Tuesday 13 August 2002

Pic of the day: Because I just can't draw. (Screenshot: The Sims. Text: Me.)

Artificial art?

I have launched myself into a debate of sorts in the MindMistress forum. The forum is of course originally meant for debating Al Schroeder's increasingly popular web comic, but this time I mainly took exception to the idea that drawing a comic is just a question of practice. Certainly practice can improve the quality of your art. Some of my favorites among web comics have improved greatly since their start. Even MindMistress has improved, even though Schroeder started it in his 40es.

For some of us, however, the starting point is so abysmally bad that a human lifetime may not be enough to reach an acceptable level. Some of us simply lack the talent. I, for instance, can write but cannot draw to save my life. Or at least not to save my dream job. Back in 1979, I started to study engineering by remote learning. (That meant correspondence at that time, it was well before the Internet or even the PC revolution.) I gave it up because I failed miserably at freehand drawing.

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I know I shouldn't complain. I've got my plate pretty much filled. I lazed through high school and what little college I attended, getting good grades with minimal reading. I read and write a foreign language better than most of its natives. I intuitively grasp large, complex systems such as a computer program or the world economy (or magic systems, much good that has done me). In terms of creativity, I write lots of fiction and sometimes poetry (though I am rather uncomfortable with that) and I sometimes compose simple music just for fun, throwaway stuff. But for some reason I cannot draw or paint. (I also make rather poor sculptures.) I feel like a reverse Idiot Savant. But I don't think I would have traded for the opposite.

But why settle for defeat? My eyesight is less than perfect, so I use glasses; with them on, it is near perfect. Why shouldn't I let a computer do the same for my artistic expression?

Well, because it cannot. The drawing tools that I have seen are rather limited. They can change colors and sizes and brightness and patterns, but they cannot actually help create the picture in the first place. One of the nice forum members mentioned that there is something called 3D rendering that might do that. This is certainly worth a look, if I find the time and a good place to start.

There have been programs for composing music for quite a while now, but we haven't seen any new Beethoven or Vivaldi come from it. I guess these tools cannot replace human creativity, only help us with some of the more boring parts of expressing it.

Will computers themselves be able to create, someday? It's probably a couple decades now since I heard claims that computers could compose music. But they haven't hit the bestseller lists so far, to the best of my knowledge. And they sure haven't written any good stories that I have seen. Perhaps there is an inherent limit which only true creativity can cross, a land reachable only by the spirit. Perhaps. I expect to see the frontier pushed a bit back, if we get a couple more decades of progress. But I don't expect a computer to ever make a good song, or a novel, or a webcomic.