Google took a step towards transparency in AI-generated images today. Google DeepMind announced SynthID, a watermarking / identification tool for generative art. The company says the technology embeds a digital watermark, invisible to the human eye, directly onto an image's pixels. SynthID is rolling out first to "a limited number" of customers using Imagen, Google's art generator available on its suite of cloud-based AI tools. One of the many issues with generative art -- apart from the ethical implications of training on artists' work -- is the potential for creating deepfakes. For example, the pope's hot new hip-hop attire (an AI image created with MidJourney) going viral on social media was an early example of what could become more commonplace as generative tools evolve.

Product Hunt prompted me to check out UnPrompt this weekend. It's a simple tool for reverse-searching prompts and parameters for generative art, which works with both text prompts and image uploads. "Like a lot of folks, I was totally blown away by the capabilities of generative art. There was so much new stuff to try and see, if you don't stay up to date you immediately fall behind. I found it difficult and time consuming to test tiny tweaks to a prompt, just to find what I wanted. At the same time, I was certain someone else in the community had done something similar. That's why we built UnPrompt. A fast and free community tool for finding recent prompts."

Note: The Coursera courses mentioned in the blog can be audited for free, meaning that you have access to all the course content and can read and view it without any cost. Machine learning is the backbone of modern technology. Almost every big company in the world is trying to use it to get the most out of the data. By taking the free courses, you will learn about classification, regression, clustering, and reinforcement learning. Moreover, you will learn about feature engineering, advanced algorithms, and optimizing techniques.

I have a grayish dual position regarding generative art and, well, basically, generative creativity. One view is extremely cynical, and the other perspective is hopeful. I wrote earlier about this topic here (note: a bit gloomy). Let me start with the cynical view, hyperbolized for ease of communication. I see this as a big tech effort to lower tech wages, reduce negotiation positions of creative workers, push the commoditization of art, create a new scaleable consumer market, and more holistically drive society towards transhumanism.

A suppressed kiss, unwelcome or badly timed. These were some of the interpretations that reverberated in my brain after I viewed a weird digital-art trifle by the Emoji Mashup Bot, a popular but defunct Twitter account that combined the parts of two emoji into new, surprising, and astonishingly resonant compositions. The bot had taken the hand and eyes from the yawning emoji and mashed them together with the mouth from the kissing-heart emoji. Compare that simple method with supposedly more sophisticated machine-learning-based generative tools that have become popular in the past year or so. When I asked Midjourney, an AI-based art generator, to create a new emoji based on those same two, it produced compositions that were certainly emojiform but possessed none of the style or significance of the simple mashup: a series of yellow, heart-shaped bodies with tongues sticking out.

AI art, i.e. art that has to a large part been generated by machine learning models, has been around for years. Its roots go way back, but it really emerged after the deep learning explosion in the 2010s, especially after DeepDream. In the past years, the improvement of diffusion models, training of large generative models such as DALL·E and StableDiffusion, and the art-centered commercialization by Midjourney brought AI art to the forefront. The results are nothing short of astonishing but these new developments also raised many questions about the use of such tools and what they mean for artists. Disclaimer: When I talk about artists, I refer to the craftspeople, like illustrators, character designers, concept artists, 3D modlers, UI designers, writers, etc.

Artificial intelligence has been used to generate artificial images since the 1950s, when American computer scientist Harold Cohen made artworks using autonomous software programs of his own design. In the 1960s, British artist Peter Blake used a computer to generate patterns for his 1967 work with Eduardo Paolozzi, demoing that computers could be used to create works with acreen-printing machine. In the 1970s, American artist Charles Csuri used a computer to generate drawings of plant forms that were made into silk screens and used in a number of his works. In the 1990s, American artist Michael Brewster used a computer to generate images of women that were used in his paintings. Generative art can be defined as art that is created by means of a system, where the artist uses a set of rules or algorithms to create the work.

When she launched the Microwave Video Festival, in 1996, Hong Kong artist and independent curator Ellen Pau had to assure her backers at the city's municipal council that she would avoid the most sophisticated media art from other parts of the world. You can tell from the wording of the original press release, in which she was quoted as saying that the festival would bring "simply produced, yet creative" videos that were "relatable" and "inspiring" to local people. "There was definitely a nervousness about new media and using technology in the arts at the Urban Council," she says. "For the festival to go ahead, I felt it was safer to reassure officials that we wouldn't overwhelm the audience with feats of computing and engineering. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

We live in exciting times where every week, we have announcements on cutting-edge technology. A few months ago, OpenAI dropped state of the art text-to-image model DALL·E 2. Only a few people got early access to experience a new AI system that can create realistic images from a description using natural language. It is still closed to the public. A few weeks later, Stability AI launched the open-source version of DALLE2 called the Stable Diffusion model. This launch has changed everything. As people all over the internet were posting prompt results and getting amazed by realistic 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.