Reben is OpenAI’s first artist in residence. Officially, the appointment began in January and lasts three months. But Reben’s relationship with the San Francisco–primarily based AI agency appears informal: “It’s a little fuzzy, because I’m the first, and we’re figuring stuff out. I’m probably going to keep working with them.”
In truth, Reben has been working with OpenAI for years already. Five 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 got to play around with that quite a bit and made a few artworks,” he says. “They were quite interested in seeing how I could use their systems in different ways. And I was like, cool, I’d love to try something new, obviously. Back then I was mostly making stuff with my own models or using websites 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 in the film Big Hero 6. He is 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 conversation has been edited for size and readability.
You’re in ways in which people and machines work together. As an AI artist, how would you describe what you do with expertise? Is it a instrument, a collaborator?
Firstly, I don’t name myself an AI artist. AI is just one other technological instrument. If one thing comes alongside after AI that pursuits me, I wouldn’t, like, say, “Oh, I’m only an AI artist.”
Okay. But what’s it about these AI instruments? Why have you ever spent your profession enjoying round with this sort of expertise?
My analysis on the Media Lab was all about social robotics, how folks and robots come collectively in other ways. One robotic [Boxie] was additionally a filmmaker. It principally interviewed folks, and we discovered that the robotic was making folks divulge heart’s contents to it and inform it very deep tales. This was pre-Siri, or something like that. These days persons are acquainted with the concept of speaking to machines. So I’ve all the time been in how humanity and expertise co-evolve over time. You know, we’re who we’re at present due to expertise.