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 lentilla on Friday March 15 2019, @06:39AM (3 children)
Supposing I am the kind of artist who creates AI-generated art, it's not too far a stretch of the imagination to believe that I'm the kind of artist who indulges in a little AI-generated art speculation? Kind of goes hand-in-glove.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @06:51AM
You could even be an AI artwork created by another AI.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @04:25PM
Yes...but the price bid is a bit beyond the means of most artists...
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:41AM
Meh. I rememeber back when anybody who could generate a Mandelbrot and/or Julia set using the visualization of computer algebra systems created "art" with a line or two of MATLAB code.
Same idea, except with words and sentences this time.
(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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(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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @08:21AM (2 children)
I've passed into an age where I start to appreciate art (as a child I never understood why anyone would be interested in it). The most important aspect in it is that you have to like and enjoy to look at it, or that it has a connection with you. Lot of these "high-price increasing masterpieces" are, in my opinion, not worth their price. Some of these things are ugly as hell, which I wouldn't pay any price for. There is a lot of much cheaper art that's better to look at. Most of these high-price increasing art pieces are sold for such price that people speculate with it.
Many years ago a Dutch artist committed suicide and his art was sold for a much higher price than when he lived... years later his art can be bought again for close to nothing. Everyone buying it just after his dead thought they could get rich quickly, well they were wrong and they could have known if they did their home work.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 15 2019, @01:12PM (1 child)
I've passed into an age where I start to appreciate art (as a child I never understood why anyone would be interested in it).
Usually it has something to do with erectile dysfunction too.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @07:54PM
what, bots have erections now? what will they think of next?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:55PM (7 children)
Cross off safe-from-AI jobs list: artist
Sure you may not like this particular iteration but someone with cash did like it. Also note that art is the area many people thought forever safe from AI; they’d tell you “if AI does take our jobs we can all be artists”
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @01:24PM (5 children)
An artist's compensation isn't necessarily correlated with their talent or creative output.
The job can often be called con artist, or schmoozer. "AI" hasn't even scored a win here since it was just some human artists who fiddled around on a computer and submitted it to an auction house. The real work was describing the process with flowery language in order to make computer illiterate types smile, nod, and break out the checkbook. You can see that in action in this Christie's article [christies.com] about the sale.
If you just want to talk about algorithms imitating art styles or creating new art, computers are doing well there and could certainly replace humans:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgpydb/robotic-jackson-pollock-painting-machine [vice.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyzn3Fmtw-E [youtube.com]
https://electricsheep.org/ [electricsheep.org]
It would be neat to see auction houses flooded by the works of algorithms and bots, but we're not quite there yet... or are we?
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @04:37PM (4 children)
Jackson Pollock is not a fair example. Most people who recognize his style don't understand the deeper layers of it. I'm one who doesn't understand it, but there's been a thorough computer analysis, and he isn't working at anything approaching random. There's a message there, even though I don't understand (or appreciate) it.
But because just about nobody understands Pollock, a superficial fake is fairly easy. Portraits are probably a lot harder, though there there's the advantage of a much larger set of training data. Landscapes with people in them, people that are in the foreground, is probably even harder. (If people aren't in the landscapes, it's probably easier, as people have special purpose built-ins for recognizing other people.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @05:42PM (3 children)
Well, I was going to link this but didn't:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/computer-algorithm-can-accurately-identify-jackson-pollock-paintings/ [arstechnica.com]
You could use an algorithm to judge the similarity of a painting to Jackson Pollock, and then tweak your robot/algorithm accordingly, until you reach a sweet spot. This is adversarial approach, like using a fake video detecting algorithm to improve your fake video. If it would take too many tweaks for a mechanical system, you could try using huge amounts of physics simulations before applying what was learned to the real thing.
Imitating a single artist for forgery is one thing but AI can of course be used to create new art styles by mixing hundreds of references or just doing its own thing. And the results could be used to flood or trick auction houses, to the extent that is possible. Currently, a human would likely manually curate the results, but the process can be streamlined as it improves.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @07:53PM (2 children)
OK. So it could paint in the style of Pollock. But Pollock was only partially about his style...from his point of view, perhaps not even partially, but from someone who doesn't understand him, that's all they see. Somehow Pollock was encoding some meaning into his work. I don't understand it, but I don't understand Joyce or Faulkner, either. So something that only paints in his style isn't producing genuine imitation Pollock's.
(OTOH, there's a story about Picasso where he is quoted as saying "I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.", so it may well be that not everything that Pollock did in his style was a "genuine Pollock", in the sense of representing what he was trying to show.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @07:59PM
> there's a story about Picasso
Currently reading Norman Mailer's "Portrait of Picasso as a young man" -- good fun read, with many photos of his works in the context of his friends and lovers at the time they were painted.
Picasso started painting very young, and early on learned to work very fast, his lifetime output is huge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @09:09PM
I have a hard time with that kind of stuff. "If you look deeply enough, you'll see the artist's true deeper meaning." I'm pretty sure you'll see what you're looking for. To see the same "true deeper meaning" as someone else you either havea similar perspective to start with, or heard what they saw and are trying to see the same thing. (Like english literature class.)
To put it in computer terms, an artist could dump a megabyte of /dev/random and anyone who looks at it with the right one-time-pad will see the plain text message. It's just random noise - the meaning/message is entirely due to the filter applied by the receiver (ie the OTP).
Now I don't know about Pollock, maybe there's a dependable source of statements -from him- clarifying the deeper meaning he was going for - so there is an objective truth to what the artist meant by his works. Without that, nothing says one POV is objectively "more correct" than another OTP, er POV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:42PM
Ha, ha right about one thing!
“he urges people to pivot to graphic design and other creative fields that artificial intelligence is less likely to automate.”
https://futurism.com/hacking-printers-warn-job-stealing-ai [futurism.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday March 15 2019, @01:07PM (2 children)
learn to paint, they said, the car factory is a nice place, they said.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @02:41PM
They told me my house would be a good place to start.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 15 2019, @07:27PM
Painter: Ok, all done, where's my $50?
Home Owner: Really? Done so quickly?
Painter: Yes. All done.
Home Owner: Ok, here's your $50.
Painter: Thanks dude! And BTW, that wasn't a porch you had me paint, it was a Ferari.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 15 2019, @02:45PM (1 child)
Is it Art? Or has the AI been exposed to or ingested some LDS?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:15AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)
Back then we had this kind of cute tricks too, like computer generated poetry.
About that time the AI hype crashed, because funders finally wanted to see real value.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @05:47PM
Plenty of people do this stuff for free.
But it looks like someone got paid a lot of money for what could have been days or hours of work.
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