TALKING ABOUT...

AI starts ge ing more creative

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has managed to make its way into the arts world.

Some people already envision it emulating real-world artists, in creating autonomously. But AI seems to lack an essential quality: imagination.

Now, American researchers are trying to remedy the situation.

Researchers at the University of Southern California are working to endow AI with the very “human” quality of imagination.

They have recently developed an algorithm capable of designing novel objects with different attributes.

“We were inspired by human visual generalisation capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines,” explains Yunhao Ge, a PhD student on the research team.

“Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes – for instance, shape, pose, position, colour – and then recombine them to imagine a new object.

“Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks.”

The scientists used the concept of “disentanglement” to allow the machine to generate new images from visual samples.

The AI programme uses the features it has observed in images analysed to perform a “controllable novel image synthesis”.

This process of extrapolation could be the next best thing to what we might consider imagination, and has allowed the researchers to generate a database containing 1.56 million novel images.

“Disentanglement” already allows algorithms to make deepfakes, controversial videos where one face is replaced by another.

But this technique could help machines go even further, according to Laurent Itti, professor of computer science at the university.

“This new approach truly unleashes a new sense of imagination in AI systems, bringing them closer to humans’ understanding of the world.”