How AI learned to be creative

With the success of deep learning, algorithms have pushed into another domain that humans thought was safe from automation: the creation of compelling art. AI-generated art has improved dramatically over the past several years, and the results can be seen in competitions like RobotArt and NVIDIA's DeepArt: But while these models are certainly an impressive technical accomplishment, a contentious point of discussion is whether AI and machine learning models are truly creative in the way humans are. Some have argued that it isn't really creative to build mathematical models of pixels in an image or to identify sequential dependencies in the structure of songs. AI, they claim, lacks the human touch. But it's also not clear that human brains are doing anything more impressive. How do we know that the artistic spark of a painter or musician isn't actually a mathematical model, trained -- like a neural network -- through constant practice?