Bernie Moreno, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, discusses the GOP's eagerness to retake the Senate in November, the illegal immigration crisis and Nikki Haley's refusal to drop out of the primary race. Republican Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno is blasting the Associated Press after a story published days before the primary election linking him to an adult online dating site, which a former intern has taken credit for creating, was called into question by the dating site's founder. On Friday, a post on X from one of the founders of the online site Adult Friend Finder, who says he wrote "most of the early code," seemingly rejected a key aspect of an Associated Press report days earlier that suggested "geolocation data," which is commonly understood as involving an IP address or GPS, linked the account to the area of a Moreno family home. "I reviewed all the available information and it showed that the account had only a single visit, no activity, no profile photo, consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site," Andrew Conru, the engineer who founded Adult Friend Finder, wrote on social media. "The AP report seeming to claim that the available data proves the account was created in Florida is inaccurate, as location information is manually entered during the signup (sic) process. In reality, there appears to be no public geolocation data tied to the account."

The Robotart (that's "Robot art") competition aims to combine art and engineering to advance both fields. Vincent van Bot: Of the 100 images submitted to the 2018 Robotart competition, a automaton called CloudPainter rose to the top, with evocative portraits featuring varying degrees of abstraction. One of its winning images (pictured above) was created by a team of neural networks, AI algorithms, and robots. Artistic progress: Robotart's founder, Andrew Conru, told MIT Technology Review that this year's entries have shown refined brushstrokes and composition. "CloudPainter, the winner this year, has been involved all three years and has made the most improvement in his system," he says.

Hold still while Vincent van Bot paints your portrait. That's right, sophisticated robots can now create works of art comparable to the old masters. The RobotArt gallery has amassed an impressive collection to show what the world's most creative androids and algorithms (and their creators) have come up with. On Wednesday, the international contest, now in its third year, announced the top ten teams, all of which walk away with cash prizes for their creations. The teams used a number of different approaches, showing that there are a hell of a lot of ways to interpret "artwork created by robot."

Entries for the 2018 RobotArt competitions are in. The top 10 teams have been announced, and you can see the robot-painters' impressive works in an online gallery. This year's first-place artist, CloudPainter used machine learning to generate portraits and landscapes (including a re-imagination of Cezanne). The second place team chose impressionistic paintings with "a high level of skill with brushstrokes," and the third place team programmed a robot "brushstroke by stroke," using haptic recording and playback to generate gorgeous reproductions of Van Gogh landscapes. For the first time this year, patrons can also buy AI produced paintings at the Seattle Art Fair on August 2-5th.

An internet pioneer who first taught the world how to find friendship, love, and sex online a quarter century ago is trying to determine at what point artificial intelligence develops emotional intelligence, and he thinks he can do it with an art contest. About 31 different robots competed for 100,000 in prizes at the first annual International Robot Art Competition. The vote was based on 2,200 votes cast on Facebook as well as judgment from six art critics who have experience working with technology. The fan and judge favorite was TAIDA from the National Taiwan University. TAIDA won first place and 30,000 for several Pointillism-style works, including a still life of fruit, landscape of the Taiwan coast, and a portrait of Albert Einstein.

All artwork in the competition are more than the typical landscapes and photorealistic portraits. "I was telling the teams, if their robot knocks over a can of paint and they think it's beautiful, they should submit it," said Conru. "We have no limit on to what constitutes art." The Carnegie Mellon team have created a bot that works like an invisible coloring book. The robot has a paintbrush that is attached to a robotic arm and guides the human hand to follow the guidelines set in a paint program.

In an art contest where robots are the artists, the future of art and artificially-intelligent computational creativity is on display. Fourteen teams from seven countries contributed 71 entries to the first RobotArt Competition. Started by artist and mechanical engineer Andrew Conru, the event aims to highlight the technical side of art creation and promote AI, image processing, and robotics. There are two different categories for robot artists: Fully automated and manually generated. Automated artwork means the entire process is done by a robot, running autonomously without input from the human creators.