How I taught an AI to think like a painter

There is a certain type of artist who yearns to go beyond the contents of their own head. I have long wished for a truly malleable painterly space, one that has the velocity and dynamism of great abstract painting, only fashioned out of figuration, made with images. There is also a history of artists embracing technological innovation: silkscreen, video, neon. Everything was new once, even oil paint. Photography was thought to signal the death of painting until artists as diverse as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas started using it in their work. Now we have artificial intelligence. Could AI help realise my vision of a fluid pictorial space, exempt from the laws of gravity? The AI art that I had seen was not promising. The more futuristic the imagery, the more banal the effect; the images seemed to have no inner life. Was it the fault of the technology or the user, a failure of the car or the driver? What did the machine not “understand” about visual art? For one thing, digital imagery is

There is a certain type of artist who yearns to go beyond the contents of their own head. I have long wished for a truly malleable painterly space, one that has the velocity and dynamism of great abstract painting, only fashioned out of figuration, made with images. There is also a history of artists embracing technological innovation: silkscreen, video, neon. Everything was new once, even oil paint. Photography was thought to signal the death of painting until artists as diverse as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas started using it in their work. Now we have artificial intelligence. Could AI help