Introduction

The emergence of a new subgenre of art known as digital art is pushing the envelope of what’s considered creative and redefining the process of making art. Companies are creating self-sufficient robots that they can work in tandem with, provide data to algorithms, and instruct machines to produce original pieces of visual art. 

They create an endless supply of one-of-a-kind pieces of art by using computer algorithms that simulate the workings of the human brain. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a creative partner has become more appealing in recent years.

AI artists embrace the interaction between accident and control and utilise AI to establish a balance between the two while producing innovative thoughts and aesthetics. This is accomplished via the application of artificial intelligence. Already, it has made its way onto the covers of popular albums, as well as the walls of conventional art galleries, and it is broadening our understanding of what constitutes computer-generated art. 

In addition to this, AI assistants may provide art historians and conservators with assistance in recreating long-lost masterpieces by studying existing works of art and picking up on the one-of-a-kind aesthetic of each artist who has ever lived.

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What Exactly Is AI Art?

AI art refers to creative work that is produced with the aid of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a subfield of computer science that focuses on the development of software and hardware systems that can imitate human intellect or perhaps recreate the workings of the human brain. 

Through the process of machine learning and the use of a variety of different self-learning algorithms that draw information from data, AI is able to create original works. AI art is the product of a cooperation between an artist and an AI system, however, the amount of autonomy may vary significantly, and the end result is greatly dependent on the quality of the data that the AI learns from.

Artists use artificial intelligence as a creative tool and collaborate with algorithms to set up specific rules that machines use to analyse thousands of images to comprehend a particular creation process, such as a particular style or aesthetic. This allows the machines to create art that is generated by AI. After that, the algorithms will develop brand new forms, figures, and patterns to use in the production of new works.

AI artists work together with creative programmers, statisticians, computer scientists, and neuroscientists to construct machines that push the bounds of human creativity. These machines are built with the help of machines.

History of AI art

The idea of artificial intelligence may be traced back to ancient philosophers who made their mark in the attempt to describe the process of human thinking as a symbolic system. These thinkers laid the groundwork for what is now known as artificial intelligence. However, the concept of programmable machines with creative potential did not emerge until the 19th century, when the first proto-computers were built.

Ada Lovelace combined her artistic and analytical aspirations in the 1840s and established herself as the first computer programmer and creative coder in the world. She carried in discussions on the so-called Analytical Engine with the English scientist Charles Babbage, who is widely regarded as the inventor of the first computer. Lovelace was especially enthused about mathematics and the possibilities that might be realised via computing. She was also aware that computers were capable of much more than just doing mathematical computations.

Alan Turing, an English mathematician and computer scientist, devised the Turing Test in the year 1950. This was more than a century after the first test. The test, which is also known as the “Imitation Game,” evaluates a computer’s capacity to demonstrate intelligent behaviour that cannot be differentiated from that of a person. The approach proposed by Turing has emerged as a central tenet in the study of artificial intelligence.

The birth of modern AI art

In the late 1950s, visual artists started connecting with new technology notions and started experimenting with computer graphics. This trend continued throughout the 1960s. Artists like Manfred Mohr and Vera Molná investigated aesthetic viewpoints inspired by science in the early days of computer art. They developed fascinating products that were considered to be generated from the subjectivity of the creative process.

Even though some of the technology that is used in today’s AI systems has been around for more than half a century, significant advancements in performance, the capacity to process vast amounts of data, and the development of new algorithms have only made these kinds of advances possible in the field in the most recent few years.

The development of generative adversarial networks was the next significant step in the progression of artificial intelligence and AI art. This event marked the beginning of a new age in both fields (GANs). Alexander Mordvintsev’s DeepDream algorithm was one of the earliest creative implementations of generative adversarial networks (GANs). 

Mordvintsev, a researcher at Google, discovered a technique in 2015 to explore the hidden depths of a neural network and examine how computers acquire visual ideas. This was a significant step forward in the field. In the years that followed, the technique of training GANs on a variety of pictures, ranging from photos of kittens and dogs to paintings by great masters, became an increasingly common one among researchers and experimental artists.

Artists were able to begin producing works almost immediately because to the increasing ease with which they could collaborate with open-source repositories and training datasets. One of the first auctions of artificial intelligence art was held in 2016 in San Francisco’s Gray Area. There, AI artists such as Memo Akten and Mike Tyka displayed works that were made by the early version of Google’s Deep Dream algorithm. After just two years, the first piece of artificial intelligence-generated art made its debut on the international art scene.

The first artificial intelligence artwork to get widespread media attention was “Portrait of Edmond Belamy.”
Edmond de Belamy, as seen in the 2018 portrait. Obvious Art, located in Paris, was the publisher of this work. In 2018, an artificial intelligence-created picture named “Obvious” was sold at auction at Christie’s. The print was created by a team located in Paris. However, several data scientists and artists had previously developed and sold AI art before the auction of Portrait of Edmond Belamy, which was the first extensively documented sale of an AI artwork. The auction of Portrait of Edmond Belamy was the first sale of an AI artwork.

Conclusion

The creation of artificial intelligence art may take various forms. One has the ability to create pictures in the manner of others, produce original visuals only by word descriptions, or even begin the trip to learn creative coding and make art using code alone.