'I've seen more self-aware ants!' AI: More Than Human – review: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/15/ai-more-than-human-review-barbican-artificial-intelligence
"They may be More Than Human but they are less than art. Mario Klingemann’s piece Circuit Training makes the process by which machines learn explicit. Klingemann creates art using a programme that can generate images and then criticise its own work. You can join in by deciding which images are “interesting” as human faces morphed by the machine flow by on screen. It’s one of the most boring works of art I’ve ever experienced. The mutant faces are not meaningful or significant in any way.""In Nexus Studios and Memo Akten’s Learning to See, you can move a pencil around on a surface and witness on a screen how an AI programme changes it into a multicoloured psychedelic image. It’s a nice effect, but not art. Meanwhile the fact that a minimalist sculpture called Totem by Chris Salter and numerous collaborators uses AI to control its pattern of twinkling lights feels utterly irrelevant."
"Does the banality of the AI “art” here tell us anything about the state of AI itself?
To be bored by the mindless doodlings and droolings of the AI artworks here is to know in your bones that AI does not yet possess anything like a conscious, let alone creative, mind. Is any existing robot or computer as self aware as an ant, for that matter? The question I’m left with is why so much is being invested in talking up the creativity of AI. Maybe we are all kids at heart who want a robot friend. Or maybe it suits powerful tech interests to bathe themselves in utopian, or even dystopian, glamour when all they’re really doing is using inert algorithms to manipulate consumers and mindless robots to replace a human workforce."
