Robot calligraphy
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People's Daily video posted on illegal Twitter:
Chinese calligraphy, an artistic expression of human language in a tangible form, is not exclusively for mankind anymore. This robot not only masters the art, but it is also designed to preserve the character calligraphy culture. pic.twitter.com/IrFZ2rlOaZ
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) December 25, 2019
This is no match for human calligraphy, nor a way to preserve it.
Selected readings
- "Robotic copying" (2/22/19)
- "Mechanistic writing of Chinese characters" (9/14/19)
- "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/7/18)
- "The esthetics of handwriting" (5/8/16)
- "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
- "Bad Chinese handwriting or just another style?" (10/3/17)
- "Handwriting legibility" (10/19/15)
- "Learning to write Chinese characters" (7/29/17)
- "Copying characters" (2/11/13)
- "Writing Chinese characters as a form of punishment" (11/1/15)
- "Cursive" (3/30/14)
- "Cursive and Characters: Dying Arts" (4/29/11)
- "The wrong way to write Chinese characters" (11/28/18)
- "Stroke order of Chinese characters" (9/4/18)
- "Idiosyncratic stroke order" (11/23/18) — and the long list of earlier posts at the bottom
- "Chaotic calligraphy" (8/6/18)
- "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
- "Chinese character inputting" (10/17/15)
- "The cost of illiteracy in China" (3/31/12)
- "The sociolinguistics of the Chinese script" (8/20/17)
- "The benefits of handwriting" (9/16/19)
- "'Collapsed' calligraphy" (12/3/19)
- "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19)
[h.t. Nick Tursi]
TonyK said,
December 27, 2019 @ 4:47 pm
Looks pretty damn impressive to me. Ignore the People's Daily hype — this is just a first step. But I don't see why we shouldn't have robots in ten, fifteen years that can impersonate skilled humans in this field.
Chester Draws said,
December 27, 2019 @ 9:36 pm
Any field where the scope is well-defined and has decent feed-back mechanisms will be conquered soon enough by machine learning. Machines will soon be producing beautiful calligraphy — and if taught that it needs to not be "too perfect" to be ideal, then they will fake that too.
You say that AI cannot match the ingenuity of humans. Yet that is what the Go players said, until beaten by machines that played in surprising and entirely unforeseen ways. Once you start programming "learning" in ways that mimic human learning, you tend to get similar results.
Scott P. said,
December 27, 2019 @ 11:55 pm
AI machine learning does not learn in any way that remotely resembles human learning.
Gali said,
December 28, 2019 @ 12:06 am
It's not that a robot could not write beautiful characters, just that if we understand calligraphy as an expressive art form, a computer can no more participate in it than algorithms creating derivative Mozart-y pieces based on real ones participate in composition. Go is an inapt comparison when that is a board game that can be modeled purely mathematically.
maidhc said,
December 28, 2019 @ 2:42 am
The robot is not creating calligraphy, it is reproducing calligraphy created by a person. Wasn't there a post here a little while ago about a Chinese girl who programmed a robot to do her calligraphy homework?
Programmable pen-and-ink plotters have been around for something like 60 years. Admittedly having the robot use a brush adds some complexity. But this system doesn't really seem all that sophisticated. A couple of undergrad CS students could get something like this up and running as a semester project. (Assuming they already knew how to write Chinese, of course.)
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2019 @ 7:23 am
"Wasn't there a post here a little while ago about a Chinese girl who programmed a robot to do her calligraphy homework?"
See the very first item in the "Readings" section of the o.p.
Chester Draws said,
December 28, 2019 @ 4:54 pm
It's not that a robot could not write beautiful characters, just that if we understand calligraphy as an expressive art form,
I am prepared to bet that in 20 years you won't be able to tell whether many "expressive" works of art are man or machine produced. At which point, why is the machine one inferior? Because it just *has* to be, by default, isn't really much of a reason.
AI machine learning does not learn in any way that remotely resembles human learning.
So? If results are judged on output, what does it matter?
Gali said,
December 28, 2019 @ 6:19 pm
@Chester Draws We are already largely at the point of not being able to discern what is machine or human produced. But that doesn't demonstrate some capacity for creating art over that which a printer possesses: even if you can use machine learning to create something new, it cannot be innovative, because machines have no imagination; nor emotive, because machines have no emotions or memories. A machine cannot "say" anything as it has nothing to say, no feelings to communicate. As such, a machine's art is entirely derivative and devoid of meaning, and just as how many million of rank imitations of, say, Dryden could get us to Shelley, no amount of "machine learning" can produce something unique and genuinely new outside of its input parameters.
Terpomo said,
December 28, 2019 @ 7:42 pm
@Gali Why do you assume that a machine can't have 'imagination, emotions, or memories'? Ultimately, those things in us are just the product of the physical working of our brains, and I see no inherent reason why they couldn't result from the physical working of some other machine, appropriately arranged. Machines as they currently exist probably don't have any feelings to communicate, but that may change fast.
Gali said,
December 28, 2019 @ 8:04 pm
@Terporno That we are ourselves mere fleshy machinery (physicalism) is a very contentious idea to say the least. It suffices to say that if our minds can be described by purely mechanical processes, we really do not have much insight into its workings at all, but that it certainly does not seem to operate like the computers we construct.
Gali said,
December 28, 2019 @ 8:06 pm
I sincerely apologize for misspelling your name, I can't see too well on this tiny screen.
Ray said,
December 28, 2019 @ 10:34 pm
and here I am, unable to watch the video because I'm not a twitter user…
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2019 @ 11:09 pm
I'm not a Twitter user either, but I can both watch and post the video.
John Swindle said,
December 29, 2019 @ 7:51 pm
It's writing upside down.
Ray said,
December 29, 2019 @ 8:15 pm
we're most likely using different browsers/devices, according to recent reddit postings about how people can't see twitter vids anymore and how to fix that — machine learning and whatnot strikes again! :-)
Ed said,
December 30, 2019 @ 3:24 am
I suppose the letterform the robot is writing are pre-programmed into the machine, and not invented by some AI process on the robot's part. If so, how different is this from moveable-type printing? Preparing a font of characters in [say] Ouyang Xun's cursive handwriting and assembling them to form different phrases would have the exact same results as this current robot.
What this video shows, if anything is how nimble robots have become. But using this nimbleness to preserve calligraphy is absolutely pointless. A cheaper, and far more efficient mode of preserving the art already exists, as it has for centuries– Printing. Witness the proliferation of calligraphic model books; these are perfectly serviceable for learning how to write.
In turn, the calligraphic script itself can be reproduced in a perfect imitation of the original through printing. Reproductions of famed calligraphers aside, The preface of most old Chinese books are done in a 'cursive' style, and that was achieved through something no more advanced than woodblock printing.
Philip Taylor said,
December 31, 2019 @ 3:56 pm
"A cheaper, and far more efficient mode of preserving the art already exists, as it has for centuries– Printing" — I would respectfully disagree. Printing captures only the final form, not the brush strokes (and the order thereof), which could be argued to form an essential part of the calligraphy , one definition of which reads "the art of producing decorative handwriting or lettering with a pen or brush". From this perspective, the robot far surpasses printing I would respectfully suggest.