Sensilab Creative AI Podcast

This week we delve into the depths of Instagram and ask if it's possible to be a successful artist on Instagram. What are the benefits and hurdles to getting recognised as an Instagram artist? Join Jon, Nina and Lucija as they explore the pros and cons of the social media behemoth!

We're back in 2021! This week we discuss the topic of the moment: NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens (Nifties). With the recent sale of artworks such as Beeple's "Everydays" selling for $69 million, the art world is taking notice of the latest offshoot of cryptocurrencies. We discuss the concepts of reproducibility, ownership and ask what NFTs will mean for the future of digital art.

With many countries going into lockdown again, we review several recent online conference events in Creative AI and Computational Creativity, including ICCC and Ars Electronica. We also look at a recent Guardian article that was written by GPT-3 and discuss the implications of AI journalism

In today's episode we interview artist Patrick Tresset. For more than a decade Patrick has been developing robots that sketch and draw. Patricks work is a unique combination of performance, robotics and art. Join Jon and Nina as they discuss Patrick's work and his views on AI and Art. Find out more on his website: https://patricktresset.com/

With many countries in lockdown due to the global pandemic, in this episode we reflect on how much things have changed over the last few months. How will work and education change now that many people are spending so much time on-line? Working at home is now the norm and many people are questioning if we should ever return to the traditional workplace. What is lost or gained when so many aspects of human relationships turn virtual? And how will all this change creative AI research? Join our team as they reflect on a new, post-pandemic world.

The SensiLab Creative AI podcast is back for 2020! To kick things off for this year, we talk to Creative AI curator, Luba Elliott. Luba is well know for her regular Creative AI newsletter and for running the workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design at the NeurIPS conference. Join podcast hosts Jon and Nina as they chat with Luba about the field of Creative AI and where it is heading.

We've reached the end of 2019, so for this extended episode we look back on the highs and lows of Creative AI in 2019 and offer our predictions for the state-of-the-art in 2020. The discussion covers everything from GAN Art to the recent UK election so, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride! We'll see you on the flip side in 2020...

This week we discuss the release of the 1.5 billion parameter model of the GPT-2 neural network. Released by OpenAI, the GPT-2 is a language model trained to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. While it's been around for some time in scaled-back forms, the release of the full model was previously considered "too dangerous" for the Internet. Why the change? Listen in as we discuss the implications of "big AI", where the resources to train very large models are beyond what most individuals or even universities can afford. And what about the energy costs for all those GPUs/TPUs computing away a gradient descent for weeks or months on end? Should there be a "training shame" (utbildningskam in Swedish) for big, energy hungry models?

Another big week in Creative AI! The announcement of the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology, A discussion pondering if “Robots could ever become artists” at the Science Museum in London, plus the release of a new book on AI-powered creativity. At that’s before we get to today’s topic: does AI need to be able to explain how it arrived at a decision? Join podcast regulars Jon, Nina and Dilpreet along with our new special guest star, Professor Simon Colton to find out more.

This week the Sensilab CreativeAI podcast goes live at the Monash School of Film, Media and Journalism's Creative Directions festival! Hosted by SensiLab Engagement coordinator, Lizzie Crouch, join podcast regulars Jon and Nina in conversation with Seb Chan, CXO at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. The panel discuss the impact and implications of AI for the cultural and museum sector.

Jon is back from this year’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. Ars is one of the biggest festivals of its kind, probing the interactions of Art, Technology and Society, and this year was its 40th anniversary. The stats are impressive: 5 days, 16 locations, 501 exhibits, 548 individual events, 1,449 artists and scientists from 45 countries, 110,000 visitors. We review the festival, in particular the impact of AI on the artworks, discussions and presentations.

AI is big: big in terms of power consumption, cost and number of GPUs you need to machine learn your "big data". But can AI be tiny? Small, low cost, low power but useful - Jon, Nina and Dilpreet discuss some example Tiny AI projects and their implications for the future.

Ever been in an art gallery and wondered if something was really art? Well, wonder no more: a handy new app allows you to harness the power of AI to decide on the question: “is that art… or not?”

Our topic this week is Surveillance AI. One of the biggest — if not the biggest — applications of AI technologies is surveillance. From face recognition and analysis to recommender systems, new AI and Machine Learning techniques are being employed to handle the data explosion. How long before automated surveillance becomes automated response?

Its 2019: how good is AI? Good in the sense of being good at the kind of intelligence it is programmed for, and good in the sense of being good for humanity. We don't shy away from the big questions, so tune in to the Creative AI podcast to find out how good AI really is!

How is AI portrayed in cinema? This week, Jon, Nina and Dilpreet go to the movies, discussing the role of AI in some of Western cinema’s most interesting takes on Artificial Intelligence.

This week we take a look at the new round of “Deep Fakes” making their way across the internet. Deep Fakes are realistic looking and sounding videos – often of well known people – synthesised using deep learning techniques. Join Jon, Nina and Dilpreet as they discuss the implications of a world where you can’t be certain what is real and what is fake anymore.

Our podcast this week looks at a new exhibition on AI art that opened at the Barbican centre in London. *AI: More than Human* is an ambitious exhibition that explores the relationship between humans and AI technology. The show has received mixed reviews, particularly from art critics. Join Creative AI researchers Jon, Nina and Dilpreet as they unpack why AI Art exhibitions are problematic and might not be as favourable to art critics as traditional exhibitions of human art.

In this week's Creative AI podcast Jon and Nina talk with former neuroscientist and now design PhD researcher, Hannah Korsmeyer, to discuss issues of bias in AI. Using Hannah's research intervention "Gendertron" they examine how playful AI devices can be used to start conversations around issues and assumptions about gender and other biases in AI and technology.

In this week's Creative AI podcast, Jon and Nina chat with computer artist Andy Lomas on the topic of artistic collaboration with AI. Andy talks about his work and the collaboration with SensiLab's Creative AI team on his "Species Explorer" Software and look at some of the roles AI can play to help artists exploit complex generative systems.

In this episode we discuss the role of emotion in developing creative AI. Affective computing, artificial emotional intelligence, or emotion AI is a rapidly developing area for artificial intelligence. What role does emotion play in understanding intelligence and how can we use emotion to better relate to non-human intelligence?

In this week's Creative AI podcast we discuss the rise of AI generated music and its impact on music composition and production commercially. While algorithmic approaches to music generation have been studied in academia for many decades, over the last few years a growing number of commercial startups have formed around offering "AI" assistance to music composition and production. Our team unpacks some of the major issues around automated music generation and comments on the state-of-the-art.

The Creative AI group at SensiLab meets every week to talk about our research topics. These meetings often turn into discussions on various aspects of Creative AI. News, events, history and opinions are raised and debated. Starting this week we have begun recording highlights of this discussion in the hope that it sparks some input from the wider community. This week we talked about about AI Art, Auctions and Authorship. Late last year members of the ai.SensiLab team wrote a paper for the 2019 EvoMUSART conference on Autonomy, Authenticity, Authorship and Intention in computer generated art. The paper frames the current discussion around AI Art, driven largely by the Christies Auction last year, in the context of more than fifty years of debate, concern and excitment around these issues. The podcast provides a casual and subjective introduction to different topics in Creative AI and we encourage anyone who listens to reach out through twitter or email to add their thoughts.