When the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera – whose full name Diego Maria de la Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanlislao de la Rivera Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez – was told by a critic that the birds depicted in his latest painting did not “look like flamingoes the way God made them”, the unfazed artist replied “No – they look like the way I made them.” Underlying the implicit assertion that nature follows art is the credo that the handiwork of the Creator can legitimately be recreated, with value addition, by a human agency as represented by the artist. Now it seems that the creations of artists can in turn be recreated by an agency other than human which is represented by AI, or Artificial Intelligence, which reportedly is revolutionising the world of art.
Using a method called `generative adversarial’ network (GAN), which involves feeding thousands of images representing a particular genre of painting into a computer which then assembles a composite facsimile, AI artists have produced works which include a portrait in the classical European style which fetched $432,500 at a recent New York auction, a price tag 60 times higher than the initial bid. A similar technique has also been used to produce AI artworks that are displayed on screens and change constantly as new data is fed into the computer. While purists might dismiss such `paintings’ by saying that whatever they are, art they AIn’t, practioners of GAN are laughing all the way to the Braque.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author’s own.