Personal Style: Where do personal style and AI intersect? *

Do we truly have our own sense of personal style, or are we just copying the influencers around us?

Investigating how well AI could copy my own personal style made me think of the nature of personal style. What does that mean in the era of large datasets that seem to contain all styles. Do we somehow just pick and choose from what is out there? What distinctive, original content lies inside of us? Is there nothing new under the sun?

People can slightly unleash themselves from the culture and community of influencers. We are distinct because we can surprisingly change our style. Machine learning that looks at past datasets can’t predict our shedding of old rules and taking in new ones. In addition, people can be exposed to events or engage in experiences that modify their personal style. We can possibly work with the world of AI by curating your own datasets.

Is it good to be guided by external forces acting on our imagination and actions? Maybe. Rules guiding creative behavior allow regular people who have something to say (don’t we all?) to use rules as adjuncts to their innate talents and educated abilities. Recognizing rules related to art and music can open up a wonderful dimension of human potential. Human expression is empowered when everyone is asked to be artistic by those who establish their community’s intellectual ecology. These mentors can encourage silent voices to add alluring qualities and expressive communication to the world around them.

Reducing Creative Expression to a Flow Chart…Yuck

Everyone is creative. However, expressing creativity outside the daily requirements of problem solving and moving into art and music goes through three basic steps.

1. Imagination of creator
2. Technology to implement creation
3. Physiology of viewer

But there is feedback, whether be from how your paint is showing on the canvas or the music to your ears or the feedback from other people (Picasso and Braque are a famous example of productive peer critiques).

It could be modeled as follows:

 

A picture of creative expression

Employing rules to bring personal mental images or musical creations to an audience broadens access to these processes. Seeking to communicate creative impulses with rules and structure extracted from cultural norms and other sources democratized artistic and musical expression. Children learn normative rules in speaking and writing that quickly let them use these abilities to express individual thoughts. A parent understands, “I miss daddy” as well as a lengthy narrative about loneliness and familial connections. A child’s stick figure drawing showing two people holding hands, presents as clear a meaning as a painting of the same thing.

We can quickly use normative rules to engage in art forms that may have traditionally been moderated by human gatekeepers. Introducing these rules can open a corridor for richer expression of ideas. Moreover, coupling these rules with intuitive software, online instruction, and the unfettered communications on the internet, allows more inclusive entrance into creating art and music.

Rules can guide the novice. For example, in music the relationship between notes that make up a chord are established and culturally conditioned. Moreover, the progression of these chords follows commonly recognized sequences. Therefore, one can couple lyrics with a chord progression that turns poetry into music. The visual arts also have rules related to guiding compositions and color. Moreover, artificial intelligence has been used in music and the visual arts to identify and redeploy patterns in new work.

I’m Offended!

Musical composers should be offended at the notion of creating music by simply accompanying lyrics with a rule-based (or sampled) approach. This offends the depth, breadth, and creative majesty of musical composition. A traditionally trained artist will likewise be offended at artwork produced by morphing existing images and applying colors from a standardized color scheme. However, musical and artistic creation can be democratized by identifying patterns and normative rules which are redeployed in a new, personal form.

One Last Thing: People can create surprise

Surprise is an idea that fascinates me and I have written about it in an early blog post. The ability to surprise is a distinctive human attribute that is a challenging notion for AI. However, surprise in one’s environment may be threatening. Both behavioral and neural responses may be rooted in minimizing surprise. Surprise is the inverse of the probability of observing the outcome. People’s expectations are moderated by experience or education to reduce surprise. A baby is surprised by snow falling from the sky, the surprise soon goes away. However, surprise can be enjoyable because it upsets the norm. Too much surprise is unappealing or even frightening, while too little is boring.

Surprise falls between the design concepts of unity (or familiarity/expectations) and variety (or novelty/tension). Unity refers to the manner in which different aspects of art combine to form a sense of wholeness. This is achieved by such means as repetition of visual elements in artwork or audible elements in music. Variety is the opposite. It disrupts repetition by including changing elements. People enjoy variety, such as watching people’s faces. They are symmetrical left to right but not top to bottom; however, they relate in a pleasing way. There is a rhythm to facial movement. In visual art, variety can be the inclusion of different colors, shapes, and textures. In music, variety can be using notes outside the key or by syncopation.

Music and art have many examples of surprise, and these normally carry the distinguishing names of artistic movements, from Impressionism to Jazz. The rules within a tradition are challenged by such works as Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain and Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring. These were overt affronts to the status quo.

Here is a remix of the song with a discussion of process. The remix is at the end.

* Much of the last two blog posts and YouTube song derive from my most recent ASEE paper, Engineering Art: Democratizing artistic expression using normative rules. The proceedings have not been published yet.

Music about a dying shopping mall

Here is a song I wrote about our local declining shopping mall. It's an allegory for the empty nest too, but it is a loss of a communal space, which is sad. The song was sung and produced by some very talented students. Hope you enjoy it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHdshSr0TJ0

AI vesus Art

 

People were not meant to be ignored. We desire to communicate ideas with the transcendence permitted by art.

I compared AI generated images with my own artwork to see how AI performed. I used the text-to-image generation ability of DALL-E and DreamStudio Lite to enter in the intended themes of my art. I tried a variety of text descriptions, including the themes I intended to evoke, to guide the AI system to recreate my artwork.

I failed in this pursuit. The comparative images below show the closest matches. I do recognize that while the artist is trying to communicate ideas with his or her artwork; however, the viewer is part of the process. One mustn’t de-art the art. Perhaps this AI failure is a good thing for artists?

Do we need each other?

 

Do we work better in groups? Consider some high performers in disparate fields that required different levels of community: Picasso, Einstein and Mozart.

Picasso: Needed people

Picasso benefited from his friend’s Georges Braque critiques. They shared all their artwork and were very dependent on the others review. Picasso made the relevance of his relationship with Braque clear, saying, “almost every evening I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. A canvas was not finished until both of us felt it was.” In addition, Picasso benefited from the art community that cleaved from the established art schools, such as Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Would any revolution start without a gathering of like-minded people?

Einstein: Used people

Einstein didn’t think math was useful to a physicist. He only wanted to study what he thought would be useful. For example, he scored poorly in his compulsory French studies. As it turns out, his work in general relativity needed a type of math with which he was unfamiliar. He leaned on his old friend Marcel Grossman to deal with non-Euclidian geometry to give language to the ideas of general relativity. This is the most common category of genius, where people use the knowledge and abilities of others to fill in their gaps, but their vision and insight dominate the pursuit. Michelangelo used thirteen artists to paint the Sistine Chapel. The artists’ names are lost to history and only Michelangelo’s remains.

Mozart: Trained and released

Mozart was unique because he was a lonely genius. He had formal training, his father was a composer and Amadeus Mozart was raised in a musical community. However, he took his training and ran into the night, developing music that was amazing. He grabbed the tools of Western music and the inspiration of Bach to create wonderful things. There are others in this camp, like the poet Emily Dickenson and jazz pianist/composer Oscar Peterson.

 

We often ascribe names to important works as a means of illustrating human potential and elevating our self-concept, but most people do better with colleagues...but sometimes they can hold you back.

We will never see it the same way

 

We will never see space the same way after this summer when the James Webb Space Telescope brings in focused images. The bell of our imagination will have been rung. It with this urgency that artistic expression needs to be put forward. It is useful for the mind to wander and mull over what we desire to see in deep space -- not necessarily what is anticipated.
What if space is ugly? What if it doesn't obey the beautification attempts of the "touched up" images we are commonly fed? What if objects are not all round and controlled by gravity? What if there is a giant cereal box floating in deep space?
Here are a couple of my homages to the space of my imagination. Enjoy the shift in history.

Interface Design

 

  

We are easily frustrated when dealing with interfaces. Things get even tougher if we need to interface with a machine while others watch out of the corner of their eye—or while waiting behind us. Sometimes it is a good way to strike up a desperate conversation, perhaps proving people are generally kind.

Fundamentally, interface design requires discerning acceptable simplification. However, there is a limit on how much you can simplify a design—and you can never win— oversimplification irritates power users.

UX design “commandments” change every year as they strive to structure ideal approaches to human machine interfaces. The meaning of UX and the legion of other "U" acronyms also changes....

Designing interactions should pursue two categories of concerns: 1) simplify and 2) assist user.

1. Simplify

Keep designs consistent and minimalistic. Encourage familiarity by standardizing formats in graphics and text. Avoid unnecessary features and functions. Break complex tasks into manageable sub-tasks.

2. Assist User

Allow perception to drive prediction. Map the design so actions and responses are connected. Disable nonrelevant functions. Use motion to show where screens and information go. Relate to physical world. Remember things for the user, e.g. autofill. Detect and anticipate errors. Spell checker has been a sweet crutch for many of us.

Ok, I guess these are a bunch of “commandments” jammed into two….

Here are examples of human-machine interface challenges from the non-digital world.

Washington DC Metro: Scary and confusing. Need tourist mode.

Cricut Cutting Machine: Manageable and sufficient