NOW AI TURNS ARTIST

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has been feeling creative lately and has entered the space of fine arts. And masters like Van Gogh would be none too happy to find out that all it takes to paint a self-portrait these days is a bunch of zeros and ones, or to put it more sophisticatedly, a programmers’ code.

Tech behemoth IBM is the one who put the idea into an AI system. Although the outcome is not likely to satisfy every art lover, the project is intriguing because of the way the process has been broken down. The first step involved scanning hundreds of articles about AI so that the system could have a borrowed sort of self-awareness. It also combed through thousands of paintings, made by humans, of course. Then it chose several representative images to indicate its learning and finally selected a picture of a human and a robot shaking hands. Next, it worked on generating an artwork of its own based on what it had learnt.

Experts may not be ready yet to acknowledge AI-generated art, but people are willing to pay big sums for the same. A few days ago, Christie’s sold its first piece of AI art, titled ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’, which fetched a whopping $4,32,500 – nearly 45 times its estimated value. The piece was made by a French art collective called Obvious.