AI art is everywhere but it can never compete with human creativity

Alex Hughes speaks to Prof Ahmed Elgammal, an expert in artificial intelligence to learn more about the rise of art made by AI

- Alex Hughes

As artificial intelligence (AI) improves, artists are finding themselves in unprecedented territory. Realistic images are being made in seconds; millions of them are created each day; and the images are being entered into and winning art competitions. But none of them are being made by humans.

We spoke to Ahmed Elgammal a professor of computer science at Rutgers University to find out about the rise of AI art and what it means for human creativity in the digital era.

HOW DO AI IMAGE GENERATORS WORK?

Five years ago, there was an advancement in AI known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). It took images and tried to generate similar results. Give it images of cats and it would return completely new versions to match. This was revolutionary and many artists started using it. Then came a newer generation that used text to generate images to give more control over what was being generated. This worked by training the model on lots of images and their accompanying text caption to understand how the words relate to the images. So in an image of a bird on a tree, the AI guesses where the tree and bird are and the network tells it if it’s correct. By doing that for billions of images, the AI figures out what words relate to what images.

WHY DO THESE AI MODELS STRUGGLE WITH COMPLICATED SHAPES?