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Artificially Intelligent Painters Invent New Styles of Art (newscientist.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the art-for-the-AI-generation dept.

Dthief shares a report from New Scientist: Now and then, a painter like Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso comes along and turns the art world on its head. They invent new aesthetic styles, forging movements such as impressionism or abstract expressionism. But could the next big shake-up be the work of a machine? An artificial intelligence has been developed that produces images in unconventional styles -- and much of its output has already been given the thumbs up by members of the public. The team [of researchers] modified a type of algorithm known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), in which two neural nets play off against each other to get better and better results. One creates a solution, the other judges it -- and the algorithm loops back and forth until the desired result is reached. In the art AI, one of these roles is played by a generator network, which creates images. The other is played by a discriminator network, which was trained on 81,500 paintings to tell the difference between images we would class as artworks and those we wouldn't -- such as a photo or diagram, say. The discriminator was also trained to distinguish different styles of art, such as rococo or cubism. The clever twist is that the generator is primed to produce an image that the discriminator recognizes as art, but which does not fall into any of the existing styles.

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. 50% completeness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    To be complete, it still needs to explain how it decides to paint what it painted using emphatic words...

    1. Re:50% completeness by tehcyder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My work explores the relationship between emerging sexualities and unwanted gifts.

      With influences as diverse as Wittgenstein and Andy Warhol, new synergies are distilled from both constructed and discovered dialogues.

      Ever since I was a teenager I have been fascinated by the unrelenting divergence of relationships. What starts out as contemplation soon becomes manipulated into a manifesto of temptation, leaving only a sense of decadence and the possibility of a new beginning.

      As intermittent phenomena become frozen through diligent and repetitive practice, the viewer is left with a tribute to the limits of our future.

      Well that pretty much made sense, so I'm not sure you've quite got the hang of it yet.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  2. Nope... by denzacar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It needs to create "art" based on personal emotional experience AND induce such emotional experience in human audience.

    Otherwise... it's just a drawing, photo, sculpture, video... but not art.
    Just like those "paintings" by monkeys and elephants are not art but paint slapped on canvas.
    Or like how birdsong is not art, an anthill is not architecture and dogs urine on the wall is not graffiti.

    --
    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
  3. Re:This is awful. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What art does is convey feelings. So far, machines have none.

    If you lay out a hundred abstract paintings, half made by humans and half by this GAN, do you think you could tell which were made with "feelings"? I doubt if you could do any better than chance. It is silly to say there is a difference if the difference is undetectable.