Google's AI is Teaching Itself Photography and It's Getting Pretty Good

A new research paper by Google researchers Hui Fang and Meng Zhang has outlined their attempt to teach Google's AI how to take aesthetically pleasing photos. Creatism: A deep-learning photographer capable of creating professional work are the researchers attempt to apply machine learning to the creative process. The first step was to define different aesthetic aspects of photography like composition, saturation and detail. They then analyzed 15,000 high-ranking photo thumbnails from 500px.com so the neural network could begin to understand which cropping and lighting effects were the most popular. The next step was to unleash the machine on Google Street View and let it take snapshots of scenic locations and crop and light the results accordingly.