Machine Marionettes

The idea of creative machines is a hot topic right now, but popular understanding of art made with artificial intelligence is still poor. Discussion of AI art is typically siloed off by genre. When a bot generates sonnets, those outputs are judged by the standards of literature. When AI is used to generate imagery, the outputs are invariably perceived within a tradition of image-making that includes painting and photography. Missing from the conversation so far is a unified perception of creative machines—whether they generate text or images or music—as works of art in themselves, ones that perform for us, much the way puppets do. In this session we will move past the tired question “Can machines be creative?” to identify common traits among generative algorithms across many categories of media production, and arrive at a framework for understanding artificial intelligence systems in terms of, well, puppetry.