The Future of AI Art Is Emotions
In this article we’re going to explore how the future of AI is all about emotions from the point of view of a science fiction author.
Ready? Well, start by taking a look at the picture below.
Boy, AI Is Amazing, Isn’t It?
I asked Midjourney to create “a teenage female Jedi knight” for a project I’m working on.
That’s impressive, isn’t it? I certainly couldn’t draw something like that. Even if I could draw, it would take me hours if not days to create this level of detail, shadows, perspective, and even emotions in the eyes. More than that. The current version of Midjourney can show emotions on people’s faces and create a picture that evokes emotions.
However…
The Essence of Being an Artist
I asked Midjourney for something general. Were I to ask Midjourney for a picture I had in my head, it would perform badly. Currently, it would require many many attempts to maybe create some sort of approximation to that image in my head.
The more precise I am as an artist, the harder it is for someone — or something — to be able to create exactly what was in my mind.
For example: The image I would have wanted could have recalled the exact feeling I had when I was nine and playing Star Wars with my friends. The surroundings need to feel the same way they felt then. And that feeling for me, in my head, is expressed in a smell not in an image.
The Jedi knight would have to recall a specific person, their importance to me, their history with me. It’s not just about their looks, but the way they made me feel.
The entire frame in fact, would give off that specific feeling that only I know and have.
This is the essence of art. As a writer, I know that no AI has yet been able to write from my soul a story that’s unique to me. After all, machine learning means that the AI’s create something new by approximating what already exists. Their ‘creativeness’ is in creating a variation of what they know is out there.
My soul is not yet available in public domain so no AI can approximate it yet.
It seems that I’m saying that, as an artist, an AI like Midjourney would be bad at creating the art that come from within me.
And yet…
This isn’t an article telling you that AI isn’t as good as a human at being an artist.
No, I’m here to show you a picture of what the future of AI may bring and how AI will be able to do what I’ve detailed above.
How AI Can Create Art from Our Actual Emotions
Let’s leap together into the future.
Let’s say in the next few years, AI will be able to categorize emotions. I don’t mean that it will be to spot emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, and so on. I mean it will be able to spot the entirety of a specific emotion, just like the moment from my childhood I detailed above.
When I think about that moment, I don’t go explaining it to myself in a thousand words. It’s a smell, it’s a small, subtle feeling.
A single feeling can include a multitude of information about the background, the people who were there, the people who were absent, the importance of the moment in one’s life, how different it was from other moments that came before or after, and a thousand other things.
Now imagine that in the future we are able to categorize each such emotion as a ‘seed’ (meaning, a number). Imagine we could define a seed — a single number that represents everything defined by a single emotion.
In that case, the AI will be able to get the specific number for our unique emotion and give us an image (or a story or a movie, etc.) that gives us that emotion with all its complexity. And then we’d be able to play around with it and ask for small changes.
That, I claim, is where we’re going.
It’s Not That Far
Every single human, from baby to old age, will be able to convey emotions as stories, as images.
Every single person on the planet will be able to be clear about their emotions, about their stories, about what they truly feel.
Every single person on the planet will be able to express themselves in an unprecedented way.
Every single person on the planet will be able to see their own feelings even when they themselves don’t understand them. We will be able to see ourselves for the first time in history.
And, jumping further into the future, maybe we’ll be able to scan babies in the womb and see their emotions. (Hey, I write science fiction author, give me a break. I go far!)
There’s no reason to think that this ability will not come soon. You just wait a few years, it’s coming… and we’ll be able to use AI to do magic and art on a scale unseen before in human history.
