Computerized aesthetics… what’s right with that idea?

by | Thursday, May 14, 2009

I just came across this… Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality
Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating system helps establish the foundation for determining how people will react emotionally to a visual image. ACQUINE delivers ratings–from zero to 100–within seconds, based on visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution, and photo composition. PSU researchers hope to improve upon the system’s current performance level of more than 80 percent consistency between human and computer ratings. “Furthermore, aesthetics represents just one dimension of human emotion,” says PSU professor James Z. Wang. “Future systems will perhaps strive to capture other emotions that pictures arouse in people.”
Wang says that linking cameras to ACQUINE could potentially enable a photographer to instantly see how the public might perceive a photo.

Now this is the ultimate democratization of the idea of aesthetics – of course diluting the idea of the aesthetic encounter to the lowest common denominator i.e. “how the public might perceive a photo.” The assumptions behind that definition of aesthetics are mind-boggling. Let me count the ways in which this is a boneheaded idea… actually let me not, at least at this time. But the link was worth sharing nonetheless. I hope to write more about this … hopefully soon.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Jabberwocky goes to graduate school

The 5th floor of Erickson Hall is a fun place to be. Typically a bunch of graduate students hang out there, working on their readings, talking shop and in general having a good time. For some reason, last week, I promised Josh Rosenberg that I would write a poem for...

Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story

Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...

Jared Diamond on creativity, innovation and wealth

Jared Diamond has an article on edge.org, somewhat provocatively titled: How to get rich? The question his after is simply, "what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation,...

Breaking free of academic publishers

It appears that the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard are considering publishing all their scholarship freely online. Here is a NYTimes story titled At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web. This is truly wonderful news and long overdue. I have been doing...

The Tale of Two Tech Teams: How Small Interactions Expose Our Values

The Tale of Two Tech Teams: How Small Interactions Expose Our Values

A while back, I wrote about an email that made my heart stop—an auto-generated message declaring that an employee had been "terminated." That impersonal, poorly designed communication spoke volumes about the organization's attitude towards its people. And the fact...

Mathematical paradoxes & ambigrams: New article

I have always loved paradoxes so it is with great pleasure that the fourth article in our series on Art and Math (co-authored with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar and published by At Right Angles) focuses on paradoxes and visual wordplay. It was great fun coming up with a...

Turing’s Tricksters: How AI Hijacks Our Social Instincts

Turing’s Tricksters: How AI Hijacks Our Social Instincts

In a recent article in The Atlantic (Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret), Lila Shroff delves into the surprising willingness of people to share intimate details with AI chatbots. To be clear, this did not come as a surprise. Readers of this blog will know this is something...

Ads in Video Games

A couple of people have emailed me about the Obama campaign inserting advertisements into video games. Check out this Flickr set with screenshots of these advertisements. Most of the press is reporting that these ads show up in just racing games but as these...

véjà du, all over again

A véjà du experience is about looking at a familiar situation but with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before. It forms the basis of an assignment I give in my CEP818, Creativity in Teaching & Learning course. The assignment is described in greater detail...

1 Comment

  1. Greg Casperson

    I’m sure part of benefit they’ll claim to this (if they haven’t already) will be like the computerized assessment of writing: It will help most who struggle with composition improve to a certain level with the computers assistance.

    It could never replace true creativity, especially the kind that knows artistic conventions and breaks them in new, interesting ways. I’m also sure you could probably compose something awful that fit’s the programs parameters and thus passes the test as you usually can with the computerized writing assessment programs.

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *