Researchers have created an AI based on a deep neural network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing an algorithm for the creation of artistic images.
The algorithm can duplicate the style of a Van Gogh painting, or uses the brush strokes and colors of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or any number of other famous artistic style. According to the computational neuroscience researchers, Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, and Matthias Bethge, responsible for the study, the striking similarities between their performance-optimized artificial neural networks and traditional human-made artwork "offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery."
It is truly fascinating that a convolutional neural network, which was trained to perform one of the core computational tasks of biological vision, automatically learns image representations that allow the separation of image content from style. According to one poster on a reddit thread about the research, "Art, among the few jobs that people thought AI would take the longest to replace, looks like it may be among the first to be replaced by AI."