Can animals create and enjoy art?

In 1954, British zoologist and artist Desmond Morris undertook a strange experiment at London Zoo: to see whether animals could create art. His subject was Congo, a chimpanzee chosen for his boisterous personality. Morris taught the chimp how to hold a paintbrush, provided him with paints and paper, and observed his first artistic attempts.

Congo’s initial paintings would probably fail the criteria for what most of us consider ‘art’. Primarily, they lacked creative intent. Each painting consisted solely of brushstrokes in a radiating fan shape – a wild chimp makes this movement when spreading out leaves for a nest, so these early paintings arguably just represent a reflexive action.

However, Congo’s paintings began to change as he started using a wider variety of shapes and colours. The first painting that really excited Morris was titled Split Fan Pattern with Central Black Spot. Here, Congo disrupted his usual fan pattern with a bold circle of paint in the centre. These small decisions, claimed Morris, marked the chimp’s transition from animal instinct to aesthetic intent and indicated that Congo had a nascent understanding of artistic composition.

"Picasso himself held no grudges against animal artists: allegedly when asked by a reporter to comment on Congo’s art, Picasso left the room, returned clutching his newly purchased Congo painting, wildly swinging his arms like a monkey, and bit the reporter. "

Whether they were horrified or thrilled by the irreverence of displaying Congo alongside Pollock and Picasso, those within the art world became intrigued by the chimp’s paintings. Picasso himself held no grudges against animal artists: allegedly when asked by a reporter to comment on Congo’s art, Picasso left the room, returned clutching his newly purchased Congo painting, wildly swinging his arms like a monkey, and bit the reporter. Works by Congo hung in the homes of other well-known artists like Joan Miró and were publicly praised by Salvador Dali.

But was Congo’s “natural curiosity for shape and colour”, as Morris called it, enough to call him an artist? An eye for colour is present in many animals for survival reasons rather than aesthetic reasons. Bower birds, for example, decorate their tunnel-shaped nests with brightly coloured objects; by arranging these from smallest to largest, they create the optical illusion of a much larger nest, to attract mates. This is arguably more of a method of communication and manipulation than it is art.

It is Congo’s behaviour that arguably sets him apart from other animal artists. For example, he often threw tantrums if his paintings were taken away before he deemed them finished. Just as importantly, he exercised restraint in his painting – while some compositions were dense with colourful brushstrokes, others were strikingly sparse, and Congo would refuse to add to them further. These accounts suggest that Congo cared about how his paintings looked and had an artistic process.

Since Congo made his artistic debut, many more artists have undertaken collaborations with animals. In the 1970s, the Russian artistic duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were the first to equip Asian elephants with paintbrushes and colour. The sale of the elephant’s paintings raised more than £19,000 for elephant conservation. In a Guardian interview, Komar said of the animals’ aptitude for painting “elephant art is only new to people, but it's not new to the elephants”; wild elephants had been seen doodling in the mud with sticks previously.

This raises another question: to what extent are animals capable of enjoying art for its own sake? It is difficult enough to establish neurobiological reasons for why art elicits emotion in humans, let alone animals. However, Stendhal, a 19th-century literary realist, suggested that we enjoy beautiful things because “beauty [is] the promise of happiness” – a principle which can be seen in the theory of sexual selection in animals.

For example, in many species of butterflies and birds, males have evolved beautiful colours which they use to woo females. Modern evolutionary biology would identify this as a tool for the female to pick a partner with the best reproductive fitness. For example, in birds like peacocks, abundant and colourful feathers are a sign of good health. However, Darwin himself was convinced that female animals “appreciated the beautiful as [beautiful]”. While studying butterflies, he decided that females did not favour flashier males solely because their beauty was a sign of fitness. Rather, he believed that the females enjoyed the males’ beauty for its own sake. Personally, I think that we should not be hasty to overexplain this behaviour with aesthetic judgements, we cannot assume that our human tendency to enjoy the ‘beautiful’ extends to birds and even insects. In peacocks, scientists have found that aesthetic factors as seemingly frivolous as tail symmetry are linked to environmental and genetic stress, providing potential mates with valuable information. This research suggests that even some of nature’s most beautiful animals are not motivated by straightforward aesthetics.

Congo, on the other hand, appeared to genuinely care about how his paintings looked. In a review of a Congo exhibition, art critic Waldemar Januszczek found it notable that the artist’s brush never shoots off the edge of the paper or blends colours into an unattractive muddiness. Congo was even said to have had favourite colours, preferring to paint with reds over blues.

Whatever the judgement, animal artists like Congo continue to capture the public imagination. The well-respected Mayor gallery in London exhibited 55 of the chimp’s paintings as recently as 2019. To enthusiasts, animal art is like gaining an insight into the secret inner world of a being with whom you can never otherwise communicate. To detractors it perhaps cheapens the definition of art, surely an animal could never compete with the emotion and aesthetic intent of the human artistic process?

However, I think that the aesthetic imperfection of true, animal-created artthose crude yet promising suggestions of selfexpression through symmetry, shape, and colour - is part of its appeal. Because there is something captivating about the idea of animals creating art, of creatures transcending the boundaries between species and doing what is, essentially, communication in its simplest form. After witnessing the creation of the famous Split Fan Pattern with Central Black Spot, Desmond Morris said that watching Congo paint “was like witnessing the birth of art”. To whatever extent animals can be said to be capable of creating art, the results are certainly fascinating to look at.

How AI and artists can coexist as collaborators rather than adversaries?

MONTY GOULD

this process involve grainy nothing canvases that CLIP squints at and says “I guess it kind of looks like an erupting volcano painted by Van Gogh?”, or whatever the prompts was, before VQGAN returns a new iteration and asks “How about now? Hotter or colder?”. This repeats until we have an VQGAN image output that can fool CLIP (and discerning humans) that what they are seeing is the real deal. The success of this process relies heavily on how well-trained the process is, which is primarily a function of the quantity of images it has been fed as reference. This dataset routinely demonstrates societal biases seen in online image catalogues – for example, disproportionately returning photographs for cis-men when searching ‘CEO’, or white people when searching ‘professional hairstyles’ - and searches and inevitably contains copyrighted material, like original art and photography. Artist RJ Palmer told BBC News’ Chris Vallance that “AI is not just like finding inspiration in the work of other artists: This is directly stealing their essence in a way".

literature has, however, been much more focused on the improvement of decision-making/outputs through HITL, rather than viewing it as an ethical necessity.

We begin with creating the prompt for the ‘art’; the designer here comes up with a broad idea and refines it through conversation with an AI. This issue of I, Science is around creativity, so the designer wants to produce something that represents the theme. They let a chatbot finish the sentence “The overlap of technology and creativity can be represented by a painting of…”

"...Charlie Chaplin and a music box that plays Modern Musical Instruments (1935) by Gerald Landgrebe

...the artist and the child looking at the light switch at the bottom of the artwork

...one giant code, from which our knowledge is being redefined and our creativity evolved"

The AI struggles to stay on topic here, but the designer likes the idea of a painting of code, something we rarely see outside the medium of a pixellated screen. The designer takes this idea and brings it to Midjourney, an image generator and discriminiator as we described earlier, prompting the AI to create fuzzy shapes that iteratively approaches the prompt “a beautiful impressionist oil painting of computer code”the outputs of this can be seen in progress and finalised in the first two images.

The designer appreciates the AI framed pieces, but much prefers the computer setup included in the second option. The designer returns to the AI for variations on that image-the finalised outputs of this iteration can be seen in in the third image.

The discourse concerning ‘art’ created by artificial intelligence seems to be fast approaching a consensus. Computergenerated art has at its best been an exercise in creating absurd surrealist memes, such as the twitter viral “Court Sketch of Godzilla on Trial” by DALL-E Mini. At its worst, AI art has been a method by which freelance artists are being driven out of work, such as “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” by Midjourney which won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, much to human competitors’ dismay. Using AI to create ‘art’, or at least images, is not new however, the ease with which these images can be created has drastically decreased whilst the quality has drastically increased. Andy Baio does a comprehensive analysis of the various dangers this advancement holds, ranging from reducing “demand in some paid creative services” to “opening up new avenues for deepfakes, misinformation, and online harassment and exploitation”. If we believe there is an ethical responsibility on artists in the creation of their art, which is perhaps an unreasonable belief, can we find an ethical and constructive use for AI within the field of design?

Beginning a search for this tool should start with a brief look at how these image generators work. Many of the most popular generators (DALL-E

2, Midjourney, Nightcafe, Stable Diffusion) use Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network and Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (VQGAN+CLIP) – a maths-heavy acronym that isn’t particularly meaningful for anyone outside of machine learning circles.

Breaking this down, we have an image generator process in VQGAN and an image discriminator process in CLIP; VQGAN creates the ‘art’ and CLIP decides how well this ‘art’ meets the prompt the user has supplied, feeding back to VQGAN who tries again. The first iterations of

The 3 main considerations we want to consider in creating an ethical use of AI in design (alongside concerns about the quality of output, well-covered elsewhere) are as follows:

• AI should not replace an artist but instead be another tool a designer could utilise, like a new set of brushes or an idea journal.

•AI should not mimic an existing artist but instead at most reference styles and concepts, with personal touches added by the designer, like seeking inspiration from a gallery visit.

• AI should not be trusted with solely directing output but instead work under supervision and guidance from an (ethical) designer, like a master directing an apprentice.

With these in mind, we can craft a VQGAN+CLIP+Designer approach in which the designer inserts themselves into the AI process to ensure these considerations are met. This concept, known as Human In The Loop (HITL), has been applied in many machine learning environments to improve transparency, incorporate human judgement, and lessen the need for ‘perfect’ algorithms. The existing

The designer instructs the AI to now upscale the favoured option from this batch, so it is a higher resolution for use-seen in in the fourth image. They can then import it into their design software of choice (which may have its own AI tools) to add their personal touches to the piece and shape the output to their requirements-seen in the fifth and sixth images.

When appraising this approach against our stated considerations, we can at most say that damages have been limited rather than completely averted. Has the designer robbed an artist of the opportunity to fill this magazine page with their original art? Has the designer stolen the copyrighted content of historic and contemporary impressionist painters as well as stock photography companies? Is there enough involvement on the designer’s part to claim this ‘art’ is theirs or does it belong to the generator? Or to nobody?

I started an AI-designed-graphic-tee-sidehustle earlier this year, called GraphicAI, and attempted to use this design process and principles throughout. I am certainly doing my best to be ethical, but there may be something inherently flawed in AI ‘art’ and design that I cannot overcome. Should this endeavour grow in success, the size of this moral dilemma will certainly grow with it.

Diagnosis Is Futile Nandhit Reddy Vasanth

Medical tests like electroencephalography (EEG) or blood tests cannot solely be depended upon to diagnose mental illness, yet treatment is widely through medical intervention. Regardless, in many communities mental illness diagnoses aren’t taken seriously and remain taboo. ‘Diagnosis is Futile’ is an attempt to reconcile with these contradictions and personal battles.