Museum's AI exhibit compares art masterpieces to latest news photography

The Tate Britain art museum has just launched a new artificial intelligence exhibit that applies machine learning technology to images in some pretty unique ways. Called "Recognition," the exhibit is the winner of Tate's annual IK Prize, which was created in association with Microsoft and awards "digital innovation." It compares images from Tate's enormous archive of artwork with up-to-the-minute Reuters news photography, based on various pattern-recognition tools. These include object recognition, facial recognition, composition analysis, and even natural language processing for looking at captions and text. "From the moment it launched, it's continually scanning both databases and comparing images, trying to find works which are comparable -- whether that be visually or thematically -- and then publishing them online in a virtual gallery," Tony Guillan, producer of the IK Prize, told Digital Trends.