A Collaboration with DARCI - Neural Network and Machine ...

IntroductionDARCI (Digitial ARtist Communicating Intention) is a computersystem designed to eventually produce original andmeaningful images [4, 5]. Inspired by Csíkszentmihályi’s systemsmodel of creativity [1], DARCI is designed to functionin a social environment. She begins by learning how to associatelanguage with images through online training by humanteachers. Currently, DARCI can only associate adjectives withlow-level features extracted from image, but in the future,she may be able to associate much more. This understandingof language provides the basis for DARCI to produce originalimages herself. Currently, when provided with a source imageand list of adjectives, DARCI can render the source tomatch the adjectives in an original way. Eventually, she willbe able to produce entirely original images and communicatethe intention of her artifacts through the language she is developing.She will use the social and environmental contextof each moment, as informed by data obtained from the internet,as well as her training to make decisions regardingthe creation of her artifacts.DARCI is partially dependent upon her interaction with humanteachers in order to learn meaning. At DARCI’s website(http://darci.cs.byu.edu) volunteers can view randomimages and describe them for DARCI. Additionally, DARCIwill describe images herself and volunteers can correct anymistakes they feel she has made. This is very similar to astudent-teacher interaction among humans. With a series ofneural networks trained with this human labeled data, DARCIlearns to associate descriptions with combinations of imagefeatures present in the images. She is then able to generalizethis knowledge to images that she has never seenbefore. Currently, DARCI’s descriptions include only lists ofadjectives; but in the future, these descriptions could be expandedto natural speech. DARCI can also assign quantitativevalues to the image-adjective associations. For example, shecan indicate how “abstract” an image is. In this way, DARCIcan analyze and evaluate any images she is presented with,including her own attempts at art. Figure 1 shows a briefoutline of the system.Figure 1: Overview of DARCI’s artifact creation process.Sociological ExperimentsSince DARCI’s concept of meaning is shaped by those whotrain her, what she produces and how she judges art is directlyimpacted by her environment. This yields the possibilityfor an interesting study analyzing different social groups.One group of individuals may perceive a particular imagefeature in a different light than another group. For example,what may be funny to one group is sacred to another.If different versions of DARCI were trained by distinct socialgroups, what would be the differences in her judgment andthe artifacts she produces? In a sense, DARCI would act as afilter for the different social groups, providing a new lens toqualify social variances.