Emily Zhou – Looking Outwards – 01

For the first time, an artwork produced by an AI is set to go on auction (this coming October).

A Paris-based art collective called Obvious developed the AI as a GAN, a generative adversarial network. The group is a collective of artists and AI researchers with three leads at its core. The project creators were inspired by portraits from the 14th-20th century. The team fed the AI 15,000 paintings, to which it applied generative and discriminative components to the data set in order to produce the final work.

I admire the competence of this program to hold its own in the creative world. I am fascinated by the AIs ability to evaluate and produce art without emotion; as humans we heavily attribute art to emotion. I would like to see the group turn their attention to other styles of art in future development. I am certain that AI technology will continue to develop into creative fields as traditional standards are turned upside down.