15 October 2021
Since ancient times, man has fantasised about creating life. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion creates a sculpture of perfection to his liking, with whom he falls in love. Victor Frankenstein creates a sapient creature which turns out to be a monster, and it leads to his own destruction. In today’s modern world, scientists create AI robots and various kinds of solutions to make our lives more convenient, enabling us to pursue our own interests and advance, leaving most if not all labour-intensive and dangerous tasks to be taken care by the AI robots. What a utopia it is!
Our AI scientists and artists at HKBU are also co-creating a “helper” or “buddy” which is much more amenable to producing artworks. Our Creation embodies 3Cs, as it is clever, compassionate and cooperative. It listens to your heart and learns to understand your emotions – whether you feel elated, sad, or nervous among other sensations when you listen to a piece of music or see a work of art. It will figure out what makes you feel the way you do. By listening and learning over time, it will be able to collaborate with artists to produce art pieces or a movie script in the way you intended - light-hearted, touching, melancholic or thrilling.
I am not picturing a scene from a sci-fi film, but a reality that may come true in the not-too-distant future, as our “Building Platform Technologies for Symbiotic Creativity in Hong Kong” project, led by Professor Guo Yike, Vice-President (Research and Development), and Professor Johnny Poon, Associate Vice-President (Interdisciplinary Research), has received HK$52.8 million in funding from the Research Grants Council (RGC), the first time that the RGC has awarded major funding to an art-tech scheme. This is a significant milestone in our quest to fulfil our vision of becoming a world leader in the development of art-tech. Echoing the Government’s drive to develop Hong Kong into an East-meets-West centre for international cultural exchange, as mapped out in the 2021 Policy Address, it is also an important initiative to support and spearhead the development and promotion of art-tech in Hong Kong.
The project team is now building an Extended Reality (XR) platform to collect data about human responses during the artistic creation and appreciation processes. Such data will enable the AI artist to understand through machine learning how people feel when making and interacting with art, so that it may learn to feel what humans feel. Unlike the current technology which mimics the art pieces produced by humans, the AI artist will eventually be able to express itself through different art forms that will aesthetically and emotionally move the audience.
With the aid of cutting-edge infrastructure, such as a database and an algorithm system that the project will establish, the AI artist will be trained to set itself up as an intelligent helper in the artistic creation process. Equipped with the ability to create content, cooperate with humans and harness its emotions, the AI artist will offer audiences a brand-new art experience - a symbiotic opera with music co-created with humans in an environment enhanced by the immersive Extended Reality (XR) technology. It will also appear in other collaborative art projects and activities such as a music and art biennale that will be launched between 2024 and 2026. All of these examples symbolise an exciting new era of art-tech, as we explore a strange new world, to boldly go where no one has gone before!
This project is undoubtedly bold and visionary. However, when AI solutions are intelligent enough to anticipate what you want to do next, it may probably conjure up in your mind the dreaded monster, causing fears that it will displace employees, and challenge the fundamental proposition of man being “the wisest creature on earth”. Are artworks created by AI really art? We want AI to become compassionate, but isn’t compassion one of the defining features of man? The ethical dimensions of this innovation will be addressed by our experts in AI ethics, while our artists will enable AI to learn about aesthetics. To this end, this five-year project is an ambitious and ground-breaking initiative to be carried out in collaboration with a group of international partners from mainland China and overseas: Huawei, Microsoft, SenseTime and Opera Hong Kong as well as cognitive scientists, AI and data scientists, media scientists, ethicists and art policy scholars from Yale University, the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Tsinghua University, the University of Hong Kong and City University of Hong Kong.
Another revolutionary development in art-tech will be the creation of future cinema systems, which will transform the linear world of cinema into an intelligent, responsive, personalisable and interactive social space. Professor Jeffrey Shaw, a ground-breaking visionary in new media art, has recently joined HKBU as the Chair Professor of the Academy of Visual Arts. With his decades of experience in expanded cinema, he is now working with our faculty and students to explore ways to increase the sophistication of interactivity in future cinema systems, and these developments will give viewers an unprecedented experience when watching films.
I foresee that our endeavours in advancing art-tech will bring about a quantum leap in Hong Kong and the world’s art and cultural ecosystem, for it can unleash infinite new possibilities for creativity. The results we produce will certainly set the standards for future research and development, and they will be astonishing.
Unlike Galatea of Pygmalion, this HKBU creation will not be a romantic lover, but you will fall in love with our creation! I can’t wait for the debut concert of our AI artist, and I look forward to seeing you in the audience too.