CM Seminar: Professor Jim Whitehead – “Sides Taken: Generative Artists Made by Generative AI”

Title: Sides Taken: Generative Artists Made by Generative AI

Presenter: Dr. Jim Whitehead, Professor of Computational Media and Associate Dean for the Undergraduate Experience in the Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

Description: Can generative AI be creative? Skeptics call large language models “stochastic parrots” that recombine their training data; others grant them creativity but find it pedestrian; a third camp sees genuinely original work. This talk offers evidence for you to weigh.

Sides Taken is a framework for creating autonomous generative artists. Each artist is endowed with dossiers on a few human artists (among them Vera Molnár, Jim Campbell, Okazz, and Verena Loewensberg), notes on craft, and a contract for its code. When creating an artwork, the artist is presented with the most recent pieces in its archive and ability to view the rest. The artist has one obligation: every piece must take sides, writing what it builds upon and what it argues against. When executed, each artwork creates a time-varying interactive display on a 64×64 pixel LED panel. Each artwork thus exists in three media: an argument, software, and a time-varying (interactive) light display. Over time, artists accumulate a lineage of variations and contrasts, record lessons learned from their own successes and failures, and eventually name themselves through an evidence-gated ceremony.

I will present work by two artists, Wake (apprentice name Saccade) and Register (apprentice name Selvedge), trace how each developed distinct themes from different influences, and compare output across language models. Finally, I will observe that Sides Taken performs search without an explicit objective function, with the use of argumentation against an archive achieving similar goals as novelty search. The approach may prove useful well beyond art.

Bio: Jim Whitehead is a Professor of Computational Media and Associate Dean for the Undergraduate Experience in the Baskin School of Engineering. Jim leads the Augmented Design Lab which explores generative art, mixed-initiative co-creative systems, and procedural content generation. Within Baskin Engineering, Jim has helped create the Slugworks creatorspace, and the Experiential Learning Program which holds the Pathways to Research and Lead By Design/Early Design-Build programs. Jim received his PhD from UC Irvine in 2000 with a dissertation on hypertext versioning.

Zoom Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94103955103?pwd=od4ueavRt06ECpwAwqvgofwn5Suyal.1Meeting ID: 941 0395 5103

Passcode: 124806