The first solo gallery exhibit of an AI artist is on display at HG contemporary museum in New York. The exhibition entitled “Faceless Portraits Transcending Time” was presented as a “collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal”.
After several auctions and presentations in the past few years, this is the first larger solo exhibition of AI-generated art.
Artificial Intelligence has impacted many aspects of our life already, and art is one of them. Especially with the rise of generative models such as GANs – Generative Adversarial Networks, AI-generated art has become very popular.
AICAN – the neural network developed by Ahmed Elgammal was trained using more than 100 000 images spanning five centuries of artistic genres. The name AICAN comes from Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network.
As compared to other AI-generated art models, which mostly used Generative Adversarial Networks and style-transfer to do art, AICAN is doing something different. Elgammal tried to use artificial neural networks to learn a large set of expert brushstrokes, themes, and imagery from artistic masterpieces.
AICAN is able to generate AI-based art pieces being requested to “create” something specific. In the case of HG Contemporary, the theme is portraits so AICAN was requested to generate results that still resemble a portrait. Even more, AICAN is able to produce artistic and original titles for each piece of art.
The catalog of portraits showing the joint efforts of AICAN and its creator can be found here.