grow my ears the computer said
5 Mar
I saw this image by Samuel Zuder and thought I’d like to try photographing portraits with the subject in the space between two cars at some point too. No doubt I’d come up with a recognizably “similar” photograph, but ideally, I’d hope to go beyond the concept and inject my own photo with something that is also recognizably me. The problem is never really whether you’re allowed to copy, but with how forthcoming you are about your “sources” and process. (Um, remember Edgar Martins?) Ideas spread and people reinvent the wheel all the time – it’s just bad form to do it and claim originality.
In my mind the claim that there is no such thing as a the exact same photo is just ridiculous. If you go to the exact same spot, with the exact same format camera, with the exact same focal length of lens and take the exact same exposure under very similar weather conditions, you will get a virtually identical photo, given that the place hasn’t changed too much. Of course, the chances of that happening are very low, but considering the amount of photography going on, it’s not surprising that it could happen. The issue in the Burdeny and Leong ruckus is that multiple photos were so similar and in fact seemed to be processed very similarly in addition to being composed almost identically. What are the chances of that?
Listen first, ask questions later
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But all that isn’t very interesting. What I’m curious about is what happens when computers go beyond telling me that I like “Visually-striking Cerebral Dramas” and “Dark Foreign Movies based on real life,” to actually composing in the style of select artists. David Cope has been writing algorithms – Emmy and Emily Howell – that produce new computer-generated works in the style of classical composers. He asked people to guess which of two pieces was a computer-composed piece and which was a real Bach. (Makes me think of R is for Replicant at the Wattis gallery, a show that was inspired by the Voight-Kampff test to distinguish real people from replicants in Bladerunner. Speaking of plagiarism – isn’t that essentially a Turing test?)
When Emmy’s Bach pieces were first performed in 1987, they were met with stunned silence. Two years later, a series of performances at the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival was panned by a music critic — two weeks before the performance. When Cope played “the game” in front of an audience, asking which pieces were real Bach and which were Emmy-written Bach, most people couldn’t tell the difference. Many were angry; few understood the point of the exercise.
Though musicians and composers were often skeptical, Cope soon attracted worldwide notice, especially from scientists interested in artificial intelligence and the small, promising field called artificial creativity. They have varying goals, though most seek to better understand human creativity by modeling it in a machine. Many artificial creativity programs use a method called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity. In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.
from “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer“ (thanks, Captain Dee!)
Is this Epagogix and Platinum Blue are going? From predicting and prescribing hits to actually writing them? If one person copying another causes this sort of controversy, imagine what will happen anyone can do as Cope did when he “clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and [Emmy] spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.”
You can hear more excerpts from the computer-generated pieces in the article as well as on his website. When I heard them, without knowing what they were, I did think that they sounded derivative of some classical composer I couldn’t put my finger on but it didn’t occur to me that they hadn’t been written by a person. If I were more familiar with Bach, maybe the connection as well as the differences would be more obvious. But I don’t like Bach, though I did like them. What the hell does that mean?
