Is it just another tool in the hands of artists similar to the point in time when photographs appeared next to canvas paintings? Or would it go beyond that and render artists obsolete? How could art use new technology and still preserve its function as a critical insight into the hidden workings of society? Will art remain independent enough to be able to critique AI and the world it creates? Even the description of AI art is a bit simplistic if we say it is the practice of employing code, data, and machine learning systems to generate pieces of art.

To many they are art's next big thing -- digital images of jellyfish pulsing and blurring in a dark pink sea, or dozens of butterflies fusing together into a single organism. The Argentine artist Sofia Crespo, who created the works with the help of artificial intelligence, is part of the "generative art" movement, where humans create rules for computers which then use algorithms to generate new forms, ideas and patterns. The field has begun to attract huge interest among art collectors -- and even bigger price tags at auction. US artist and programmer Robbie Barrat -- a prodigy still only 22 years old -- sold a work called "Nude Portrait#7Frame#64" at Sotheby's in March for £630,000 ($821,000). That came almost four years after French collective Obvious sold a work at Christie's titled "Edmond de Belamy" -- largely based on Barrat's code -- for $432,500.

In recent years, as a novel form of art, AI art has caught more and more mainstream attention. AI is short for artificial intelligence. If computer-generated imagery can be called digital art version 1.0, and art created by people on the Internet is version 2.0, then the emerging AI art may bring us into the third iteration of digital art. From 1.0 to 3.0, digital art is constantly upgrading and revolutionizing itself. As we have witnessed, CGI-based digital films, anime and online games are some of the most powerful driving forces of digital art.

What better time for a "next-generation" version of art to come crashing into the art world than 2021? After all, this is the unprecedented year that saw an explosion of demand and sales of NFTs or non-fungible tokens, which are inextricably tied to crypto-currency and blockchain technology. Specifically, we're now talking about art created by "artficial intelligence"… yes, the machines are taking over art too. In 2018, Christie's sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), the first-ever original work of art created using artificial intelligence to come to auction (it sold for $432,500 against a high estimate of $10,000), Inspired by reports of the sale, Ben Kovalis and two like-minded childhood friends from Israel, Eyal Fisher and Guy Haimovitz, launched the Art AI Gallery one year later, in late 2019. It involves collections of curated work made using an algorithm that was created over the course of six months and then refined over the next year and a half.

If you Google "what is art", this is the first definition you see: But AI generated "artwork" takes a new spin on this definition. In most artistic computer programs, human artists and programmers are still heavily involved throughout the production process. First, the human team must build various algorithms that train the bot to visualize a certain aesthetic. These algorithms are based on careful analyses from thousands of other art samples. The human artists are also needed in order to select which art samples to use in supposed algorithm.

A new study that measures how humans perceive artworks generated by artificial intelligence, alongside artworks created by humans, has concluded that a majority of people basically can't tell the difference. Published in the journal Empirical Studies in the Arts by researcher Harsha Gangadharbatla, the study was inspired by the sale of "Edmond de Belamy", an AI-generated portrait by the creative studio Obvious. Hailed as "the future", the artwork fetched around ten times the average price for a male artist at auction (and 20 times more than artworks by women), going for $432,500 at Christie's in 2018. The hype around "Edmond de Belamy" wasn't an isolated occurrence, either. In a 2017 study that asked people to compare a selection of AI artworks and actual Art Basel pieces, people mostly preferred the artworks created by machines.

From abstract expressionist masterpieces to perfect portrayals of the real world, artificial intelligence (AI) can create artworks that are indistinguishable from pieces painted by humans, a new study reveals. In online surveys, around 200 humans were unable to suss the human-made artworks from the artificial art, the US author reports. AI art is created by machine learning algorithms that are trained with many thousands of images of real paintings. The more images of a particular style or aesthetic that the algorithm analyses, the more human-like the results can be, down to fine details like brushstrokes. Despite AI paintings already selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds, replicating artistic human emotion appears to be the final frontier for technology.

"Anthropomorphising AI systems can undermine our ability to hold powerful individuals and groups accountable." Edmond De Belamy, a portrait generated by a machine learning (ML) algorithm was sold at Christie's art auction for $432,500; 40 times higher than the initial estimate of $10,000. The whole event was marketed by Christie's as ''the first portrait generated by an algorithm to come up for auction''. AI for art, especially generative adversarial networks (GANs) have come a long way since then. Christie's affair makes one wonder how good has AI become, but if one looks closely they might think otherwise.

In recent years, researchers have leveraged computer algorithms for a host of applications across industries, including the arts. In 2018, the "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy," an original artwork created by an artificial intelligence (AI) computer algorithm sold at Christie's for $432,500. Now, a team of researchers are leveraging algorithms to shed light on similarities in art across cultures, styles, and mediums. Researchers at MIT have developed an image retrieval system to comb through a vast art collection and pinpoint analogous artworks. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in partnership with Microsoft created the algorithm known as "MosAIc" to sift through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.

"GANs and the variations are the most interesting idea in the last 10 years in ML." The potential of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) was already witnessed at the Sotheby's auction, a couple of years ago when the painting titled Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy was sold for a whopping $432,500, and it now hangs opposite the works of pop art geniuses like Andy Warhol. The applications of GANs have made their presence felt in the esoteric trading floors, nuclear facilities and even the office of Presidents. The rise in its popularity indicates that its usage is only limited by the imagination of its users. In the era of APIs, it's a no-brainer to not to build algorithms from scratch.