Artificial intelligence art is any visual artwork created through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs.
Artists began to create AI art in the mid to late-20th century, when the discipline was founded. In the early 21st century, the availability of AI art tools to the general public increased, providing opportunities for use outside of academia and professional artists. Throughout its history, artificial intelligence art has raised many philosophical concerns, including those related to copyright, deception, and its impact on traditional artists, including their incomes.
History
Early history
The concept of automated art dates back at least to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, where inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria were described as having designed machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music. The tradition of creative automatons has flourished throughout history, such as Maillardet's automaton, created in the early 1800s.
The academic discipline of artificial intelligence was founded at a research workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, and has experienced several waves of advancement and optimism in the decades since. Since its founding, researchers in the field have raised philosophical and ethical arguments about the nature of the human mind and the consequences of creating artificial beings with human-like intelligence; these issues have previously been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.
1950s to 2000s
Since the founding of AI in the 1950s, artists and researchers have used artificial intelligence to create artistic works. These works were sometimes referred to as algorithmic art, computer art, digital art or new media.
One of the first significant AI art systems is AARON, developed by Harold Cohen beginning in the late 1960s at the University of California at San Diego. 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. 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. AARON was exhibited in 1972 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In both 1991 and 1992, Karl Sims won the Golden Nica award at Prix Ars Electronica for his 3D AI animated videos using artificial evolution.
In 2009, Eric Millikin won the Pulitzer Prize along with several other awards for his artificial intelligence art that was critical of government corruption in Detroit and resulted in the city's mayor being sent to jail.
2010s and deep learning
In 2014, Ian Goodfellow and colleagues at Université de Montréal developed the generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of deep neural network capable of learning to mimic the statistical distribution of input data such as images. The GAN uses a "generator" to create new images and a "discriminator" to decide which created images are considered successful. Unlike previous algorithmic art which followed hand-coded rules, generative adversarial networks could learn a specific aesthetic by analyzing a dataset of example images.
In 2015, a team at Google released DeepDream, a program that uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia. The process creates deliberately over-processed images with a dream-like appearance reminiscent of a psychedelic experience.
In 2018, an auction sale of artificial intelligence art was held at Christie's Auction House in New York where the AI artwork Edmond de Belamy (a pun on Goodfellow's name) 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.
In 2019, Stephanie Dinkins won the Creative Capital award for her creation of an evolving artificial intelligence based on the "interests and culture(s) of people of color." Also in 2019, Sougwen Chung won the Lumen Prize for her performances with a robotic arm that uses AI to attempt to draw in a manner similar to Chung.
2020s and generative AI
In the 2020s, text-to-image models, which generate images based on prompts, began to approach the quality of real photographs and human-drawn art.