Creativity Machines

Next Rembrandt is a computer programme that has analysed Rembrandt's work and created a completely new Rembrandt. Should this be terrifying for anyone who still believes that creative workers will escape automation relatively unscathed?

The Next Rembrandt project involved analysing every Rembrandt, working out the rules of his work and producing algorithms based on those rules – who did he tend to paint, how did they tend to pose etc. It then applied these rules to making an entirely new piece. Adam Greenfield, author of the newly published book Radical Technologies discusses some of the broad implications of Next Rembrandt here.

While the machine-made Rembrandt is not an original and will never be valued as such, it does take the question of the work of art in the age of mechanical production to a whole new level. This has particular ramifications for the creative industries, as we know them.

The top 10 grossing movies of 2016 were franchises based upon established characters and stories. Each franchise has its own rules. Algorithms are built on such rules. 

In 1988 James Cauty and Bill Drummond wrote The Manual (How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way). It was more than an arch art comment on the state of the music business, It was a set of rules for producing a hit single. The band Edelweiss followed the rules to a tee and scored an international hit with ‘Bring Me Edelweiss’. If there are rules to producing massively popular music then, like Kraftwerk but without the humans, a creative machine can potentially do that job.

In advertising, there’s a widely quoted truism that only about 5% of what the industry produces is original.  Most of what is produced is derivative by virtue of being written to creative briefs that are a combination of sector rules, predictable requirements of clients and the equally predictable tastes of award juries. In short, most advertising follows rules and reproduces patterns. The same can be said of design. Again, algorithms love rules.

Which begs the question, is it all over for creativity?

The artist Tacita Dean approached this question from the opposite direction, by demonstrating that anything computerisation can achieve in digital film, she could do by hand with analogue. She did this by manipulating 35mm film and creating intricate effects. Part of the power of her work is that you cannot tell the difference between the original and the machine-produced. However, her processes are time-consuming and, she herself admits, analogue filmmaking will survive but it will likely be as a premium cottage industry.

Will the same be true for Britain’s creative industry? Will our music industry, production houses and agencies be reduced to a few small hot shops employing a fraction of what they do now?

Like Dean, perhaps we need to look at things from the opposite angle. We are about to go through the most far-reaching phase of technological change since the industrial revolution. It is estimated that up to 47% of existing jobs will disappear. New jobs will be created but there will be less jobs overall. Automation will challenge the very nature of work.  But as the world comes to terms with a genuinely post-industrial and potentially postcapitalist state of affairs, we will need human creativity more than ever.  The technology itself will only achieve its full potential with the help of creative minds and original thinkers.

The new world will not be like the old. There is a mantra in Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaways (which will be familiar to Alasdair Gray fans) that we will be living in the first days of a better world.   The future will need original thinkers who can apply imagination to technology and see possibilities forever hidden to pattern readers. Originality, the creative leap, the mould-breaking film or song, these will forever be the gift of the human. Creative machines that replicate past patterns will be limited in their usefulness.

Finally, there is little irony in the fact that Next Rembrandt was created by ad agency, JWT Amsterdam and won numerous advertising awards. Making friends with automation is the way to a better world.