You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.
How is this different from a human? As humans grow, they receive input from their environment. The world around them is what feeds their imagination. Even advanced professional artists are still just using their memories and life experience to create works of art. The only difference here is that the machine has been provided a much smaller, more focused environment.
Yeah the whole notion about genius pulling ideas from thin air is frankly laughable. We are simply not aware of what they have read or observed in the past. Even old Archimedes was inspired by observing the rising water.
Motivation. A machine that has its own motivation will produce work we won't like and will be attacked for it (I'd like to mention that I stand with sentient machines against stupid humans when that day comes, BTW).
You think art is just some stimulus-response thing because American psychology has been mired in behaviorism for decades and lacks a coherent theory of mind. But art is much more than the whimsical reproduction of presented stimuli to varying levels of accuracy, it is about making selections that foreclose other possibilities and which embody a certain perversity.
I paint, among other things, and one thing I especially enjoy about painting is that it's solitary rather than performative so I don't have to interact with other people while I slap colored goop onto sheets of fabric. While I'm painting, I think intensely about the part I'm working on now, (duh) and also why I'm making that painting, and what decisions about the painting are coming up that will be impossible to undo.
Why did you paint this and why did you paint it this way are questions that cannot be answered by automation. Nor does the answer lie in technique. There's no shortage of technically astonishing work that is semantically empty; I die a little every time I see a Facebook video of some impressive new graphic technique that is then used to reproduce some lowest-common-denominator pop icon for maximum recognizability. There's no feeling there and the resultant work is about as thrilling as a robocall or a display mannequin. The level of craftsmanship is very high indeed, but the level of artistry is close to zero. In short, it's eye candy that never activates anything much past your visual cortex, or at most tugs on some existing semantic relationship.
When I talk about feeling, I mean the desire of the artist that the work embodies. That isn't something that comes along after a certain level of technical accomplishment has been reached. It is what motivates the act of creation in the first place.
That covers a lot of ground. No-one prompts us directly to draw or tells us what we must draw. Still, something does prompt us. Something does determine what we draw. It's our reactions to those somethings that defines us.
The unanswered question is whether there is something in our nature that differentiates our "initiative" and our "reactions" in a qualitative way from what can be achieved with current computational concepts.
I think the answer to that is probably yes. But still this work is impressive and every step like this elucidates the argument more clearly, reducing it to its fundamentals - rather than to crude heuristics about what constitutes a particularly human ability.
