We Made Our Own Artificial Intelligence Art, and So Can You

On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a Macbook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google datacenter in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line--my new AI art studio. Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits. I may reasonably be considered "good" with computers, but I'm no coder; I flunked out of Codecademy's easy-on-beginners online JavaScript course.