COMPUTER GAMES
AI attempts to mimic human creativity in art, music and literature prove it’s one soft skill that’s tough to replicate, writes Jessica Irvine.
“Writing is not data,” British author Steven Poole said in a 2019 article for The Guardian. “It is a means of expression, which implies that you have something to express. A nonsentient computer program has nothing to express.”
It hasn’t stopped them from trying. While true creativity might still be the exact kind of soft skill that’s beyond the reach of robots, AI has been employed to create art in the form of movie scripts, novels and music – with varying degrees of success. Poole’s article followed the release of an AI system, called GPT-2, capable of generating copy that matched text it had been fed. To the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – the system added, “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.” A step beyond predictive text, perhaps, but not quite canon material.
A new take on auto-tuning has also been attempted. In 2020, OpenAI (the San Francisco outfit behind GPT-2) revealed Jukebox, a music-generating AI. The system had a crack at making a Frank Sinatra song, which was later described as “sounding as if [Sinatra] has just unhooked his jaw like a snake” with “nightmarish scat singing”. And earlier this year, Toronto organisation Over the Bridge, which focuses on mental health in the music industry, was behind a project that saw AI create music in the styles of Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and others. “What if all these musicians that we love had mental-health support?” asked Sean O’Connor, a member of the organisation’s board of directors. The songs the software created were an attempt to answer the question of what might have been. But arguably the experiment did more to prove that human creativity is irreplaceably unique, with Nirvana’s iconic style particularly confusing to the AI. “There is less of an identifiable common thread throughout all their songs to give you this big chunk of catalogue that the machine could just learn from and create something new.” For now, at least on this front, it seems that the robots may be better left unplugged.