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

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.

Comments

AI has improved a lot

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Human beings are notorious for seeing patterns in noise. They see a man in the craters of the Moon, various objects in cloud formations, deduce cause and effect for natural events, (Saturn in the seventh house means, Mr Bhagat Singh Thonde will lose his case in the Supreme Court, because Justice Sutherland has Jupiter in the seventh house. Because Jupiter and Saturn are insanely jealous of each other and they never pass a chance to beat each other up, everyone knows that).

And there is no better noisy environment than "high art" where paint by numbers picture might win the first prize much to the embarrassment of the officials, and museums mount art works upside down unbeknownst to the patrons as well as the artist!

AI pitted against humans in seeing patterns in noise, is probably a high point, acme, zenith of intelligence. What next? Illusions of grandeur?

There is a fundamental problem

[imatter]

The AI did not actually create the art. The programmer gave the AI the ability and method for which to create the art, therefore the programmer is the artist and the AI is simply his brush. AI does not exist without the programmer. If it ever does, its name will no longer contain the word artificial.