I always thought it to be a bit anthropocentric to assume that art is a harder problem than say, exploring meaningful theorems in math. Art is basically learning what the human brain and sensory processing find pleasant, in certain ways. Sure, I believe that creating very fine art with deep meanings might be hard, but consumer-grade stuff? I can readily believe that that is pretty automatable given enough training data. Journalists in my country already mostly copy-and-paste from a central agency...
> art is a harder problem than say, exploring meaningful theorems in math
I think it is not all that difficult to argue that math is art.
Sure, some questions posed by mathematicians (such as "Is god's number 20?") can be proven by computers with rote brute force, but the actual creative process of playing with a given system, adding and removing constraints, and seeing what emerges is very much a creative and artistic process.
One of the easiest ways to see this is to read a good math paper. They're rare, but good pieces of math can spark the same sort of feelings that a good pieces of art does.
Well, that depends on what counts as art I suppose. If you are reductionistic enough, I'm fairly certain you could throw in almost any meaningful creative human endeavor in there.
But I mean it in the sense: Sensory inputs that evoke certain emotions (awe, fear, joy...) in the human brain - that should encompass most things people immediately associate with the term.
This seems a bit naive and shallow, also when you talk about Art are you talking in the sense of painting and drawing? Or a more general sense of creation?
How is this more "naive and shallow" than the assertion that art is somehow inconquerable by machines because it is supposedly so hard, without any evidence for this claim?
I personally think the definition in Wikipedia captures my sentiment quite well:
> Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual ideas, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.
Since I limited my discussion to art meant to be consumed for "consumer-grade" entertainment purposes, I'd focus more on the last part. I just think that it is possible, maybe even likely, that by using ML, we may at one point be able to "pinpoint" what humans, perceive to have "beauty and emotional" power and generate that. Have the networks learn the same rules that artists learn indirectly, so to speak. And I while this is probably a really hard problem, I don't see why this should be the "last" problem to be solved - we seem quite a bit closer here than we are in many other domains.
