The Artist in the Machine excerpted in Papaya Rocks

Thrilled to be excerpted in Papaya Rocks.

Today, computers are creating an extraordinary new world of images, sounds, and stories such as we have never experienced before. Gerfried Stocker, the outspoken artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz, says provocatively, “Rather than asking whether machines can be creative and produce art, the question should be, ‘Can we appreciate art we know has been made by a machine?’”

Alexander Mordvintsev’s DeepDream sees things we don’t and conjures up images merged in extraordinary and, to the human eye, sometimes nightmarish ways. Ian Goodfellow’s generative adversarial networks (GANs) provide a way for computers to assess their creations without human intervention. As he puts it, they give AI a form of imagination. Computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal has used them to evolve his creative adversarial network (CAN) in the quest to create art not only definitively new but appealing to human eyes. Pix2Pix, creating fully developed images from an outline, and CycleGAN, merging two photographs, have created images never seen or even imagined before. […]

Excerpted and adapted from The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity. Read full article on Papaya Rocks website, first published on 28 October 2019.

Image by Patryk Sroczy?ski and Papaya Rocks