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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: 3, Interesting) by Captival on Friday March 15 2019, @07:57AM (1 child)
I had a look at that faceless series linked in the story, and I'm very suspicious. Not because it's too good to be AI, but because it is NOT good enough for it. Go have a look at Studio Painter [synthetik.com], which is a nice piece of art software I use now and again. There's some really impressive results coming from this software that simulate a wide variety of drawing and painting styles, all "interpreted" from an image by the software's AI. The Faceless series looks primitive in comparison, almost as if it's a real person in Photoshop pretending to be an AI through a couple of shitty filters.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @12:26PM
Just going by the results, this is kiddie stuff. Real "AI art" should be fun and free, or super advanced like the AI-created "sculpture" in Journeyman Project 2. Other acceptable answers include forgeries created by AI or made with AI assistance. You could come up with a "lost painting" by some famous master and program a robot to do brush strokes, or just use the output as a guide to do it yourself.
However, in managing to sell a sloppy "AI-created" painting for $432.5k, "French collective Obvious" have created a good piece of performance art, and perhaps a nice profit for themselves. Unless the bid was faked or submitted by one of their own, in which case they have at least fooled the media and art world at some cost.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]