This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Eugune Wei, writing on his blog, about the “Magic iPod”: How such work is received by a human audience is about more than its intrinsic qualities, however. In an objective competition like a game of Go, or when considering a mashup which is simply the synthesis of existing creative works, I suspect humans will be comfortable with acknowledging the achievements of an algorithm. With original creative works, however, like music, novels, movies, I suspect humans will recoil from even intrinsically appealing creation if it was written by a computer program. Call it some variant of the uncanny valley effect. We have a romantic attachment to human creation, and it may take a generation of people passing on before we overcome that cultural aversion. Expand - View Original
Kinda felt like Wei jumped past the question of "Can a computer make an art?" I think that it may be next to impossible to reach a point where a work of "culture" is attributed solely to a machine/A.I. My guess is that if work of art created by an algorithm receives any kind of acclaim, people will look back for any instance of human involvement in the work, or in programming the algorithm "author", and attribute creation of the work to the human interventionist. Audiences will be so invested in finding humanity in their art that the machines will almost always be considered a conduit for their programmer/user's creative expression, and at best would be considered a collaborator that enhanced a human's creative work.