We know machines and artificial intelligence (AI) can be many things, but can they ever really be creative? When I interviewed Professor Marcus du Sautoy, the author of The Creativity Code, he shared that the role of AI is a "kind of catalyst to push our human creativity." It's the machine and human collaboration that produces exciting results--novel approaches and combinations that likely wouldn't develop if either were working alone. Can Machines And Artificial Intelligence Be Creative? Instead of thinking about AI as replacing human creativity, it's beneficial to examine ways that AI can be used as a tool to augment human creativity.

This is a 30 minute talk from GOTO Copenhagen 2019 by Feynman Liang - Creator of BachBot. I've dropped the full talk abstract below for a read before diving into the talk: Can musical creativity, something believed to be deeply human, be codified into an algorithm? While most music theorists are hesitant to claim a "correct" algorithm for composing music like Bach, recent advances in machine learning and computational musicology may help us reach an answer. In this talk, we describe BachBot: an artificial intelligence which uses deep learning and long short term memory (LSTM) to compose music in the style of Bach. We train BachBot on all known Bach chorale harmonisations and carry out the largest musical Turing test to date.

Today, we're extremely happy to announce AWS DeepComposer, the world's first machine learning-enabled musical keyboard. Yes, you read that right. Machine learning (ML) requires quite a bit of math, computer science, code, and infrastructure. These topics are exceedingly important but to a lot of aspiring ML developers, they look overwhelming and sometimes, dare I say it, boring. To help everyone learn about practical ML and have fun doing it, we introduced several ML-powered devices.

What Do You Make of the Results?

One of the most contentious aspects of AI is the meaning of'intelligence.' No one debates the meaning of the word'strength,' or belittles the idea that machines can be stronger than humans, or even tries to re-define mechanical strength to mean some mysterious physico-spiritual capability that is unique to humans. The debate around the meaning of intelligence when it crops up in any conversation on AI is extremely baffling - until we take into account the fragile psychology of humans. Somehow, we've convinced ourselves that cognitive abilities are the sole province of the human brain, while we grudgingly cede the physical realm to the machines. Every encroachment on human cognitive abilities is fiercely contested.

One of the most contentious aspects of AI is the meaning of'intelligence.' No one debates the meaning of the word'strength,' or belittles the idea that machines can be stronger than humans, or even tries to re-define mechanical strength to mean some mysterious physico-spiritual capability that is unique to humans. The debate around the meaning of intelligence when it crops up in any conversation on AI is extremely baffling - until we take into account the fragile psychology of humans. Somehow, we've convinced ourselves that cognitive abilities are the sole province of the human brain, while we grudgingly cede the physical realm to the machines. Every encroachment on human cognitive abilities is fiercely contested.

AI attracts a lot of attention from many different industries, and marketing is no exception. There are a lot of discussions going on about how AI can help companies make their marketing efforts more efficient. When speaking about AI in marketing, the focus is usually on how AI can effectively process big data to make predictions, help marketers save time on repetitive tasks, or drive conclusions from big chunks of data. AI already helps us with automation and making better marketing decisions, so it's safe to say the technology can execute complex analytical tasks. But we all know marketing is not only about crunching data -- it is also about creativity.

Antwerp (Belgium) – May 16, 2017 – Today, at the imec technology forum (ITF2017), imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technologies, demonstrated the world's first self-learning neuromorphic chip. The brain-inspired chip, based on OxRAM technology, has the capability of self-learning and has been demonstrated to have the ability to compose music. The human brain is a dream for computer scientists: it has a huge computing power while consuming only a few tens of Watts. Imec researchers are combining state-of-the-art hardware and software to design chips that feature these desirable characteristics of a self-learning system. Imec's ultimate goal is to design the process technology and building blocks to make artificial intelligence to be energy efficient so that that it can be integrated into sensors.

PARIS Just as IBM's Deep Blue showed the world a computer can play chess as well as a human master, Eduardo Reck Miranda, a researcher for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., aims to demonstrate a computer program able to compose original music. So far, neural networks have succeeded in imitating distinct musical styles, but truly original compositions have remained elusive. Miranda is tackling that problem with an orchestra of virtual musicians called agents that interact to compose original music. "From the viewpoint of a composer, I can hardly say that our agents are composing music at this stage," Miranda acknowledged. Instead, he said, "the breakthrough in this work is the action of collective machine learning for generative music systems."

When BYU PhD candidate Kristine Monteith was sitting in natural language processing class, it wasn't letter sequences going through her head but music notes. The class was talking about probability in language that helps with speech recognition of knowing what words would come up next. When she did the experiment, "It made me think, oh, you could do the same thing with music," Monteith said. The Utah State graduate in music therapy pursuing her PhD in computer at BYU decided to apply her right and left brain abilities to combine music and computer science. She invented a computer program that can compose original music that evokes emotions humans can relate with, even though it was generated from a machine.