Can machines create art? An AI-generated portrait has an answer

It has always been hotly debated whether a machine can create art or not. But it seems like technology is slowly finding ways to create mesmerizing art that looks as real as the ones painted in real colors. The perfect example of such machine-made art is an AI-generated portrait-likeimage that is being sold for nearly half a million dollars ($432,500)at an auction.The portrait “Edmond de Belamy” is a member of a fictitious“Belamy” family designed by “Generative Adversarial Network”. The Belamy family comprises of the strange or distorted faces that might have a dreamy or scary touch to them.

GAN (Generative Adversarial Network)consists of two parts, the “Generator” and the “Discriminator”. Both visual recognition models are given a set of data including 15,000 portraits from last 600 yearsfor analysis. Based on this data, the Generator tries to create new portraits and the Discriminator has the task to identify those portraits are real or artificially created by a machine.

The portraits look so real; it is hard to guess that they are computer-generated. Although the choice of colors in those paintings is interesting and the paintwork looks like brush strokes, the stippling pattern is the only thing that hints of a computer attempting to create consistent texture.

Such attempts are made to move closer to get the appreciation and acceptance of such generated constructs to be counted as art.