Creative AI

Currently live-streaming on YouTube is a non-stop, algorithmically-generated torrent of technical death metal, and regardless of one’s personal musical taste, it’s undeniably an impressive example of machine-driven creativity.

At the rate AI-generated music is progressing, it could be old-fashioned to manually compose songs in as little as a decade. The latest step forward comes with the release of "Break Free," from the album IAMAI, for which all the music is entirely written and produced by artificial intelligence.

​Over the past 12 months we've witnessed an explosion of AI generated art from machines composing pop music to writing film screenplays. Here is a run-down of some of the most interesting, and amusing, developments in computer generated creativity.

What happens when an artificial intelligence system is tasked with making a trailer to a horror movie about an artificially enhanced human hybrid? We now have the answer.

Over recent years, we've seen artificial intelligence systems designed to write software, compose music, paint works of art, and even pen news articles, but how close are we to having machines pen our blockbuster films?

Researchers from the University of Illinois are developing a computer system capable of communicating with humans through the medium of jazz. The project forms part of DARPA's Communicating with Computers (CwC) program, approaching robot communication skills from a very different direction.

In this final part of our deep dive into the world of computational creativity, we turn to the underlying ideas and challenges that face the field as a whole as researchers grapple with questions of non-human creativity and public fears about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Algorithms can already produce remarkable architecture of incredible detail, that never would have been possible before computers and modern fabrication techniques. Now there are robotic craftsmen under development, that may soon add a touch of uniqueness to stock standard buildings.

Painting might be the last thing you'd expect computers to excel at, but artificial intelligence researchers are proving that computers can in fact generate paintings and other kinds of visual art with a high degree of skill and, arguably, imagination.

We communicate with stories, and now we're training our computers to do the same. By writing sets of rules and instructions of varying complexity, artificial intelligence experts can enable computers to write stories both real and fictional – with big implications for the future.

Artificial intelligence research is opening new avenues in the ever-evolving dance between human game developers and their algorithmically-intelligent tools. Procedural generation can now create universes, game mechanics, and even complete, standalone 2D and 3D games.

Computer algorithms and artificial intelligence programs are fast approaching the level of humans in music composition, and AI researchers say they computers have immense capacity for creativity. But what does computer-authored music sound like? Why do it? And how is it changing music creation?