This AI Paints Like The Old Masters. Can You Tell The Difference?

The Munich-based Google artist-in-residence Mario Klingemann's Twitter feed is a delightful mess of neural experimentation. He shows, in near real-time, his explorations training neural nets on various types of data. The results of his attempts are often humorous, showing just how bad algorithms are at conjuring something as complex as a human face. That's the point, though: By watching how these neural nets learn from something as innocent as an old painting, we get a glimpse at the state of the art of AI. "If you look at art history, it's clear that faces have fascinated artists since the beginning of culture. I guess one of the reasons is that faces are easy and very hard at the same time–you can draw a recognizable face with just a few lines or you can try to reproduce one down to the last pore," Klingemann tells Co.Design via email.