AI can beat humans at chess, power vacuum cleaners, and now it can even compose songs. This year's winner of the AI Song Contest, in which machine learning was used to create music, was recently announced. "Listen To Your Body Choir" was co-written with artificial intelligence and takes inspiration from the song "Daisy Bell," the first song to be sung by a computer in 1961. But is a computer program really capable of being creative? "The short answer, right now, is'no' or at least'not yet,'" Chirag Shah, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, told Lifewire in an email interview.

It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: They would train an AI on 14 years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album "Chain Tripping." "I'm not interested in being a reactionary," YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said in a documentary about the album. "I don't want to return to my roots and play acoustic guitar because I'm so freaked out about the coming robot apocalypse, but I also don't want to jump into the trenches and welcome our new robot overlords either." But our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation. Even though the Grammy-nominated "Chain Tripping" was released in 2019, the technology behind it is already becoming outdated.

It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: They would train an AI on 14 years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album "Chain Tripping." "I'm not interested in being a reactionary," YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said in a documentary about the album. "I don't want to return to my roots and play acoustic guitar because I'm so freaked out about the coming robot apocalypse, but I also don't want to jump into the trenches and welcome our new robot overlords either." But our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation. Even though the Grammy-nominated "Chain Tripping" was released in 2019, the technology behind it is already becoming outdated.

Art has long been considered the exclusive domain of human creativity. But turns out machines can do a lot more in the creative realm than we humans can imagine. In October 2018, Christie's sold first AI-generated painting for $432,500. Titled Edmond de Belamy, the artwork was expected to sell for $10,000. Obvious art created this masterpiece using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm by feeding the system with 15,000 portraits created between the 14th and 20th century.

Image generation by AI is based on "generative models," a type of deep learning technology. Generative models can learn patterns in given data and generate new data similar to that data. There are two types of generative models: discriminative models, which solve problems such as classification and regression through supervised learning, and generative models, which generate new data. Discriminative models extract features from data to perform classifications, etc., while generative models can generate data from random noise. A generative model called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was proposed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014; a GAN can generate realistic images by pitting two neural networks against each other.