A computer program called (CAN) Creative Adversarial Network has been making creative works that are being compared with art made by human artists, and it is learning how to continue to improve it's works by itself judging them and having people judge them.
This is important because if a computer can truly make art on its own then it can make artists obsolete. One of the doubts about the program being truly creative is if people were just voting the works to be good because they could be sold. While I disagree with this idea I understand the thought that they could just be viewing the art as something marketable. The pieces to me who is is just a normal person with no qualifications whatsoever are very visually pleasing to look at and I personally like the computer generated images. "Researchers then tested whether or not these generated works could pass as creative to some people. An object, for their purposes, demonstrates creativity if it is both “novel and influential.” When compared to human artists works it was judged to be lesser than the code generated art, whether or not it is lesser it is undeniable that the code generated art is very impressive.
The Creative Adversarial Network was created by a team of computer scientist researchers at Rutgers University in their Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory "Computer scientists at Rutgers University developed a system to generate artworks that were deemed more communicative and inspiring than human-made art" (Hyperallergic) The results of their research on machine learning created the results of these paintings that ended up being more visually pleasing to viewers than man made ones were.
The relation of this interesting exhibition to our topics of self creating art is exactly that, it’s not just a mechanical forever self altering artwork like we have previously looked at. The CAN can (pun not intended) not only can create brand new artworks, but it can learn how to improve them and come to an understanding of what humans find visually pleasing. Its works became so good that in an experiment participants thought the images made by the program were man made. “The first question they posed was whether humans could simply distinguish between the computer’s art and human-made artworks. As Elgammal sums up in a blog post, participants believed that the generated images were made by artists 75% of the time, compared to 85% of the time for the collection of Abstract Expressionist artworks, all made between 1945 and 2007. In terms of the Art Basel paintings, participants thought that humans had made them just 48% of the time." (Hyperallergic).”
Link:
https://hyperallergic.com/391059/humans-prefer-computer-generated-paintings-to-those-at-art-basel/
Works cited:
Voon, Claire. “Humans Prefer Computer-Generated Paintings to Those at Art Basel.” Hyperallergic, Hyperallergic, 31 July 2017, hyperallergic.com/391059/humans-prefer-computer-generated-paintings-to-those-at-art-basel/.