Harold Cohen once said of his painting program AARON (http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html):
AARON exists; it generates objects that hold their own more than adequately, in human terms, in any gathering of similar, but human-produced, objects, and it does so with a stylistic consistency that reveals an identity as clearly as any human artist’s does. It does these things, moreover, without my own intervention. I do not believe that AARON constitutes an existence proof of the power of machines to think, or to be creative, or to be self-aware, to display any of those attributes coined specifically to explain something about ourselves. It constitutes an existence proof of the power of machines to do some of the things we had assumed required thought, and which we still suppose would require thought, and creativity, and self-awareness, of a human being.
If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the ‘real thing?’ If it is not thinking, what exactly is it doing?
These last questions infect more or less all discourse about computers and creativity, or indeed computers and intelligence. Perhaps to answer them we need a much clearer idea about what “intelligence” and “creativity” actually are. A lot of hot air has been generated around those terms, and they are arguably no closer to being clarified. What we can be reasonably clear about is what computation is, what computers are actually doing. We can characterise computational processes and consider their potential, and whether they have limits. But this seems to leave much still open.
Later on Cohen said (http://crca.ucsd.edu/%7Ehcohen/cohenpdf/colouringwithoutseeing.pdf):
I don’t regard AARON as being creative; and I won’t, until I see the program doing things it couldn’t have done as a direct result of what I had put into it. That isn’t currently possible, and I am unable to offer myself any assurances that it will be possible in the future. On the other hand I don’t think I’ve said anything to indicate definitively that it isn’t possible. Many of the things we see computer programs doing today would have been regarded as impossible a couple of decades ago; AARON is surely one of them.
Can we ever get beyond this pragmatic agnosticism?
e|thos 