Tate Uses AI to Match Old British Art to New Photojournalism

Developed by Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon, and Monica Lanaro of the Italian communication research center Fabrica, in partnership with a team of AI specialists at the French company Jolibrain, Recognition is only the latest project to explore how artificial intelligence can change the way humans look at images. So far, the value of robots' contributions to human understanding of art doesn't often go beyond novelty -- take Microsoft's emotion-detecting app, which deemed the Mona Lisa 43% happy, for example. But with Recognition, a robot inadvertently creates subjective meaning with its pairings, and starts to seem like a shrewd commentator. A recent Reuters photograph of a Singapore airport's control tower alongside a bustling construction site paired with "Industrial Landscape" (1955) by L.S. Lowry, for instance, seems like a comment on the relentlessness of industrial development.