AI art? 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Can computers create art in the same way that humans do? It depends on how you define the words "create" and "art."

Computers or artificial intelligence can generate answers to questions, can direct equipment to build (like 3-D printer), can generate digital images, and much more, on one condition: that they have been programmed to do it.

That is, programmed by a human engineer to do the task. It's called "narrow AI." Programming is done by algorithms. An algorithm is instruction, a recipe, a formula. AI can be programmed or instructed by a human being to do any number of tasks for us.

But that's not "general AI," which would think for itself and create - in the sense that humans create ideas. So artificial intelligence doesn't actually create art, but rather the human engineer had the idea and taught the computer how to generate what he had in mind. The engineer is creating the art and using AI as a tool. 

What is creativity? This article explores its meaning. What is digital art? Wikipedia has an article on it.

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(Experts tell us to use the word "it" rather than a personal pronoun like he or she to refer to a robot. It may be designed with something like a face on it, it may have a name (like Sophia), it may be programmed to use friendly words -- but it is a machine, not a person.)