Unconditional Bond

 

Can AI and ML algorithms create painting masterpieces

AI artwork sold for $432,500 — nearly 45 times its high estimate — as Christie’s becomes the first auction house to offer a work of art created by an algorithm

 

Portrait of Edmond Belamy, 2018, created by GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). Sold for $432,500 on 25 October 2018 at Christie’s in New York. Image © Obvious

 

The portrait in its gilt frame depicts a portly gentleman, possibly French and — to judge by his dark frockcoat and plain white collar — a man of the church. The work appears unfinished: the facial features are somewhat indistinct and there are blank areas of canvas. Oddly, the whole composition is displaced slightly to the north-west.

A label on the wall states that the sitter is a man named Edmond Belamy, but the giveaway clue as to the origins of the work is the artist’s signature at the bottom right. In cursive Gallic script it reads:

 

 

It was created by an artificial intelligence, an algorithm defined by that algebraic formula with its many parentheses.

The algorithm is composed of two parts…. On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.
Elsewhere in the AI world, researchers are playing other art-historical games. Ahmed Elgammal, director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is working with a system that he calls CAN — a ‘creative’ rather a ‘generative’ network. The basic binary hokey-cokey is the same — maker and judge, artist and critic — but CAN is specifically programmed to produce novelty, something different from what it sees in the data set, which in this case consists of all manner of paintings from the 14th century on.

 

No AI researchers are claiming that much just yet. They are still addressing the fundamental question of whether the images produced by their networks can be called art at all. One way to do that, surely, is to conduct a kind of visual Turing test, to show the output of the algorithms to human evaluators, flesh-and-blood discriminators, and ask if they can tell the difference.