For a few years now, generating impressive artworks have been one of the many popular applications in the world of AI. Also, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been popularly applied by researchers and artists for artistic tasks, including creating artworks, style transfers, converting photographs into beautiful painting and more. In one of the popular instances, in 2018, a generative adversarial network (or GAN) generated portrait entitled "Edmond De Belamy" was sold for $432,500, which was 40 times the initial expectation. Before we dive into how AI is making a huge difference in the world of art, let's look at some of the latest AI-based art innovations that have made its way in 2020. Recently, undergrad student Alice Xue from Princeton University proposed a GAN-based model -- SAPGAN -- that generates Chinese landscape paintings from end to end, without any conditional input.

GANksy, a new artificial intelligence software, has been trained to produce works that mimic those of'a certain street artist'. 'GANksy wants to be put into a robot body so it can spraypaint the entire planet,' says the team, adding that all proceeds will be reinvested in the company.

Over the past year we've heard AI-generated music in the style of Kanye West, Tupac, and Nas, a lyrically nonsensical (but stylistically pretty believable) track based on the catalogue of Travis Scott, and a fake Nirvana song written by a computer. It's not just musicians that are being tapped for inspiration by artificial intelligence though, as confirmed by a recent bot that's learned to create drawings in the style of Banksy. Named GANksy (after the machine learning framework, a generative adversarial network, on which it's based) the software "was born into the cloud" in September 2020, as detailed in a statement on the creator's website. The statement continues to explain that GANksy was trained using hundreds of images from the portfolio of a "certain street artist". And though Banksy isn't explicitly mentioned by name, it seems pretty clear from the title – plus the fact that the images are eerily reminiscent of his work – that he's the artist in question.

Artificial intelligence is adept at doing many things: making deepfakes, determining disaster-related damage, and virtual urban planning, just to name a few. There are also some tasks that AI hasn't picked up quite as well -- like art. AI art is downright disturbing. This case is proven perfectly by GANksy, a clever piece of AI that's been trained on the work of renowned street artist Banksy. The results of GANksy's artistic pursuits to date have been strange, to say the least.