Our children are growing up in an AI-augmented world that’s being profoundly changed by technology. In this series, each child’s portrait was painted by a robot and paired with a prediction of how their lives will be different from their parents.
2021 Series of 9 Acrylic on Canvas Painting
Each portrait in this series, in which nine have already been completed, has been paired with a prediction of the future for the subject being painted.
The NVIDIA® Jetson™-based autonomous robot begins each portrait with a set of reference photographs. Pindar’s generative AI system then goes to work mimicking the artist’s creative process.
Artonomous uses more than two dozen artificially creative algorithms, including multiple generative adversarial networks (GANs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and feedback loops to paint the portrait one brush stroke at a time. The robot’s creativity is modeled on Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind.
Dozens of independent creative agents are put into competition with one another, each continuously evaluating the painting and trying to influence the next mark being made. At the completion of each work, Pindar critiques the painting, adjusts the algorithms, and begins the cycle all over again.
Generation AI is a collaboration between artist Pindar Van Arman, photographer Kitty Simpson, and the robot, artonomous. Pindar and Kitty provide carefully curated portrait photographs for artonomous to train on, and then paint. It has already completed hundreds of studies using a broad array of AI, including feedback loops, neural networks, and procedural algorithms. With each painting, the results are studied by Pindar and Kitty and artonomous’ algorithms are improved. The studies are quick paintings to explore whether the robot can capture the emotional nuances of a portrait. When a study successfully captures emotions, they tune the robot’s algorithms and repaint as a final portrait. Of the hundreds of studies performed, only ten have been turned into final Generation AI portraits.
Pindar Van Arman’s artwork is an exploration of the artistic process, and how close artificial intelligence comes to human creativity. Over 15 years, his painting robots evolved from making backgrounds to using AI algorithms. Then he was inspired by Minsky’s The Society of Mind, which theorized that the human mind was a collection of smaller interactive intelligences, each of which surfaced when needed. As his robot’s algorithms started competing for control of the brush, they became creative.
Kitty Simpson was born and raised in the Netherlands. Originally from a career in technology, she has been a longtime portrait and fine art photographer. Her work focuses on removing distractions and capturing the core of each subject. In addition to photography, she transforms her own original high-resolution photography into digital art.
www.artonomous twitter.com/vanarman twitter.com/kittylifeart The AI Podcast
Go behind the scenes with one of our amazing AI Art Gallery artists for a virtual tour of their innovative studios, and learn how AI has helped shape their creative process.
Our stories are passed down through generations, but what if those stories are passed through neural models instead of people? Join a discussion of how language in the age of AI takes on new forms and tells new stories. Artists Stephanie Dinkins and Pindar Van Arman and poet Allison Parrish share how the language of AI has shaped their artwork and their creative process.