We’re in 2022, and the year started on a high note especially when it comes to the field of “creative AI” - the AI artwork by India’s first AI artist Harshit Agrawal appeared on the cover of the prestigious IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine. Harshit is currently working in Machine Intelligence Design at Adobe.

Sharing his excitement, Harshit said, “I feel great to be on the cover of this prestigious magazine. I feel this is a great indication of how art and technology can and are coming together, where the cover of the top computer science magazine is that of art, created with AI technology. As an Indian artist working with AI art, I feel honoured to be on the cover too, because the artwork is about bringing Global South aesthetics and narratives to the AI Art and technology art space, something which is currently dominated largely by Global North individuals and institutions.”

Take a look at the cover page below.

To name a couple of other examples, Sophia the social humanoid robot sold a digital artwork for a whopping $700,000, and the AI-generated Portrait of Edmond Belamy was sold for more than $430,000. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was used to create the portrait, which uses convolutional neural networks to replicate human creativity. Humans are not born creative, are we? Of course not, we develop abilities like singing, dancing, writing, or painting after observing and acting upon data fed to us during our lifetime, we call it “learning.” Well, the case is the same with machines and they are doing a pretty well job. Let’s see how.

AI pumping life into drawings

Available state-of-the-art AI systems, unlike parents and teachers, fail to perceive what a child’s drawing is meant to show. To overcome this barrier, Meta AI researchers came out with a prototype system that can better recognise and animate children’s hand-drawn figures of humans and human characteristics. Simply put, using AI the team can bring drawings to life. 

Parents and children can enjoy the thrill of seeing their drawings transform into moving characters who dance, skip, and jump by uploading them to the prototype system. They can also share their animated drawings with friends and family by downloading them. Parents can also submit their drawings to assist enhance the AI model if they choose, as per the blog. The project will not only encourage more computer vision work but will enable AI to better understand the world from a human point of view.

Image Credit: Meta AI

Listen to poems and songs from AI

A team of Microsoft and Kyoto University researchers created a poet AI that can fool people. Thousands of images were fed to the AI along with human-written descriptions and poems in order for it to construct anything as arcane as a poem, as reported by the World Economic Forum. 

Moreover, a whole lot of musicians, artists, and composers are using artificial intelligence to shape, inspire and enhance the output. Google Arts & Culture has a collection of at least 12 songs created by AI. Take, for example, the song Break Free from Taryn Southern has registered over 2 million views on YouTube, uses AI that not only composed the notation but also produced the instrumentation.

Improve your writing process

Several AI technologies exist that can help with the writing process, such as CopyAI, Wordtune, and Copysmith. These techniques aid marketers in overcoming the dreaded "writer's block," resulting in increased productivity. Even if AI-generated copy isn't used directly, it can assist the creative process going forward. Remember that, while AI can churn out reams of text, it can be a powerful co-writer but it has no idea what it's talking about. This is the reason why skilled and knowledgeable authors are still required as part of the writing process.

AI is the paintbrush for creative future

Humans and AI together can be termed as a creative pairing. From marketing to music, painting to poems, AI is widely used for creative applications, still, AI does not stand a chance to replace humans - they can augment their work. AI has evolved into a strong tool for creativity, empowering artists while also encouraging new kinds of self-expression, such as augmented reality effects, providing fashion advice, and even developing new dance routines. To conclude, humans and AI when put together can open enormous creative opportunities and do great things.