When people think of the greatest artists who've ever lived, they probably think of names like Beethoven or Picasso. No one would ever think of a computer as a great artist. But what if one day, that was indeed the case. Could computers learn to create incredible drawings like the Mona Lisa? Perhaps one day a robot will be capable of composing the next great symphony. Some experts believe this to be the case. In fact, some of the greatest minds in artificial intelligence are diligently working to develop programs that can create drawing and music independently from humans. The use of artificial intelligence in the field of art has even been picked up by tech giants the likes of Google. The projects that are included in this paper could have drastic implications in our everyday lives. They may also change the way we view art.

A new experiment from Google is looking to help you sketch images faster and more accurately with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). The software is called Sketch-RNN, and it's baked into a straightforward web app. The idea is simple: Select one of the pre-existing objects, start drawing, and the software will try and guess the best way to automatically complete it. Sketch-RNN's artificial mind is trained on a neural network fed with thousands of human-drawn doodles, like the ones found in past Google Brain efforts such as AutoDraw and Quick, Draw!. In a blog post published earlier this year, Google said that the ultimate goal of these AI efforts specific to computer vision is to train machines to identify and recreate objects with an accuracy that mimics human thinking as closely as possible; in this case, the way we draw and connect lines and shapes when trying to sketch an image of a given object.

Google Brain, the search giant's internal artificial intelligence division, has been making substantial progress on computer vision techniques that let software parse the contents of hand-drawn images and then recreate those drawings on the fly. The latest release from the division's AI experiments series is a new web app that lets you collaborate with a neural network to draw doodles of everyday objects. The software is called Sketch-RNN, and Google researchers first announced it back in April. At the time, the team behind Sketch-RNN revealed that the underlying neural net is being continuously trained using human-made doodles sourced from a different AI experiment first released back in November called Quick, Draw! That program asked human users to draw various simple objects from a text prompt, while the software attempted to guess what it was every step of the way.

Remember last year when Google released an AI-powered web tool that played Pictionary with your doodles? Those doodles you drew have now been used to teach Google's AI how to draw. The resulting program is called Sketch-RNN and, frankly, it draws about as well as a toddler. But like any new parents, Google's AI scientists are proud as punch. To create Sketch-RNN, Google Brain researchers David Ha and Douglas Eck collected more than half a million user-drawn sketches from the Google tool Quick, Draw!

Remember last year when Google released an AI-powered web tool that played Pictionary with your doodles? Those doodles you drew have now been used to teach Google's AI how to draw. The resulting program is called Sketch-RNN and, frankly, it draws about as well as a toddler. But like any new parents, Google's AI scientists are proud as punch. To create Sketch-RNN, Google Brain researchers David Ha and Douglas Eck collected more than five million user-drawn sketches from the Google tool Quick, Draw!

Google has been working on a wide range of AI-based projects lately – earlier this week, it showed off one that can identify what you're trying to draw and surface clean clipart that resembles your doodle. Its latest experiment is called Sketch-RNN, and it's a neural network system that has learned to draw on its own by looking at roughly 5.5 million sketches from people who played Pictionary with Google's AI-powered Quick, Draw! game from last year. We've teamed up with Product Hunt to offer you the chance to win an all expense paid trip to TNW Conference 2017! By triaging sketches in 75 different categories like cats, pigs and trucks, the AI can now draw basic representations of these things when presented with hand-drawn sketches. It's not merely copying what it's fed; instead, it's identifying what the input stands for and is trying to create a unique doodle based on what it knows about each object. For example, you could give Sketch-RNN a drawing of a cat's face with three eyes, and it'll spit out another version with two eyes – because it's been trained to understand that cats only have a pair of eyes.