Prof. Aleks Farseev is an entrepreneur, research professor, keynote speaker, and the CEO of SoMin.ai, a long-tail ad optimization platform. Not too long ago, I was asked to present a tool to some of my clients. It was a simple prototype, where a person would type in a few things (i.e., advertising channel, product and occasion), and in turn, the machine would give a number of sample ads. When I clicked the button, in just a few seconds, the machine spat out several ads complete with images and text. The first comment was, "Wow, that was really fast." What would take a person a few hours to do, this machine did in but a fraction.

Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid AI robot artist, has made history once again due to her appearance in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the UK Parliament, where she addressed the question of whether creativity is under attack in today's ever-changing, technology-driven world. Ai-Da's address to members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee was part of the House of Lords' inquiry into the future of the creative industries. During her speech, she explored the topic of AI and how this new technology is pushing the boundaries of how we think about creativity. We are entering a new era of machine creativity that presents new possibilities of creativity and technology beyond what humans can do. Ai-Da's creativity, which is driven by AI, sparks an in-depth conversation on what it means to be human in a post-human society, at a time when technology is fostering creativity like never before.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly utilized in synthesizing visuals, texts, and audio. These AI-based works, often derived from neural networks, are entering the mainstream market, as digital paintings, songs, books, and others. We conceptualize both existing and future human-in-the-loop (HITL) approaches for creative applications and to develop more expressive, nuanced, and multimodal models. Particularly, how can our expertise as curators and collaborators be encoded in AI models in an interactive manner? We examine and speculate on long term implications for models, interfaces, and machine creativity. Our selection, creation, and interpretation of AI art inherently contain our emotional responses, cultures, and contexts. Therefore, the proposed HITL may help algorithms to learn creative processes that are much harder to codify or quantify. We envision multimodal HITL processes, where texts, visuals, sounds, and other information are coupled together, with automated analysis of humans and environments. Overall, these HITL approaches will increase interaction between human and AI, and thus help the future AI systems to better understand our own creative and emotional processes.

The most prolific musical artists manage to release one, maybe two, studio albums in a year. Rappers can sometimes put out three or four mixtapes during that same time. However, Auxuman plans to put out a new full-length album, featuring hot up-and-coming artists like Yona, Mony, Gemini, Hexe, and Zoya, every single month. Before this goes any further, don't worry: You're not hopelessly out of touch with today's pop music. Well, at least not in the sense that you could meet them and shake their hands.

AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks used by the program which shows that humans are unlikely to be able to use much of their brain for any one specific task. This, combined with the ability to run machine networks fast and against a lot of training data will make this technology formidable for many tasks. Many people have been claiming that creativity will be one area in which machines will not be competitive with humans any time soon.

AlphaGo, the computer system Google engineers trained to master the ancient game of Go, needed only one move to make it abundantly clear it has left humans in its dust. The move came Thursday, in the second game of AlphaGo's 4-1 landmark victory over South Korean Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players. About an hour into Thursday's match, AlphaGo placed one of its stones in a nontraditional spot on the board that surprised those watching. "I don't really know if it's a good or bad move," said Michael Redmond, a commentator on a live English broadcast. Redmond, one of the Western world's best Go players, could only crack a bemused smile.

In 1992, as personal computers were beginning to reshape everyday life, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wrote that computing could never overshadow human achievement, because of one missing quality: creativity. "A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way," he wrote in Fortune. "Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that." But new projects are challenging the question of computer creativity--like Beyond the Fence, the world's first computer-generated musical, which opens at the Arts Theater in London today.