Can an AI Learn to Draw?

At the Deep Learning Summit conference here in London, DeepMind Research Scientist Ali Eslami presented a very interesting project, entitled "Artificial Intelligence and Creativity". Eslami's team at DeepMind set an AI agent (a neural network which takes some kind of action) the challenge of drawing a human face, given a computer drawing program (Mypaint) and allowing it to experiment with variables including brush selection and placement, and line pressure and colour. The agent was fed an unlabelled training dataset of photographs of faces. The results were startlingly realistic. Eslami's group used a technique called reinforcement learning. With most AI systems today, we use supervised learning, where we feed in data that is labelled in some way, so the system can compare its results with the right answer.