Aican the AI artist: putting the art in to artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is shaking up the art world; earlier this month Miami was at the forefront of the AI revolution when a presentation of 12 works created by an AI artist called Aican went on show at the Scope Miami Beach fair. This arty technological innovation comes courtesy of Dr Ahmed Elgammal from Rutgers University who devised the algorithm that underpins Aican. His intriguing AI creation draws from works made in the last 500 years. “To Aican, all the works are equally important and represent the canon of western art. It learns the aesthetics from the whole collection,” Elgammal says. And the $100m question: has Aican really learnt how to paint? “We can see good choice of complementary colours for the foreground and background, warm colours for foreground and cool colours for background. We can see a variety of textures, painterly contours and linear contours,” Elgammal adds. The artists Tim Bengel and Devin Gharakhanian also showed works developed in collaboration with Aican.