Is Emotion Necessary In Art?

Last week, I was reading Lateral Action, one of my favourite creativity blogs, and Mark was writing about computer programs that were thinking creatively. Using algorithms, computers were able to extrapolate patterns to create new ideas that were judged by a panel to be more creative than similar ideas thought up by humans.

I'm a big believer that creativity does indeed happen in an incremental fashion and is informed by previous experience and knowledge. I'm not a proponent of the "muse" school of thought that tends to favour a theory of sudden inspiration of a nearly other-worldly nature. As such, the idea that algorithms could be used for creative thinking was not terribly surprising to me. However, the idea that computers could be "creative" in the same way as humans and produce "art" was more unsettling.

Instinctively, I knew this could not be true, but I was at a loss to explain why. In his post, Mark offered the explanation of critical thinking, and that computers can't critique themselves, but that explanation still didn't feel right to me.

So, I began thinking about the finished product and what it achieves. A computer can be programmed to do something creative. In that context, creative will mean unique and different. If you take any pattern far enough, you'll get to a point that no one has been before, and that's what these computers are doing. They're taking old things and creating new things. The resulting new thing is different from anything else I've seen before, but what is my reaction to it? "Hey, that's different."

A human creating something new will basically follow the same basic steps. He will take his previous experience and create something new that hasn't been done before. Where the finished product is different from what the computer has done is where that product becomes art. Humans can create art. Computers cannot.

Computers can create images, and musical arrangements, and sequences of words, but these will never be art because true art elicits an emotional response. If it doesn't conjure up some emotion in its audience, it has failed at being art. The reason computers cannot cause this emotional reaction is because to do so, the artist needs to inject his own emotion into the work. Computers with the most sophisticated algorithms imaginable can outmatch humans in logic, but they will never have emotion. Without that emotion, whatever is created by a computer is hollow.

Because an artist injects his emotion into his art, and it then causes a reaction in his audience, art is in fact a medium for connecting artist and audience. So, not only does the art differ because it is infused with emotion, but it serves an additional purpose of creating connections. You can't connect with a computer, and nothing a computer creates will have any soul.

In the end, this is all just a convoluted attempt to explain the uneasiness that we feel when we hear that computers can be creative. I explain it as a lack of emotion in the work, and a lack of human connection with an artist. Mark explained it as a lack of critical thinking. Others explained it as a lack of personality. Whatever it is, there is something uniquely human about the creative process. It is something that logic and algorithms alone can't replicate, and whether we can explain it or not, our gut tells us it's there.

That's why, I for one, am not scared that computers will take over the creative world.