AICAN doesn't need human help to paint like Picasso

Artificial intelligence has exploded onto the art scene over the past few years, with everybody from artists to tech giants experimenting with the new tools that technology provides. While the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that power the likes of Google's BigGAN are capable of creating spectacularly strange images, they require a large degree of human interaction and guidance. Not so with the AICAN system developed by Professor Ahmed Elgammal and his team at Rutgers University's AI & Art Lab. It's a nearly autonomous system trained on 500 years worth of Western artistic aesthetics that produces its own interpretations of these classic styles. AICAN stands for "Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network" and while it utilizes the same adversarial network architecture as GANs, it engages them differently.