AI Made These Paintings

Less than a year after he got his high school diploma and left Shenandoah Junction, W.Va., for Silicon Valley, Robbie Barrat began teaching computers to paint. He fed a few thousand examples of paintings into his artificial intelligence software until it learned how to create landscapes like the one on this issue's cover. By computer standards, these works of art took a long time to produce: a little more than two weeks. "AI is going to be one of the larger art movements of this century," says Barrat, a Stanford researcher who goes by @DrBeef_ on Twitter. "It just has really great untapped potential."