If art is what makes us human, how come Google’s bots can do it too?
Google’s artificial intelligence, or shall I say “painters,” raked in thousands for charity over the weekend in San Francisco at an art show called “DeepDream: The art of neural networks.”
The computers weren’t working completely alone though. A team of researchers and artists from Research at Google fed them images to produce the art.
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Then the computers set to work, creating pictures of spiraling vortexes and psychedelic-looking towers, morphing animal faces, and colorful landscapes. At the auction Friday night, the priciest of the 29 artworks went for as much as $8,000, The Wall Street Journal reports. (If you want to see the Google robotic “artists” in action, you can generate some of your own psychedelic art here.)
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But there are other ways that Google machines are starting to learn more like humans: Google’s DeepMind recently learned how to think like a world-class Go player, and last week the group announced DeepMind Health, which will work on learning how to diagnose like a doctor, work that’s bringing the “Google brain” just a little closer to lifelike.
