6 Times AI Tried to Get Creative, and How the Results Turned Out

Breakthroughs in neural networks--a type of machine learning that vaguely imitates the structure of neurons in the brain--have given rise to a form of the technology called generative AI that can do everything from imitate photorealistic images and abstract art to composing music or writing. As the cultural debate around AI-fueled art begins to heat up, we're looking back on what kind of work has actually come out of the initial experiments in this space. Here are six examples of AI's use in creative processes that offer a sense of the current state of the technology and a hint at its larger potential: Google's DeepDream computer vision software, first released in 2015, turns any image into an abstract hallucinogenic version of itself by finding and enhancing certain patterns within the image. While the system might have little practical use for creative professionals on its face, it represented an early foray into the type of AI-generated art that has come to proliferate the open-source community. One of the most important breakthroughs in AI art also came from then-Google AI researcher Ian Goodfellow in a 2014 paper in which he formalized the structure for something called a generative adversarial network, a key tool in AI-created content.