Last week we opened up a new thread on USV.com to think about and discuss the intersection of creativity (art) and artificial intelligence.
Added a new thread to https://t.co/9FxMEQwEoa: Creative A.I. https://t.co/ZphcTt77vb
A few more to come soon
— Jonathan Libov (@libovness) March 3, 2016
We have seen a lot of interesting companies in this area but have not yet made an investment.
Of course, the entire notion that machines will help us make art or even make it without human intervention gets to the essence of what art and creativity are.
Last summer I posted an art project by Ian Cheng that my daughter was involved in. The cool thing about that art project is that it evolves over time based on rules provided to a machine. The art is initially made by humans but it evolves and changes over time using a machine. That is one of many interesting ideas that artists are exploring at the intersection of creativity and computing.
An existential question that society is grappling with right now is how humans and machines will co-exist in the future. And one of the roles of art, maybe it’s most important role, is to force us to confront issues like this.
So while the idea of using a machine to make a song or an image or a novel or a sculpture without human intervention is at some level disturbing, it is also revealing. We expect that artists will push the envelope of what is possible with technology and we also expect that technologists and entrepreneurs will be willing collaborators in this effort.
Whether this will lead to interesting investment opportunities is anyone’s guess, but we think it might. And so we are going to spend some of our time and energy thinking about it and we’ve created a public space to do that. If you are interested in this area you can follow the thread and contribute to it here.
