COURTESY OF ALEXANDER REBEN
Reben is OpenAI’s first artist in residence. Formally, the appointment began in January and lasts three months. However Reben’s relationship with the San Francisco–based mostly AI agency appears informal: “It’s slightly fuzzy, as a result of I’m the primary, and we’re figuring stuff out. I’m most likely going to maintain working with them.”
In reality, Reben has been working with OpenAI for years already. 5 years in the past, he was invited to check out an early model of GPT-3 earlier than it was launched to the general public. “I obtained to mess around with that fairly a bit and made a couple of artworks,” he says. “They have been fairly enthusiastic about seeing how I might use their techniques in several methods. And I used to be like, cool, I’d like to attempt one thing new, clearly. Again then I used to be largely making stuff with my very own fashions or utilizing web sites like Ganbreeder [a precursor of today’s generative image-making models].”
In 2008, Reben studied math and robotics at MIT’s Media Lab. There he helped create a cardboard robotic known as Boxie, which impressed the lovable robotic Baymax within the film Massive Hero 6. He’s now director of expertise and analysis at Stochastic Labs, a nonprofit incubator for artists and engineers in Berkeley, California. I spoke to Reben by way of Zoom about his work, the unresolved stress between artwork and expertise, and the way forward for human creativity.
Our dialog has been edited for size and readability.
You’re enthusiastic about ways in which people and machines work together. As an AI artist, how would you describe what you do with expertise? Is it a device, a collaborator?
Firstly, I don’t name myself an AI artist. AI is solely one other technological device. If one thing comes alongside after AI that pursuits me, I wouldn’t, like, say, “Oh, I’m solely an AI artist.”
Okay. However what’s it about these AI instruments? Why have you ever spent your profession taking part in round with this type of expertise?
My analysis on the Media Lab was all about social robotics, taking a look at how folks and robots come collectively in several methods. One robotic [Boxie] was additionally a filmmaker. It principally interviewed folks, and we discovered that the robotic was making folks confide in it and inform it very deep tales. This was pre-Siri, or something like that. Lately persons are conversant in the thought of speaking to machines. So I’ve at all times been enthusiastic about how humanity and expertise co-evolve over time. You understand, we’re who we’re as we speak due to expertise.
