Algorithms Can Now Mimic Any Artist. Some Artists Hate It

Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag is known for haunting paintings that blend natural landscapes with the eerie futurism of giant robots, mysterious industrial machines, and alien creatures. Earlier this week, Stålenhag appeared to experience some dystopian dread of his own when he found that artificial intelligence had been used to mimic his style. The act of AI imitation was performed by Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex in the UK who has been studying legal issues around AI-generated art. He used a service called Midjourney to create images resembling Stålenhag's spooky style, and posted them to Twitter. Guadamuz says he created the images to highlight the legal and ethical questions that algorithms that generate art may raise.