Christie's auction house notes that an AI-generated "portrait" of an 18th-century French gentleman recently sold for $432,500. (One member of the Paris-based collective behind the work says "we found that portraits provided the best way to illustrate our point, which is that algorithms are able to emulate creativity.")

But the blog post from Christie's goes on to acknowledge that AI researchers "are still addressing the fundamental question of whether the images produced by their networks can be called art at all."

. One way to do that, surely, is to conduct a kind of visual Turing test, to show the output of the algorithms to human evaluators, flesh-and-blood discriminators, and ask if they can tell the difference.
"Yes, we have done that," says Ahmed Elgammal [director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey]. "We mixed human-generated art and art from machines, and posed questions — direct ones, such as 'Do you think this painting was produced by a machine or a human artist?' and also indirect ones such as, 'How inspiring do you find this work?'. We measured the difference in responses towards the human art and the machine art, and found that there is very little difference. Actually, some people are more inspired by the art that is done by machine."
Can such a poll constitute proof that an algorithm is capable of producing indisputable works of art? Perhaps it can — if you define a work of art as an image produced by an intelligence with an aesthetic intent. But if you define art more broadly as an attempt to say something about the wider world, to express one's own sensibilities and anxieties and feelings, then AI art must fall short, because no machine mind can have that urge — and perhaps never will.

This also begs the question: who gets credit for the resulting work. The AI, or the creator of its algorithm...

Or can the resulting work be considered a "conceptual art" collaboration — taking place between a human and an algorithm?

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/15/0412246/what-if-people-like-ai-generated-art-better?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.