College seeks AI to create ‘human-quality’ sound
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Can an algorithm pass for an author? Can a robot rock the house? A series of contests at Dartmouth College in the US is about to find out.
New Hanpshire-based Dartmouth is seeking artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that create “human-quality” short stories, sonnets and dance music sets that will be pitted against human-produced literature, poetry and music selections. The judges won’t know which is which.
The goal is to determine whether people can distinguish between the two, and whether they might even prefer the computer-generated creativity.
“Historically, often when we have advances in artificial intelligence, people will always say, ‘Well, a computer couldn’t paint a sunset,’ or ‘a computer couldn’t write a beautiful love sonnet,’ but could they? That’s the question,” said Dan Rockmore, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth.
Rockmore spun off the idea for the contests from his experience riding a stationary bike. He started thinking about how the music being played during his spin class helped him pedal at the right pace, and he was surprised when the instructor told him he selected the songs without any computer software.
“I left there thinking, ‘I wonder if I could write a program that did that, or somebody could?’” he said. “Because that is a creative act — a good spin instructor is a total artist. It sort of opened my mind to thinking about whether a computer or algorithm could produce something that was indistinguishable from or even perhaps preferred over what the human does.”
The competitions are variations of the “Turing Test,” named for British computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed an experiment to see if a computer could have humanlike intelligence. The Turing test involves intelligent computer programs that can fool a person carrying on a conversation with it, and there have been many competitions over the years, said Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
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