Scott “Will” Chambers is an artist who studied cosmology and then became an artificial intelligence and robot strategist, technologist and innovator.

On December 23, 2020, Scott “Will” Chambers published a post on Towards Data Scince. Let's read a few paragraphs from the post posted by the artist.

I am working on an oil painting that I started months ago; or perhaps it has been a year. When I began at that fuzzy beginning, I had tried a new approach. I had skipped the dead coat that I tend to use to establish the form and values of the composition, and leaped straight to laying in strokes of color. The composition was not right. The values and form were wanting. I struggled to get the desired optical effects that oil paints allow. I now recall why I had decided to wrap the large canvas in a bed sheet and store the unfinished piece those many months ago. I have labored the past weeks to cover the mishap with a white and umber dead coat. I should had done this in the first place.

Oil painting is my hobby. Applied artificial intelligence is what I do for a living. And what a time it is to be an artificial intelligence engineer! It is an uncommon day that passes when one does not encounter discourse on artificial intelligence research and practice.

There are many claims of artificial intelligence creating art. I will concede that upon inspection, many generated images are artistic and aesthetic. And the research is fascinating.

But are Creative Adversarial Network creating art?

Artificial art lacks its own intrinsic psychic meaning to the agent. AI agents are not creating art; rather, they are replicating art. For example, the Creative Adversarial Network agents were trained on tens of thousands of original artworks created by humans. 

When a Creative Adversarial Network agent generates a new image, it is not drawing upon its personal or collective experiences, neither conscious nor unconscious. It’s generated images are predicated on human experiences, as manifest in the symbols and archetypes captured in our human artwork on which the Creative Adversarial Network agent is conditioned and trained.

This explains why humans resonate with the Creative Adversarial NetworkS artificial art: after all, it is capturing our human experiences, our human condition, our human existence. The Creative Adversarial Network agent is not creating art because its generated images are not manifestations of the symbols and archetypes swimming in its own unconscious. If fact, the Creative Adversarial Networks do not have psychic structure.

The dead coat of my painting is almost completed. I will finish the piece, eventually; perhaps a year from now. I am not willing to allow an artificial artist to beat me to it. Artificial intelligence might take my factory job but it will keep its hands off my paint brushes, thank you very much.

https://towardsdatascience.com/artificial-intelligence-agents-are-not-artists-9743d5dba2d0