July 2022

How Indian Arts can influence Artificial Intelligence?

By Aparna Sridhar

Artificial Intelligence is all around us. Its ubiquitous presence is seen in many of our daily technologies, including security, banking and healthcare, and marketing. However, its powerful reach and access has raised concerns regarding some of its inherent biases and how it uses available data. These biases are based on sensitive attributes such as race and gender, as well as the non-participation of large pockets of people in critical AI decision-making. Some efforts are being made to make the largely Western (Euro and US centric) AI systems include considerations from the East, including India.

Cultural differences in the real world are often overlooked in the construction of global information architecture applicable to all. Scholars in India have emphasized that the Information Technology world has to be conscious of the many differences in how Western and Indian Society is structured. Dr. Sai Susarla, Director, MAEER's Institute for Indic Knowledge Studies, Pune, is a PhD. in Computer Science from the University of Utah and has been spearheading the movement to bring the Indian Knowledge System into mainstream education in India in the last decade. He opines that the notion of Western ethics is fundamentally based on “notions of right and wrong to which all systems, including AI conform. In Indian understanding, though, ethics is beauty, and anything unethical is ugly. The question of what is beautiful - is defined as anything that helps to expand one’s inner nature. The closer one is to one’s inner nature, the more beautiful one is. "

Discovering one’s inner self is the purpose of every aesthetic endeavour in India. The Indian world of art and our rishis, in fact, have codified emotions so precisely and minutely that we have manuals and treatises on how performing certain actions can generate certain responses and lead us further in this path of inquiry. Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra is all about the range of bhavas that human beings can have and “what are the different ways” they can be expressed.

Dr. Susarla says that in a workshop conducted recently on the computational modelling of aesthetics, experts in Shilpa, Natya, Sangeetha, Nritya and Vastu were asked “if their shastra was a codification of knowledge which would allow one to reverse engineer from the abhinaya to the bhava and from the bhava to an understanding of how it manifests. The experts believed that such a codification can be done because the shastras are very precise about this correlation chain between action and emotion.”

Dr. Susarla says that the Bhava rasas are the same world over, and while the abhinayas may vary slightly, the canonical forms are the same. In music, he says they are trying to figure out what gamaka prastaras evoke which moods and is such a codification possible. “What is the alphabet of music, and with this knowledge, can we analyze people’s conversations and say this particular conversation is expressing this particular mood or bhava.”

It is largely accepted that Western systems are largely rule-based, and the difficulty of AI lies in capturing all the possible rules that exist in the complex real world. Indian shastras, on the other hand, largely work on a First Principle basis where the knowledge cannot be derived from other assumptions or propositions, one of the pitfalls of current AI. Indian rishis have done a structured analysis of bhavas and created a model of emotions, which contains within it all possible combinations of bhavas, both permanent and transient.

The preciseness of the descriptions of music in Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra has been pointed out by many. It is just one sterling example of how our rishis dealt with complex data. Art expert the late Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan points out how Bharata describes a music system on modes (jatis) that are scales (murchana) based on the successive of two heptatonic scales (sadjagrama and madhyagrama). Bharata speaks of Dhruva (fixed) Gana, which were the kinds of songs with which a play was ornamented. He also speaks of microtonal interval: the sruti (that which is heard). He describes 22 of these microtonal intervals constituting an octave. Intervals of three - 4, 3 or 2 srutis - formed the basis for ancient scales. While this has not been in practice for over millennia, modern musicians still use the word sruti to refer to describe microtonal inflection in their playing.”

In the West today, there is a lot of excitement on how AI is revolutionising the world of art. AI-generated art is the most talked about. Scientists are retrieving ‘new works’ of art by analysing lesser known works of great artists. It is the equivalent of trying to understand how the music of Carnatic vaggeyakara Thyagaraja evolved by trying to unravel his lesser-known compositions or even portions of the popular ones.

AI’s entry into the world of art has been to influence art production digitally more than it has been to transform art in any fundamental way. It has also failed to be influenced by the depth of understanding that art offers into the human mind. While it has helped to make AI sound and appear less insidious, a whole world of possibility has gone unexplored on how art can transform Artificial Intelligence technologies. In India, science and art have not lived as siloed disciplines, disconnected from each other. Indian music reflects the metaphysical idea at the heart of Indian philosophy, which is that humans are all fragmented parts of a whole, ultimately united as one. Any approach to art is a means to understand and move towards this unity rather than merely an expression of creativity. AI would benefit from approaching its problems from this sense of Oneness, where data is not looking out for differences but for commonality.

Interested for more?

Read Article 1-https://www.academia.edu/62234415/Artificial_Intelligence_Hindu_Art_and_Aesthetics

Watch the Art of Paradox Part 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q08vFXR2PHE

Watch the Art of Paradox Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwVZDBkWma8