Week 3: Robotics and Art

    The exploration of industrialization's impact on art, film, and robotics in our lecture this week reveals a fascinating narrative of technological progression and its influence on our current society. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin states that "one might subsume the eliminated element in the term' aura' and go on to say that which withers in the age of mechanical production is the aura of the work of art" (Benjamin). Indicating that mechanical processes such as printing, photography, and filmmaking revolutionized art production, as they also challenged the authenticity and uniqueness traditionally associated with art. This phenomenon is exemplified in our current most popular AI tool, ChatGPT, which has introduced a function called DALL-E2. This AI system can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language (OpenAI). This emphasizes how people who are not artists can take as little as a few seconds to create an image that artists may take weeks or months to complete.


August Kamp x DALL-E, outpainted from Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer


    One of the intriguing aspects of the lecture by Professor Machiko Kusahara was the emphasis on the humanoid form of robots in Japanese engineering. The concept of creating humanoid robots was driven by the idea of them being 'helpers' in various roles, such as elderly assistants or physical therapists (Kusahara). This concept resonates with the lecture by Professor Vesna, where workers in some films were depicted as machines assigned tasks rather than looking like humans (Vesna). 


Lifting Robot, Robear



AI Artificial Intelligence

    Various movies came to mind when discussing how appearance becomes relevant to how we perceive robots, which was mentioned in the lecture on Japanese robotics by Professor Machiko Kusahara. For instance, in a movie directed by Steven Spielberg called AI Artificial Intelligence, the humanoid robot blurs the lines between artificial and human, as the futuristic character who was designed to know how to love challenges the conventional notion of AI capabilities (Forest). However, AI has not yet achieved the level of human thinking in our current society due to the complications of the human brain. As industrialization continues to shape our world, the evolution of robotics and AI prompts us to reconsider fundamental questions about identity, empathy, and the nature of consciousness in an increasingly mechanized society.     






Citations: 

Benjamin, Walter. “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. BruinLearn, https://bruinlearn.ucla.edu/courses/183769/pages/unit-3-agenda?module_item_id=6671237. Accessed April 2024.

Forest, Ben. “AI: Artificial Intelligence.” Journal of Religion & Film, vol. 6, no. 1, 2022. DigitalCommons, https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1770&context=jrf. Accessed April 2024.

Kusahara, Machiko. “Professor Machiko Kusahara on Japanese robotics.” BruinLearn, https://bruinlearn.ucla.edu/courses/183769/pages/unit-3-view?module_item_id=6671238. Accessed April 2024.

OpenAI. “DALL·E 2.” OpenAI, 25 March 2022, https://openai.com/dall-e-2. Accessed April 2024.

Vesna, Victoria. “lecture: Robotics Part 2.” BruinLearn, https://bruinlearn.ucla.edu/courses/183769/pages/unit-3-view?module_item_id=6671238. Accessed April 2024.


Image Citations: 

Jourgensen, Al, et al. “A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).” IMDb, 2001, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/. Accessed April 2024.

Kamp, August. “DALL·E: Introducing outpainting.” OpenAI, 31 August 2022, https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-introducing-outpainting. Accessed April 2024.

Wright, James. “Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating eldercare.” MIT Technology Review, 9 January 2023, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/. Accessed April 2024.



Comments

  1. Fay LustriaApril 21, 2024 at 3:37 PM

    Hi Nan! I really enjoyed reading your post, it was very insightful! I especially liked how you related this past week's readings/lectures to something that is very prevalent (and controversial) today--the emergence of AI and Chat GPT. On social media, I often see people claiming to have made artwork that was actually rendered through AI, which does eliminate the authenticity that Benjamin Walter claims goes behind other artworks and am glad you pointed it out!

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