condition for artistic creativity is “having an inner disposition and mode of expression”. Artistic creativity can also lead to the expansion of artistic horizons. For example, figurative art, installation art, etc. are considered to have expanded the horizons of art with new interpretations and practices. However, the expansion of artistic horizons is a byproduct of artistic creativity, not a requirement of artistic creativity.

The paper “An Exploration of Artistic Creativity” emphasizes the need for an artistic definition of creativity, stating that not only are artists not interested in defining creativity in language, but the definition of creativity is not clear because there is no consensus on the definition. However, since creativity has the characteristic of uncertainty, this study attempts to define artistic creativity centering on the inner disposition to produce creative results without interpreting creativity from any outcome. Therefore, this study defines artistic creativity as “an authentic artistic encounter between a thoroughly conscious human being and the world he or she lives in. This means that the catalyst for creativity is the catalyst of consciousness, the intense immersion that occurs when an artist encounters an authentic object. Research has also shown that this definition is consistent with the ideas of many artists and thinkers, including Plato, Walpole Lula, May, Picasso, and John Dewey.
On the other hand, an artist who encounters an object is guided by ideas. In this process, the way of expressing the work is either consciously or deliberately discovered, or it is discovered by chance. Therefore, every artwork has a mode of expression. Furthermore, if we look at art history, there are commonalities between paradigm-shifters. Monet the Impressionist, Picasso the Cubist, Jackson Pollock the Abstract Expressionist, and Marcel Duchamp the Dadaist were recognized as innovative and highly creative artists because their methods of expression were accepted as shockingly new. The subject matter they chose to express was important, but it was the way they expressed it that had the power to shift paradigms.
Artificial intelligence can have a mode of expression among the conditions of artistic creativity. The brain’s neocortex is hierarchical, and analogies and predictions arise from it. This ability to make analogies and associations helps humans express themselves. Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of artificial intelligence technology company Numenta, explains more about analogies, predictions, and creativity in his book The Thinking Brain, the Thinking Machine.

“Creativity can be defined as just making predictions by analogy, and it shows up everywhere in the cortex, and it’s something you do all the time when you’re awake. Creativity is on a continuum from low-level to high-level. It ranges from simple, everyday activities like perception, which take place in the sensory areas of the cortex, to difficult and rare acts of genius, which take place in the highest areas of the cortex” (Jeff Hawkins).

According to the book’s authors, an AI that mimics the neocortex should be able to express all areas of creativity. However, to be precise, A.I. can only have a “mode of expression” and not an “inner disposition. Unlike humans, A.I. does not experience neurological changes or intense immersion when confronted with an object. Therefore, even if an A.I. uses genius figurative expressions or new expression techniques with excellent associative abilities, it only looks like a work of art, but it cannot be called a “real work of art” that contains artistic creativity.
Furthermore, A.I. cannot imitate all areas of human expression because it cannot have human emotions. Emotions can be understood through experience, but the emotions that A.I. gains through understanding are bound to be different from the original emotions. In addition, unlike humans, there are limitations in the artist’s life and mind because of the limitations of physical form. Therefore, A.I. cannot have the expression methods that can be obtained through intense original emotions that are influenced by emotions.
Therefore, A.I. cannot have artistic creativity because it can only have some expression methods and cannot have an inner disposition. Also, the works produced by A.I. cannot be recognized as ‘real art’. And the expansion of the horizons of art is based on artistic creativity and the recognition of ‘real art’. Therefore, the works created by A.I. cannot be evaluated as expanding new horizons of art. I think artistic creativity is a highly developed area in the creative realm, and only humans can have it.