“If machines want to make art, will humans understand it? ”
from：aeon
这些随意的颜色分布画实际是由经特殊开发的电脑程序所绘制而成。你能看懂机器想表达什么吗？
Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art. But will we be able to understand it? To answer this question, we need to consider two subquestions: when does the machine become an author of an artwork? And how can we form an understanding of the art that it makes?
在文章开头，对于理解机器艺术，作者先提出了两个小问题(subquestions)：
1.机器从何时起开始成为创作艺术作品的作家？
2.我们怎样去理解它所创作的艺术？
the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds 人工智能出现意识 哦？ 有点意思，继续往下看看~
Empathy, we argue, is the force behind our capacity to understand works of art. Think of what happens when you are confronted with an artwork. We maintain that, to understand the piece, you use your own conscious experience to ask what could possibly motivate you to make such an artwork yourself – and then you use that first-person perspective to try to come to a plausible explanation that allows you to relate to the artwork. Your interpretation of the work will be personal and could differ significantly from the artist’s own reasons, but if we share sufficient experiences and cultural references, it might be a plausible one, even for the artist. This is why we can relate so differently to a work of art after learning that it is a forgery or imitation: the artist’s intent to deceive or imitate is very different from the attempt to express something original. Gathering contextual information before jumping to conclusions about other people’s actions – in art, as in life – can enable us to relate better to their intentions.
同理心，同感(Empathy)是促使我们理解艺术作品的驱动力。（这也不难理解，有时候我们会对一幅画，一个雕塑特别有感觉，这也许就是冥冥中的同理心在起作用。）我们往往用自己的经历代入这幅作品去理解它，自问：如果是我，我会因何去创作这样一幅作品，然后从自己的视角去貌似合理地解释作品和自己的关联。然鹅，这样的理解通常因人而异，并且会和艺术家的创作初心大相径庭，不过，如果有足够多的经历和文化背景作参考，也许就能得出一个最合理的解释。在对他人的行为匆忙下结论前，掌握相关信息能帮助我们更好地将行为与意图联系起来，生活如此，艺术亦如此。
works of art, an artwork, piece 艺术作品
be confronted with 面对
sth. motivate sb. to do sth. ……鼓舞某人去做……
first-person perspective 第一人称视角
a plausible explanation 貌似合理的解释
differ significantly from 大相径庭
forgery or imitation 赝品
jump to conclusions 匆忙下结论
表示认为：argue, maintain
But the artist and you share something far more important than cultural references: you share a similar kind of body and, with it, a similar kind of embodied perspective. Our subjective human experience stems, among many other things, from being born and slowly educated within a society of fellow humans, from fighting the inevitability of our own death, from cherishing memories, from the lonely curiosity of our own mind, from the omnipresence of the needs and quirks of our biological body, and from the way it dictates the space- and time-scales we can grasp. All conscious machines will have embodied experiences of their own, but in bodies that will be entirely alien to us.
比起文化因素，艺术家和你之间更重要的共同点是：你们有相似的身体结构，也因此，有相似的具体视角。所有有意识的机器都会有它们自己的具体经历，但它们和人类的构造完全不同。
fight the inevitability of our own death 与死亡的必然性斗争
cherish memories 珍惜记忆
omnipresent |ˌɒmnɪˈpreznt; 美 ˌɑ:m-| a. (formal) present everywhere 无所不在的；遍及各处的
omnipresence n. 遍及
quirk n. a strange thing that happens, especially by accident （尤指偶发的）怪事，奇事
We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: ‘What would it be like for a human to behave as x?’ In order to understand machinic art as such – and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place – we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us. It might very well happen that we understand some actions or artifacts created by machines of their own volition as art, but in doing so we will inevitably anthropomorphise the machine’s intentions. Art made by a machine can be meaningfully interpreted in a way that is plausible only from the perspective of that machine, and any coherent anthropomorphised interpretation will be implausibly alien from the machine perspective. As such, it will be a misinterpretation of the artwork.
从这一段，作者提出了理解机器艺术的第一点：假设自己是机器，从机器的经历视角去解读作品，不过这么做，很可能将机器的创作意图拟人化。
artifact 人工制品，手工艺品
volition n. [不可数名词](formal) the power to choose sth freely or to make your own decisions 意志力；自愿选择；自行决断
anthropomorphise v. 人格化，赋与人性
But what if we grant the machine privileged access to our ways of reasoning, to the peculiarities of our perception apparatus, to endless examples of human culture? Wouldn’t that enable the machine to make art that a human could understand? Our answer is yes, but this would also make the artworks human – not authentically machinic. All examples so far of ‘art made by machines’ are actually just straightforward examples of human art made with computers, with the artists being the computer programmers. It might seem like a strange claim: how can the programmers be the authors of the artwork if, most of the time, they can’t control – or even anticipate – the actual materialisations of the artwork? It turns out that this is a long-standing artistic practice.
如果机器知道我们如何思考，知道我们如何感知事物以及知道无数的人类文化之例，也许机器就可以创造出人类能懂的艺术，但这也同样会使得机器艺术人为化——也即非真正意义上的机器艺术。由于现在大多“机器创作的艺术”其背后真正的操作者是程序员，如果程序员无法控制或预测一件机器艺术的走向，那他们又怎么称之为艺术品的作家呢。
peculiarity n. [可数名词] a feature that only belongs to one particular person, thing, place, etc. （人、物、地等的）个性，特色，特点
apparatus n. [可数名词, 常用单数形式](technical 术语) a system of organs in the body 器官
authentically adv. 确实地，真正地
Suppose that your local orchestra is playing Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 (1812). Even though Beethoven will not be directly responsible for any of the sounds produced there, you would still say that you are listening to Beethoven. Your experience might depend considerably on the interpretation of the performers, the acoustics of the room, the behaviour of fellow audience members or your state of mind. Those and other aspects are the result of choices made by specific individuals or of accidents happening to them. But the author of the music? Ludwig van Beethoven. Let’s say that, as a somewhat odd choice for the programme, John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No 4 (March No 2) (1951) is also played, with 24 performers controlling 12 radios according to a musical score. In this case, the responsibility for the sounds being heard should be attributed to unsuspecting radio hosts, or even to electromagnetic fields. Yet, the shaping of sounds over time – the composition – should be credited to Cage. Each performance of this piece will vary immensely in its sonic materialisation, but it will always be a performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4.
这里作者列举了贝多芬的《第七交响曲》和约翰凯奇的《景观遐想4》，不管现场由谁演奏、如何演奏，人们联想到的作曲家始终是贝多芬和约翰凯奇，听到的也始终是《第七交响曲》和《景观遐想4》。
acoustics n.（空间的）传声效果，音响效果 If you refer to the acoustics or the acoustic of a space, you are referring to the structural features which determine how well you can hear music or speech in it.
musical score 乐谱
electromagnetic adj. 电磁的
immensely adv. 很
Why should we change these principles when artists use computers if, in these respects at least, computer art does not bring anything new to the table? The (human) artists might not be in direct control of the final materialisations, or even be able to predict them but, despite that, they are the authors of the work. Various materialisations of the same idea – in this case formalised as an algorithm – are instantiations of the same work manifesting different contextual conditions. In fact, a common use of computation in the arts is the production of variations of a process, and artists make extensive use of systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, external inputs or pseudo-randomness to deliberately avoid repetition of outputs. Having a computer executing a procedure to build an artwork, even if using pseudo-random processes or machine-learning algorithms, is no different than throwing dice to arrange a piece of music, or to pursuing innumerable variations of the same formula. After all, the idea of machines that make art has an artistic tradition that long predates the current trend of artworks made by artificial intelligence.
早在当前人工智能艺术品的发展趋势之前，就有用机器制造艺术的这种传统。
instantiation n. 实例
pseudo-randomness 伪随机性
dice n. 骰子 throw dice 掷骰子
Machinic art is a term that we believe should be reserved for art made by an artificial mind’s own volition, not for that based on (or directed towards) an anthropocentric view of art. From a human point of view, machinic artworks will still be procedural, algorithmic and computational. They will be generative, because they will be autonomous from a human artist. And they might be interactive, with humans or other systems. But they will not be the result of a human deferring decisions to a machine, because the first of those – the decision to make art – needs to be the result of a machine’s volition, intentions and decisions. Only then will we no longer have human art made with computers, but proper machinic art.
机器艺术是指人工智能用自己的意志所创造的艺术，而非有人为指导。从人类的角度来看，机器艺术仍然是程序性、算法性和计算性的。直到机器真得可以自己愿意并决定去做艺术时，才会有真正意义上的机器艺术。
anthropocentric adj. believing that humans are more important than anything else 人类中心论的；人本位的
procedural adj. 程序的; 有关程序的
generative adj. 能生产的，有生产力的; 生殖的
The problem is not whether machines will or will not develop a sense of self that leads to an eagerness to create art. The problem is that if – or when – they do, they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. Machinic art will always lie beyond our ability to understand it because the boundaries of our comprehension – in art, as in life – are those of the human experience.
问题关键不在于机器是否会发展自我意识从而有创造艺术的欲望，而是如果或者当机器这么做了之后，它们就会形成自己的一方世界，且旁人将无法从一个主观的、具体的角度去看待。由于对艺术理解的局限来自于人类经历的有限，就像难以理解生活那样，人类也将会难以理解机器艺术。
Umwelt 客观世界
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