Artificial imagination is a narrow subcomponent of

artificial general intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Some researchers argue that sta ...

which generates, simulates, and facilitates real or possible

fiction Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying character (arts), individuals, events, or setting (narrative), places that are imagination, imaginary or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent ...

models A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided int ...

to create predictions,

inventions An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

, or conscious experiences. The term artificial imagination is also used to describe a property of

machines A machine is a physical system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action. The term is commonly applied to artificial devices, such as those employing engines or motors, but also to natural biological macromolec ...

or programs. Some of the traits that researchers hope to simulate include

creativity Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable Idea, ideas or works using one's imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible (e.g. an idea, scientific theory, Literature, literary work, musical composition, or joke), or a physica ...

, vision,

digital art Digital art, or the digital arts, is artistic work that uses Digital electronics, digital technology as part of the creative or presentational process. It can also refer to computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960 ...

humor Humour ( Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids i ...

, and

satire Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposin ...

. Practitioners in the field are researching various aspects of Artificial imagination, such as Artificial (

visual The visual system is the physiological basis of visual perception (the ability to detect and process light). The system detects, transduces and interprets information concerning light within the visible range to construct an image and buil ...

) imagination, Artificial (

aural Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds through an organ, such as an ear, by detecting vibrations as periodic changes in the pressure of a surrounding medium. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory s ...

) Imagination, modeling/filtering content based on human emotions and Interactive Search. Some articles on the topic speculate on how artificial imagination may evolve to create an

artificial world An artificial world may refer to: * Megastructure, large man-made structures, especially those located in outer space. ** Artificial planet, specific type of megastructure See also

Megastructures {{Disambiguation, building and structure ...

"people may be comfortable enough to escape from the real world". Some researchers such as G. Schleis and M. Rizki have focused on using artificial

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

to simulate artificial imagination. Another important project is being led by Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

in Japan. They have developed a computer capable of translating a description of an object into an image, which could be the easiest way to define what imagination is. Their idea is based on the concept of an image as a series of pixels divided into short sequences that correspond to a specific part of an image. The scientists call this sequences “visual words” and those can be interpreted by the machine using statistical distribution to read an create an image of an object the machine has not encountered. The topic of artificial imagination has garnered interest from scholars outside the computer science domain, such as noted communications scholar Ernest Bormann, who came up with the Symbolic Convergence Theory and worked on a project to develop artificial imagination in computer systems. An interdisciplinary research seminar organized by the artist Grégory Chatonsky on artificial imagination and postdigital art has taken place since 2017 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Use in interactive search

The typical application of artificial imagination is for an interactive search. Interactive searching has been developed since the mid-1990s, accompanied by the World Wide Web's development and the optimization of search engines. Based on the first query and feedback from a user, the databases to be searched are reorganized to improve the searching results. Artificial imagination allows us to synthesize images and to develop a new image, whether it is in the database, regardless its existence in the real world. For example, the computer shows results that are based on the answer from the initial query. The user selects several relevant images, and then the technology analyzes these selections and reorganizes the images' ranks to fit the query. In this process, artificial imagination is used to synthesize the selected images and to improve the searching result with additional relevant synthesized images. This technique is based on several algorithms, including the Rocchio algorithm and the

evolutionary algorithm Evolutionary algorithms (EA) reproduce essential elements of the biological evolution in a computer algorithm in order to solve "difficult" problems, at least Approximation, approximately, for which no exact or satisfactory solution methods are k ...

. The ''Rocchio algorithm'', locating a query point near relevant examples and far away from irrelevant examples, is simple and works well in a small system where the databases are arranged in certain ranks. The ''evolutionary synthesis'' is composed of two steps: a standard algorithm and an enhancement of the standard algorithm. Through feedback from the user, there would be additional images synthesized so as to be suited to what the user is looking for.

General artificial imagination

Artificial imagination has a more general definition and wide applications. The traditional fields of artificial imagination include visual imagination and aural imagination. More generally, all the actions to form ideas, images and concepts can be linked to imagination. Thus, artificial imagination means more than only generating graphs. For example, moral imagination is an important research subfield of artificial imagination, although classification of artificial imagination is difficult. Morals are an important part to human beings' logic, while artificial morals are important in artificial imagination and artificial intelligence. A common criticism of artificial intelligence is whether human beings should take responsibility for machines‘ mistakes or decisions and how to develop well-behaved machines. As nobody can give a clear description of the best moral rules, it is impossible to create machines with commonly accepted moral rules. However, recent research about artificial morals circumvent the definition of moral. Instead, machine learning methods are applied to train machines to imitate human morals. As the data about moral decisions from thousands of different people are considered, the trained moral model can reflect widely accepted rules. Memory is another major field of artificial imagination. Researchers such as Aude Oliva have performed extensive work on artificial memory, especially visual memory. Compared to visual imagination, the visual memory focuses more on how machine understand, analyse and store pictures in a human way. In addition, characters like spatial features are also considered. As this field is based on the brains' biological structures, extensive research on neuroscience has also been performed, which makes it a large intersection between biology and computer science.

References

{{reflist Applications of artificial intelligence Philosophy of artificial intelligence

Use in interactive search

General artificial imagination

See also

Further reading

References