People Could Not Tell Whether a Painting Was Created by AI or an Expressionist Painter

A team of scientists from Rutgers University, the College of Charleston and Facebook’s AI Lab taught an AI to create paintings that people could not always tell from the works of expressionist painters, Smithsonian writes.

According to the authors, they wanted to develop a program that will not only imitate the existing styles of painting, but will also be able to create its own ones. In order to be able to do this, the AI was taught based on over 80,000 paintings. As a result, it learned to see the difference between the work of the painters and other images, such as photographs or graphs. In addition, the AU learned to distinguish between different styles of painting and tell, for example, pop-art from impressionism and cubism from futurism.

After completing training, the AI even managed to develop its own unique style. On the one hand, its painting doesn’t look like any of existing paintings, and on the other hand, still looks like works of art.

The authors checked the effectiveness of the program on people, who were shown the works created by the AI together with an expressionist painting and the works of the participants of Art Basel 2016. Sometimes, the respondents not only couldn’t identify the computer-generated paintings, but also gave them higher marks.