Artificial intelligence has to date been enlisted as a bogeyman in cultural circles: Software will take the jobs of writers and translators, and AI-generated images ring the death toll for illustrators and graphic designers. Yet there's a corner of high culture where AI is taking on a starring role as hero, not displacing the traditional protagonists--art experts and conservators--but adding a powerful, compelling weapon to their arsenal when it comes to fighting forgeries and misattributions. AI is already exceptionally good at recognizing and authenticating an artist's work, based on the analysis of a digital image of a painting alone. AI's objective analysis has thrown a wrench into this traditional hierarchy. If an algorithm can determine the authorship of an artwork with statistical probability, where does that leave the old-guard art historians whose reputations have been built on their subjective expertise?

Get access to everything we publish when you join VeloNews or Outside . Team Jumbo-Visma and its race clothing supplier AGU have created a limited-edition kit that will be worn during both the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes. The new design was required because the team's typical yellow and black design is considered too similar to the maillot jaune worn by the race leader of the Tour de France. Last year the team created a bespoke kit for the Tour de France and the squad has followed suit for 2022. The Dutch team collaborated with AGU with the squad stating that its inspiration stemmed from Dutch artists Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Vincent van Gogh.

The web is rife with these things. Now generative adversarial networks are being used to create realistic things that don't actually exist as well. There are all sorts of them too, some are incredible, some daft, all a certainly interesting. We've collected a few for your enjoyment. You either love them or hate them.

Okay, that might not be completely true--but it's certainly a distinctive experience, and one that we can thank state-of-the-art technology for. Last week the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam posted an AI-constructed, ultra-high-res image of "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt. The original piece is nearly 15 feet long and more than 12 feet high and has been under intensive restoration since the early 1900s. As the story goes, in the 1600s Rembrandt was commissioned by the Amsterdam civic guard to create a sweeping oil painting for their headquarters. The Dutch portraitist constructed a scene with the city's mayor and his lieutenant--plus 32 other characters, including a dressed-up young lass.

Data scientists have long tried to quantify the artist's creative genius. This spring, one project came closer than any other.

Robert Erdmann, a senior scientist working for the Rijksmuseum, cannot help but smile when I ask him to explain -- in as much detail as possible -- how exactly he used artificial intelligence to recreate long-lost portions of Rembrandt van Rijn's most famous painting, The Night Watch (1642). "Most people just want the elevator pitch," he tells me over Zoom. The Night Watch is a mammoth of a painting, and it used to be even bigger. In 1715, it came into the possession of the bureaucrats in charge of Amsterdam's Town Hall. In order to fit it on their wall, they sliced off all four outer edges of Rembrandt's priceless masterpiece, inadvertently creating the compromised version we know today.

AMSTERDAM, June 23 (Reuters) - For the first time in 300 years, Rembrandt's famed "The Night Watch" is back on display in what researchers say is its original size, with missing parts temporarily restored in an exhibition aided by artificial intelligence. Rembrandt finished the large canvas, which portrays the captain of an Amsterdam city militia ordering his men into action, in 1642. Although it is now considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, strips were cut from all four sides of it during a move in 1715. Though those strips have not been found, another artist of the time had made a copy, and restorers and computer scientists have used that, blended with Rembrandt's style, to recreate the missing parts. "It's never the real thing, but I think it gives you different insight into the composition," Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said.

Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn is famous for his extensive oeuvre of art, which includes sketches, prints, and paintings. Among the many masterpieces within his portfolio is a particularly ambitious piece that has impressed audiences with its scale and detail centuries after the painter's death--The Night Watch (1642). This lifesize group portrait is one of the most influential pieces from the Dutch Golden Age and, since 2019, has been the subject of an extensive restoration by the Rijksmuseum called Project Night Watch. Last year, Project Night Watch released an extremely detailed--and completely free-to-download --44.8 gigapixel image of Rembrandt's masterpiece. Recently, the museum unveiled another incredible feat.

For 300 years, we only had a partial view of Rembrandt's 17th-century masterpiece "The Night Watch." But now, with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers at the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands were able to reconstruct missing pieces of the painting, giving us a rare view of what it looked like when the Golden Age Dutch artist finished it in 1642. In 1639, Rembrandt was commissioned to make the painting for a new banqueting hall at the headquarters of the Kloveniers, the civic militia guards (or musketeers) of Amsterdam. The painting was part of a series of seven militia portraits (schuttersstukken), commissioned by Captain Banninck Cocq along with 17 members of his militia. In 1715, "The Night Watch" was moved to what was at the time Amsterdam's City Hall, now the Royal Palace on Dam Square.

In the late 1970s I lived and worked briefly in the Netherlands. Often, on Sundays, I would travel to Amsterdam, go to the morning concert in the Spiegelzaal of the Concertgebouw, and afterwards walk over to the Rijksmuseum, Holland's national gallery, and spend a couple of hours there. The museum is a wonderful storehouse of Dutch art and there was always much to explore. But on nearly every visit I found myself being drawn back to one of Rembrandt's most famous pictures – The Night Watch – which I guess is to the Rijksmuseum what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre. Its official title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.