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The images are huge and square and harrowing: a form, reminiscent of a face, engulfed in fiery red-and-yellow currents; a head emerging from a cape collared with glitchy feathers, from which a shape suggestive of a hand protrudes; a heap of gold and scarlet mottles, convincing as fabric, propping up a face with grievous, angular features. These are part of "Faceless Portraits Transcending Time," an exhibition of prints recently shown at the HG Contemporary gallery in Chelsea, the epicenter of New York's contemporary-art world. All of them were created by a computer.
The catalog calls the show a "collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal," a move meant to spotlight, and anthropomorphize, the machine-learning algorithm that did most of the work. According to HG Contemporary, it's the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist.
[...] The AI-art gold rush began in earnest last October, when the New York auction house Christie's sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print in the style of 19th-century European portraiture, for $432,500.
Bystanders in and out of the art world were shocked. The print had never been shown in galleries or exhibitions before coming to market at auction, a channel usually reserved for established work. The winning bid was made anonymously by telephone, raising some eyebrows; art auctions can invite price manipulation. It was created by a computer program that generates new images based on patterns in a body of existing work, whose features the AI "learns." What's more, the artists who trained and generated the work, the French collective Obvious, hadn't even written the algorithm or the training set. They just downloaded them, made some tweaks, and sent the results to market.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday March 15 2019, @07:21AM (4 children)
Anyone ever seen the BBC program "Fake or Fortune"? Take an artwork, where you're not quite sure whether it was painted by X, or by friend of X. It's the same painting either way: there's no question of its authenticity, or age, or whatever. It's only a question of who held the brush at the time. Difference in value? Maybe a factor of 1000. Rich fools wanting to be parted from their money, as far as I can tell.
So if someone cooks up a neural net that can swirl some colors on a a screen, and someone else wants to pay stupid amounts of money for that? The news isn't the AI "art". The news is the lunacy of the high-end art world.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 15 2019, @07:28AM (1 child)
Seems like a good place to pay respects to the good olde https://electricsheep.org [electricsheep.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @04:27PM
Yeah, but it stopped working on my Linux systems. It's good to hear that it still works on Android and Apple.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 15 2019, @09:28AM
More recently, it's one of the things that Adam's Ruined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw5kme5Q_Yo
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Bot on Friday March 15 2019, @01:10PM
> Rich fools wanting to be parted from their money.
It's worse than that, it's not the full of bliss rich throwing money around. It's the social ladder climbing rich who needs something that is both new and flashy to distinguish himself from his peers. It's like the quest of social influencers for a good video story. Kind of sad.
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