Over the past few years we have seen artificial intelligences do very strange things. One of them "finished" the next Game of Thrones book, and another came up with an entire chapter of the Harry Potter saga, with results worthy of a comedy. However, everything gets more confusing and abstract when they explore visual art and challenge traditional limits. One of the most recent examples is that of artist Mario Klingemann, who trained a neural network to generate paintings inspired by the nude human body. The best of them was "El Hijo del Carnicero", to such an extent that it received the main award at the Lumen Awards 2018.
The world still has doubts about the true value of artificial intelligences. At the end of the day, their performance depends heavily on the material used for training and the time they spend analyzing it (not to mention they have made several high-profile mistakes), but they have advantages that are truly compelling. Some tasks have been almost completely mastered, among which face recognition stands out, and that ability allowed them to advance in aspects such as the creation of photorealistic portraits. However, many specialists in artificial intelligences and neural networks are interested in art, and they decided that their platforms should attack it head-on. Today, one of them was awarded.
What you are looking at is "El Hijo del Carnicero", a creation of the neural network by artist Mario Klingemann. The painting was born from a randomly generated "stick figure" using a database of 150,000 human poses. The final pose is fed into a generative adversarial network, split into two networks, with one creating bodies and the other trying to determine whether they are convincing enough relative to the original training data. In this case, the chosen material was pornography, because of an issue of abundance (it needed full nude bodies). Each body with its pose is then optimized with a second generative network, increasing definition, adding textures and other minor details. Klingemann kept the 20 best, and among them was "El Hijo del Carnicero".
The novelty would end there if it weren't for the fact that the painting was recognized with the main prize of the Lumen Competition dedicated to digital art. This is the first time in history that a "machine" has received a major art prize, but it's not the first to work with nudes, because other projects have tried before, with disturbing results. What's next? Probably a category dedicated to neural networks, or why not, an entire competition dedicated to them.
