As we anticipated in our article about Nvidia's fake portraits, artificial intelligence and art are crossing paths once again. This time it's thanks to Alexander Reben, an artist and robotics expert who has created his works without ever touching a brush. What's the trick? An AI develops several images based on words and their supposed meaning, while another AI reads Reben's brain waves as he views the results, repeating the cycle until an optimal image is achieved.
Paint with your mind. Never touch a brush or a canvas. Lie on a sofa while the artwork materializes. Some artists may see this as an impossible dream, while for others it's an aberration, since they find the physical act of painting stimulating and enriching. The point is that it's possible today, as long as you accept a collaborative structure. Meaning, the artist will need a little help from an artificial intelligence.
Alexander Reben and amalGAN
Alexander Reben is an artist based in California, and he has shared on the Web his works created on the amalGAN platform. In the initial step, an AI combines different words to generate an image of what it 'thinks' those words mean. Then, it produces additional variants by combining or 'fusing' that original image with other photos. These variants are fed to a new AI, which simultaneously records Reben's brain waves and other bodily indicators to determine which images he likes most.
The loop of image fusion and brain wave analysis repeats until the AI concludes it has reached an 'optimal' image. The result is sent to China, where it is painted by hand anonymously, and the final step is that the AI sees the finished painting to give it a title. Want to know more? Don't hesitate to visit his official page.
