Arturo Calvo - Blog

  In 2014, a 28-year-old American researcher called Ian Goodfellow published a paper called   Generative Adversarial Networks   (GANs) that presented a powerful technique to generate brand new images (i.e., human faces) with Artificial Intelligence. Goodfellow's idea got a lot of attention from the academic and industry communities and new research papers followed improving the state of the art and, as it can be seen in the images below, the perceived quality of the human faces that GANs generated. Needless to say that none of these six people actually exists. However, for the last three ones, only a skilled computer forensic would be able to detect the deception. GANs are making a tremendous positive impact in different domains, such as  healthcare  or in creative industries. Unfortunately, malicious applications of this apparently harmless technique are emerging and posing a thread to our pe...

In a   previous article   we discussed how Artificial Intelligence is pushing the boundaries of art, and how collaboration between humans and AI is enriching the creative industries. Although the term " AI Art " is often used to refer to   wall art   made by Artificial Intelligence, the rise of these generative techniques has impacted other artistic domains  such as  music ,  poetry  and even  film . Wall Art.  After a portrait made by AI was  sold at auction  at Christies for almost $500k, we have seen many other digital artists exploring this domain. Some of the most relevant pioneers in this field are  Cueva Gallery  (Ireland),  D'Agostino AI  (France) and, of course, our own gallery  AImade.art  (Norway) ;-) Music.  One of the emerging uses of AI nowadays is the generation of music in collaboration with humans. Two useful resources are  MuseNet  and  Magenta ,...

Cambridge Dictionary defines   art   as " the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings ". However, defining the boundaries of art has always been controversial. In the early years of photography, many art experts argued that it shouldn't be considered an art form since photography involved mechanical and chemical procedures instead of human hand and spirit. Photographers that attempted to have their images included in the fine arts sections of the exhibitions were responded with criticism in the press and eventual repudiation. Nowadays, photography is considered an art form as valid as any other, with thousands of galleries around the world specialized in  fine art photography . Something similar might be happening now with  AI Art . In 2018, an image created by Artificial Intelligence was  sold for $432500  in an auction at Christie's. The announcement generated a h...

In November 2018, three French students used an open-source algorithm developed by 19-year-old Robbie Barrat to generate  Portrait of Edmond Belamy , which was   sold in auction   at Christie's for $432500. This case sparked a heated debate about who owns the copyright of artworks created by Artificial Intelligence. The expert Jonathan Bailey summarized it well in  this article : " it is a total legal clusterf*ck ". These are the stakeholders that could potentially claim intellectual property rights: The creator of the algorithm.  However, if the code is released with  MIT license , it allows anyone to use it even for commercial purposes. The artists whose works were used to train the AI.  However, if the artists have died more than 70 years ago, their artworks automatically become  public domain   in Europe  and in many other countries. That is why most AI artists only include paint...