Interview: ANGELINA, the creative - but 'eerie' - artificial intelligence

Can a computer make art? It’s a question that has been debated for decades - although if you ask  online AI “chat machine” Cleverbot, the answer is simple - “Yes”

The London Symphony Orchestra has performed works written by computers, and Amazon has sold books written by software, while a robot chef, PIERRE, writes recipes which require “0.26 slices of bacon”  - but one London researcher’s creation, an Artificial Intelligence called ANGELINA, creates worlds, all by “herself”.

ANGELINA’S latest work is a 3D game called To That Sect - a maroon and grey maze filled with strange statues, and even weirder noises, all chosen by the AI “herself”.

ANGELINA harvests her own “ideas” from the internet, and her creator, Michael Cook of Imperial College admits that her work is often “creepy” - and “unhuman.” He believes, though, that game design will increasingly be handed over to AIs like Angelina.

“I think a lot of the creepiness of artificial intelligence comes from things it gets wrong for very unhuman reasons,” Cook says. “A human would notice that the spinning objects in the maze are unnatural - to a computer, it’s not a detail it notices. That’s why it unsettles us.”

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The game was shown off at the Ludum Dare competition for DIY games - and won praise. The game itself is a standard maze adventure (Cook says that he feeds some details to ANGELINA “like a jigsaw”) but the look, the sound, the world, are all made by ANGELINA herself.

“That’s the stuff that really makes an impact,” Cook says, “Sound effects and artwork - ANGELINA goes online to find things and has a lot more freedom. This makes the results rather unpredictable indeed!”

Cook says that ANGELINA is getting to a point where, “It'll be hard to say it's not being creative.
We're on the cusp of things. Up until now we've really been finding our feet. But we're beginning to build software that is unpredictable, inventive, appreciative, self-improving. ANGELINA can generate simple bits of program code now. When it starts to get better at this, that’s something we could call creativity.”

The London Symphony Orchestra has performed works composed by a computer cluster, Iamus, which ‘writes’ pieces of classical music in eight minutes. It’s debut piece, entitled ‘Hello World!’ premiered in 2011. The researchers had to inform the programme facts, such as the fact that certain chords are impossible due to humans having five fingers.

The ‘painting robot’ eDavid creates works using a computer-controlled arm adapted from a welding machine, and uses five brushes to paint on canvas. Its makers admit it is ‘unaware’ of what it is creating. At Spain’s Sonar festival, two robot arms adapted from factory equipment performed a DJ set.

Cook says, “There are a huge number of researchers looking into this idea - my supervisor, Simon Colton, has done machine-made poetry. Another researcher, Dan Ventura has built systems that write music to go with lyrics - or, and this is my favourite, generates recipes for soup.”

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Computer-made soup may lack a certain warming appeal that recipes designed by humans tend to have - one recipe by ventura’s PIERRE, entitled 'Divine Water With Sirloin', mixes, “yellow onion, black bean, 0.87 ounces of veal and 1.46 dashes of Worcestershire Sauce.”

When posted on cooking forums, people tended to be confused by PIERRE’s instructions to add, for instance, “0.26 slices of bacon.”

“You name a medium, someone has tried to dabble with creativity in it,” says Cook. “Though some mediums (like Music) are more developed than others.

Cook says that programs like ANGELINA will find a use in game-making - as some games already ‘randomly generate’ terrain, for instance, such as the hit dungeon adventure Diablo and its sequels.

He says, though, that rather than games turning into the “unhuman” mazes ANGELINA currently makes, it will free up game-makers to be creative. “I think in most cases we'll only hand over control if it lets us focus on something we're more passionate about. Generating levels in a game like Diablo lets you spend more time on making the rules exciting or drawing more art. I think that trend will continue - videogames are made by creative people, and those people won't want to give something to a computer to do unless they think it makes them more creative. That's the great thing about software like this - it can help people be even more creative, rather than taking creativity away from them.”

The one concept he admits his creation struggles to grasp is the idea of ‘fun'.  “Learning what's fun might be tricky,” he says. “There's so many different ideas for fun, or what a videogame should be about. What might be useful, though, is for ANGELINA to learn about a particular group of people, and find out what they think is fun. A bit like how creative companies sometimes target a demographic, and try to understand what that group needs or likes.”

The responses to her latest game have given Cook ideas. He says: “Watching the responses to ANGELINA is helping me understand what is important to people about creativity, humanity and computer software. A big part of computational creativity is philosophy - she is less free and creative in her currrent state,  but I think certainly intelligent still.”