Training the Untrained Eye with AI to Classify Fine Art

Beauty, it is said, resides in the eye of the beholder. What if that beholder is a machine learning model being trained to describe and classify fine works of art? That's what AI researchers at Zhejiang University of Technology in China are attempting to find out by comparing the ability of different models trained on a growing list of image data sets to classify artwork by genre and style. Whether these models can be trained to respond emotionally remains to be seen. Preliminary results from one study published earlier this month in the journal of the Public Library of Science highlighted the utility of using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for demanding tasks like art classification.