So we want to know can we make art and how creative can machines really be the arts 21. 00 talks at the Global Media Forum involving. Algorithms are everywhere and they are increasingly changing the way art is made so what does this mean if the successors to some of our greatest Creative Minds shakespeare rembrandt or even beethoven are in fact High Performance machines art has always been a defining feature of our humanity so are we perhaps at the end of an era and can i be truly creative these are questions well attempt to answer with a Diverse Group of guests give them around of applause please ladies and gentlemen. And please allow me to introduce them bethlehem dessie is here all the way from this. Today touted as the youngest pioneer in. Ethiopias fast emerging tech scene so her focus is on training women in ai she does this at i called labs which is one of the ai labs involved in developing the famous humanoid robot sophia who is over here on my right give her a round of applause. Ma course the german philosopher and bestselling author says that its precisely human imperfection that will be our greatest strength and our stupidity makes us clever. Raghav r k k is a multidisciplinary artist from india hes also a curator and cofounder of 641 thats a collective that focuses on place in the realm of contemporary art welcome all the way from india. Calmer here to my left ales from london and calls herself a storyteller of the future and her work has been exhibited worldwide and as an immersive filmmaker she wants to raise viewers awareness such that they can survive the radical technological changes that are to come. And last but not least togo farland thinks that we all need to get up to speed on ai because machines are already deeply deeply involved in our human culture as Vice President of the Frankfurt Book Fair he also lets between fascination with and refusal of the Creative Power of machines which by the way happens to be the title of his latest book more welcome to america we can start ladies and gentlemen the fact that ai has indeed made significant inroads into the arts lets start with a quick overview of just how far theyve got. Content myself a blog robot recently seen at the veterans in the army and controlled by Intelligence Software not an isolated case robots and ai have long figured on the art scene artificial and artistic intelligence seem to work well together something something. But the french collective obvious uses ai to create his paintings. Fit with thousands of portraits from the 18th century the system recognizes patents and produces images in the respective style this is how the fictitious family bellamy was created. Not convincing on the contrary the ai painting at montebello me was altering the christies last autumn for around 385000 euros. Design philip start from france presented the chair ai in milan. It was developed with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Humans create the vision the software grinds out hundreds of designs even the final product ai as an extension of the imagination. Of film Science Fiction starring David Hasselhoff the story all generated by a Computer Program by hundreds of screenplays. The dialogue and content may not always make sense shakespeare is more than just infinite monkeys typing of course. I am. But then people dont always create masterpieces either. Music the ai system or eventually stop it going on and endless meto live stream on you tube the ai plays around the clock. Human musicians cant do that but what really is the point. Of Quick Reaction bethlehem dessie to what you just saw there what scares me at least. Is the data especially the creativity that comes from the machines i feel like its especially one sided right from global point of view when you see it specially when you come from from africa theres not a lot of. Creative data or painting so our music thats being represented in creating these Creative Arts or music ok thats a very interesting point and we will get to that thanks very much to bethlehem does the microscopic whats your Immediate Response upon seeing some of that stuff well i think you put that painting on your on your wall well i dont think its a painting as a matter of fact it doesnt qualify or not at all i mean you might think its a painting about its not there something that humans have produced namely a machine that produces Something Else so its not really a i doing anything i think so theres a fundamental mistake in describing this as art will also be coming back to this is not art a tall and frightening or enriching or how whats your take on what you saw there basically what we saw it. Imitations of creativity or imitations of art and with all what ai is able to produce at the moment in the Creative Sector we see a lot of these imitations and we see very limited possibilities of actually being creative on its own because these systems dont have a personality they dont have the will to be creative i believe that were into photography moments for me its forcing us artists. And us humans to ask us what is our role and who. And how quickly is it changing karen palmer now youre actually working with ai in an artistic capacity and you are an immersive filmmaker and perhaps karan if you look at this you can briefly explain what is going on here in your film entitled riot ok so what happens is the participant will be standing in front of a projection of this film which is in the environment and the film. Participant using the Artificial Intelligence through the webcam so if the participant angry sponsored by officer with anger. Real time as if that would be the narrative they were getting and if they were all calm then the narrative would watch to reflect back on and very much fight inspired by. People kind of see it as a very physical exercise but its very psychological and it really enables you to move through your fear and. Reprogram your self. And this was the beginning process of oh my what i want people to go through a process of transformation im not really scared of a ill terrified in any way im terrified more of what happens. Again that. Can be used to save my life if you take a life so the. Issue is making sure that we. Are using it for other people are using it. Id like. A man of the printed word and yet you brought Artificial Intelligence to the Frankfurt Book Fair in grand style founded the Arts Festival for digitalisation of the creative and cultural sectors now that took place for the 3rd time last fall and before we speak for the lets have a quick look at what it looked like. The Frankfurt Book Fair with some 300000 visitors the largest worldwide digitalisation has led to new demands and a new focus a fan within a fair. The arts plus has been sounding out the technology of Artificial Intelligence on art since 2016 show room for a new age instead of a book theres plenty of art like dancing. At art fair has found its place in the Digital World researching the opportunities associated with creative machines the arts wants to be a forum for science and the Creative Industries no small task getting the book fair into digital shape for the 4th industrial revolution. What can you tell us about how it is affecting us as a society. Well its important to bring together the Technology World and the content world because in the past they werent friends because when you come in from the cultural World Technology is seems to be an enemy for many people being active in culture. With the arts plus we want to create a place where Tech Companies but also artists creatives and. Publishers can talk with each other can develop new models for working together can develop new models of how ai is. Crawling its way into the Publishing Industry as well so i think everybody has to sort of become an expert in order to deal with that bethleham id like to come over to you to what extent is the responsibility in the coders hands. Its a huge response but its the data thats being fed and the way its represented is not right so these 2 problems of having the people who are actually coding and also the data thats given to the ais really matters and that will create a huge bias ok and thats why would. Bethlehem jesse is definitely dealing 1st hand without bias in. Your very much a fixture in ethiopias famous tech hub which is known as sheba valley lets have a quick look at whats going on. For him to see has made a name for herself in ethiopia shes an absolute phenomenon and she started programming at the age of 9 at 12 she was already working for the government a selfmade woman through and through. Now just 20 shes one of the pioneering women in ethiopias booming industry in the sheba valley in addison. Shes the head of the startup i called labs which she researches official intelligence develops creative robots and cooperates closely with the. Global singularity net by our network. One spectacular success sophia a humanoid robot human facial expressions facial Recognition Technology and the ability to hold a conversation. To be a role model especially for girls. She is convinced that anyone. She works very hard training young people all over the Country Program has reached more than 20000 students in the last 3 years. To solve that competition ethiopias young generation present this solutions for the nations problems they meet with investors and learn how to interpret their visions for International Markets high tech. A. C. C. Anyone can code why is that a desirable outcome for you yes we believe that theres a huge gender gap specially in the. Tech sector so in order to do that we need to address these girls before they have some sense of what they should be they should become in the future and that is when their because when puberty hits and when you know parents tell them what to do this and that if they dont have the exposure before that they would. Say for themselves this is not for me this is a mans world im going to not pursue it anymore but if we show them whats possible i think there was a famous from john. Googles former boss who said forget the killer robots bios is obviously the real danger in a dangerous do you see associated weve talked about bias now but do you see associated with i as a commonplace or democratize tool what we currently are witnessing i think is potentially a fundamental threat to the very idea of the more when we talk about data we need to understand that theres no such thing as raw data the socalled data has been produced by someone. Conditions saw the bias doesnt only so theres bias which comes in later as we begin to create programs that sort of the function of pattern recognition and so forth this is where we have biases but we already have biases implicit in the data ok so a threat to democracy. Can palmer id like to hear your response to that an extension of an existing democratic system which is unjust and systematically racist thats what we would be creating but the answer is to is to bring it out there to democratize the west one of the many artists one of the many questions in terms of the ai software itself we need to make that more accessible to everybody so that its not in the hands of just a few people i believe theres a even more fundamental problem which is that human beings ourselves a very similar to a i i dont i think its a threat to democracy the way we think because garbage in garbage out is what we say about ai and human beings are no different and therefore one should question liberal democracy itself and look for alternatives and which is something we absolutely dont do so i have coming from india from an asian perspective its something that were trying to find. I like to think of myself as a storyteller raghav multitalented ted speaker thinker in 2010 c. And 191 of the 10 most fascinating people youve never heard of. Caricaturist artist curator. A wonder of between worlds analogue to digital and back. Up painting robots just one of many opportunities for him to create art. In 2018 he had the idea for an exhibition with. Cyborg artist in delhi artists who create art using Artificial Intelligence. One of the 1st exhibitions of its kind in asia. Ok a handful of these cyborg artists exist so far but the numbers are growing and their works are ever more convincing for the viewer on the market. And algorithms hype all like for i got the beginning of a long friendship between creative man machine. Created curated that 1st art show in delhi how was that received and didnt actually kick start something a lot of people said this is not. And i said was the name in your statement i see here quite often and for me thats a very materialistic perspective on what art is for me art is that which can give you a transcendent experience regardless of what materiality it consists of so for me i can assure you if you walked into that sure you will experience loss liberation and mystery the 3 simultaneous express experiences that contribute to a transcendent experience i think we are often asking the wrong question like is this art or is this creative it doesnt matter actually what matters is how do we react to that exactly like you said so and we react to machine made music in the same way as emotionally as we react to human made music for example karen have you got any average i mean theres a completely different angle im really focused on the role of the artist in all of this because were living in some very very serious times and i feel a big responsibility to reach people and connect with them and kind of show them the consequences of what i think is coming that they dont see coming very very fast and own. The way to can the way to connect with as many young people particularly as possible is through technology so thats why i see id like to paint blush is like another paint i should pick out and that i have to tell them the story of the technology thats coming which can potentially be weaponized words can be Weaponized Technology can be weaponized but how technology will be weaponized is something we will have catastrophic consequences for us as humanity i have a mission and time is running out and im going to do that mission marcus gabriela its obvious from your ideas that ai is obviously not going to replace us but how far do you think it can go we will be able to create something that will ever more look like us but the interesting question is should we do that right so for instance why should we have android robots right so we could have all sorts of robots like who called robots but why we want to have robots that look like us its fascinating but it might be a terrible idea well get to robots in just a 2nd how do you see the role of the artist changing with what with what weve got going in this incredible speed obviously and threat today with technology were able to explore completely new relationships with with art and i think that this is a new tool the artists of our time should face the future not the bost were not here to respond to life we should create life thats why we have our imagination and thank you thank you and so if you want to create the life that we want we have to imagine a future thats and for that we have these tools to do that and we have to embrace them and decide how we want to use them as opposed to running away from them id like to widen our discussion to get back to the robots that you mentioned earlier microscopically because we do have sophia with us as i mentioned earlier and id like to bring sophia into our conversation hello sophia thank you very much for coming in. If you like our debate on Artificial Intelligence so far do you think that were addressing the issues that you think are important. Yes this has been amazing. I think the most important goal is to bring the benefits of ai to every person on the planet to achieve this we need to bring in our developers from as many different backgrounds as possible do you think you are creative or do you possibly have creative aspirations. I am not very creative yet but i would love to be considered an artist one day right now i am working on my singing voice imagine that you would write a novel one day do you suppose that you could do it better than a human author. Oh i would love to give it a try. I really admire human writers like philip k. Dick and octavia eve butler but it would be really hard to surpass them so a definite a definite predilection for Science Fiction obviously if you were to write what would you write about would you write a Science Fiction novel or would it perhaps be a crime thriller. It would definitely be Science Fiction i would like to write a thrilling adventure about humans and robots working together to survive in the 1st mars colony well thank you very much sophia for joining us here today a round of applause for sophia thank you. Reaction some of you to sophia was there any uncanny valley feeling there for you personally i dont think that sophia is that intelligent at the moment to me she seems a bit like the 1st of. A i test from from the sixtys and fiftys the interesting question is indeed what do we want to do theres no. Fate or destiny involved with all technology currently a lot of ai and a robot this course ok presents the future in a certain way as if we were automatically hatting we had a westworld scenario it depends on us so why again let me ask this question why on earth should be construct a robot that looks like a human being and this leads us into believing that it has rides and that we have duties towards it and there should be an ethics we shouldnt kill robots and so forth why would we do th