MOSCOW, September 28. /TASS/. Artificial intelligence will never be able to replace humans in the field of art, Doctor Christian Kroos from the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, told TASS.

When asked if robots would ever create art, Dr. Kroos, who is a renowned robotic art researcher and a speaker at the Culture 2.0 open lecture course at the Seventh St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum, said that it "depends first and foremost on how we define art and what it means to create art." "If we define it from the view point of production and limit it to reflecting human experience, robots do not and never will create art… In this case, the robot will always only remain a tool, not different from e.g. a film camera, and the human artists would be the true creators," he explained.

However, in the expert’s view, "this view is probably too restrictive." "Posthumanism has widened our horizon to the opportunities of trans-species communication and - why not - art, including potentially AI. Maybe we only need to require agency and intentionality from a machine artist. It would be, however, still far off in the future. As ethologist and philosopher Roberto Marchesini pointed out it would mean machines very different from the current ones: They would be subjective, individual, imaginative and no longer under the control of the humans that created them," Dr. Kroos noted.

"Most robotic art focuses on the robots themselves and their encounter with humans, not the artworks robots might produce," he pointed out.

The Seventh St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum is scheduled to take place on November 15-17, 2018. The Culture 2.0 open lecture course will also involve video game industry legend and founder of the International Game Developers' Association Ernest Adams, President of the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects Andreas Lange, Europe’s biggest science art researcher Pier Luigi Capucci and Sorbonne University professor Olga Kiseleva, as well as other experts.