There are many mechanisms for creating AI art, including procedural 'rule-based' generation of images using mathematical patterns, algorithms which simulate brush strokes and other painted effects, and artificial intelligence or deep learning algorithms such as generative adversarial networks and transformers.
One of the first significant AI art systems is AARON, developed by Harold Cohen beginning in the late 1960s.[1] AARON is the most notable example of AI art in the era of GOFAI programming because of its use of a symbolic rule-based approach to generate technical images.[2] Cohen developed AARON with the goal of being able to code the act of drawing. In its primitive form, AARON created simple black and white drawings. Cohen would later finish the drawings by painting them. Throughout the years, he also began to develop a way for AARON to also paint. Cohen designed AARON to paint using special brushes and dyes that were chosen by the program itself without mediation from Cohen.[3]
Since their design in 2014, generative adversarial networks (GANs) are often used by AI artists. This system uses a "generator" to create new images and a "discriminator" to decide which created images are considered successful.[4] More recent models use Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network and Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (VQGAN+CLIP).[5]
Several programs use AI to generate a variety of images based on various text prompts. They include OpenAI's DALL-E which released a series of images in January 2021, [9]Google Brain's Imagen and Parti which was announced in May 2022 and Microsoft's NUWA-Infinity.[10][11][12]
There are many other AI art generation programs including simple consumer-facing mobile apps and Jupyter notebooks that require powerful GPUs to run effectively. Examples include Midjourney, StyleGAN, and Stable Diffusion, among many others.[13]
Sales
An auction sale of artificial intelligence art was held at Christie's Auction House in New York City in 2018, where the AI artwork Edmond de Belamy sold for $432,500, which was almost 45 times higher than its estimate of $7,000–$10,000. The artwork was created by "Obvious", a Paris-based collective.[14][15][16][17]
See also
Generative art
List of artificial intelligence artists
References
↑McCorduck, Pamela (1991) (in English). AARONS's Code: Meta-Art. Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. pp. 210. ISBN0-7167-2173-2.