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posted by martyb on Friday March 15 2019, @04:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the wish-I-thought-of-doing-that dept.

The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 15 2019, @02:45PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 15 2019, @02:45PM (#814782) Journal

    Is it Art? Or has the AI been exposed to or ingested some LDS?

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 2) by J053 on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:15AM

    by J053 (3532) <dakineNO@SPAMshangri-la.cx> on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:15AM (#815175) Homepage
    It must be art - Mormons are indigestible. Exposure can be damaging, however...