Creative Automotion

In late March of 2019, a YouTube channel by the name of Dadabots began live streaming music. This in itself is not unusual as there are multitudes of channels on the streaming video platform pumping out tunes in just about any genre you can think of. However, the safe money is on the bet that it’s the first channel that’s streaming music made without any human input whatsoever.

Dadabots have engineered an artificial intelligence algorithm, or a “neural network” in their words, that plays death metal endlessly. Waveforms are constantly triggered by a computer that has learned the conventions of death metal music by being exposed to legitimate (and human) artists. Death metal can be a complex and technical genre, and to the untrained ear sounds indistinguishable from something a band would play (not to mention every bit as brutal).

In a vast array of fields from fine art to journalism, creative work is being conceived using artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and 3D printing technologies. And we’re teaching computers how to do it all. The idea that we’re creating machines to do everything humans can - including think creatively - is a scary prospect because of all the dangerous roads that science fiction has told us it can lead us down. Obviously, we’re not embarking on this project to bring about the demise of humankind. So what’s the benefit?

For one, these oncoming technologies can free us from the more mundane tasks of the digital age. Marketing is one such area, as creating promotional copy can be tedious work that produces stale results. Artificial intelligence can learn from the most successful advertising campaigns in the world, and together with original prompts, can produce directions for the work that might have gone unthought by human minds. In this way, it serves as an machine-operated Oblique Strategies card deck.