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AICAN doesn't need human help to paint like Picasso
Artificial intelligence has exploded onto the art scene over the past few years, with everybody from artists to tech giants experimenting with the new tools that technology provides. While the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that power the likes of Google's BigGAN are capable of creating spectacularly strange images, they require a large degree of human interaction and guidance. Not so with the AICAN system developed by Professor Ahmed Elgammal and his team at Rutgers University's AI & Art Lab. It's a nearly autonomous system trained on 500 years worth of Western artistic aesthetics that produces its own interpretations of these classic styles. And now it's hosting its first solo gallery show in NYC. AICAN stands for "Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network" and while it utilizes the same adversarial network architecture as GANs, it engages them differently. Adversarial networks operate with two sets of nodes: one set generates images based on the visual training data set that it was provided while the second set judges how closely the generated image resembles the actual images from the training data. AICAN pursues different goals. "On one end, it tries to learn the aesthetics of existing works of art," Elgammal wrote in an October FastCo article. "On the other, it will be penalized if, when creating a work of its own, it too closely emulates an established style." That is, AICAN tries to create unique -- but not too unique -- art. And unlike GANs, AICAN isn't trained on a specific set of visuals -- say chihuahuas, blueberry muffins, or 20th century American Cubists. Instead, AICAN incorporates the aesthetics of western art history as it crawls through databases, absorbing examples of everything -- landscapes, portraits, abstractions, but without any focus on specific genres or subjects. If the piece was made in the Western style between the 15th and 20th centuries, AICAN will eventually analyze it. So far, the system has found more than 100,000 examples. Interestingly this learning method is an offshoot of the lab's earlier research into teaching AI to classify various historical art movements. Elgammal notes that this training style more closely mimics the methodology used by human artists. "An artist has the ability to relate to existing art and... innovate. A great artist is one who really digests art history, digests what happened before in art but generates his own artistic style," he told Engadget. "That is really what we tried to do with AICAN -- how can we look at art history and digest older art movements, learn from those aesthetics but generate things that doesn't exist in these [training] files." It can even name the art that it creates using titles of works it has already learned. To regulate the uniqueness of the generated artworks, Elgammal's team had to first quantify "uniqueness." The team relied on "the most common definition for creativity, which emphasizes the originality of the product, along with its lasting influence," Elgammal wrote in a 2015 article. The team then "showed that the problem quantifying creativity could be reduced to a variant of network centrality problems," the same class of algorithms that Google uses to show you the most relevant results for your search. Testing the quantifying system on more than 1,700 paintings, AICAN generally picked out what are widely considered masterpieces: rating Edvard Munch's The Scream and Picasso's Ladies of Avignon far higher in terms of creativity than their peer works, for example, but panned Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The pieces that it does produce are stunningly realistic... in that most people can't tell that it wasn't made by a human artist. In 2017, Elgammal's team showed off AICAN's work at the Art Basel show. 75 percent of the attendees mistook the AI's work for a human's. One of the machine's pieces sold later that year for nearly $16,000 at auction. Despite AICAN's critical and financial successes, Elgammal believes that there is still a market for human artists, one that will greatly expand as this technology enables virtually anybody to generate similar pieces. He envisions AICAN as being a "creative partner" rather than a simply artistic tool. "It will unlock the capability for lots of people, so not only artists, it will make more people able to make art," he explained, in much the same way that Instagram's social nature revolutionized photography. He points to the Met Museum in NYC, as an example. A quick Instagram search will turn up not just images of the official collection but the visual interpretations of those works by the museum's visitors as well. "Everybody became an artist in their own way by using the camera," Elgammal said. He expects that to happen with GANs and CANs as well, once the technology becomes more commonplace. Until then, you'll be able to check out AICAN's first solo gallery show, "Faceless Portraits Transcending Time," at the HG Contemporary in New York City. This show will feature two series of images -- one surreal, the other abstract -- generated from Renaissance-era works. "For the abstract portraits, I selected images that were abstracted out of facial features yet grounded enough in familiar figures. I used titles such as portrait of a king and portrait of a queen to reflect generic conventions," Elgammal wrote in a recent post. "For the surrealist collection, I selected images that intrigue the perception and invoke questions about the subject, knowing that the inspiration and aesthetics all are solely coming from portraits and photographs of people, as well as skulls, nothing else." The show runs February 13th through March 5th, 2019. Images: Rutgers University
Study suggests Airbnb hosts are unfair to people with disabilities
A recent study conducted by researchers at Rutgers University found evidence that Airbnb hosts might be less likely to rent to people with disabilities. But there are some important limitations to consider in regards to the findings. The researchers created fake profiles with pictures of white men around 30 years of age and messaged nearly 4,000 Airbnb listings across the country. When inquiring about the host's listing, some of the "renters" would ask if the unit was accessible to one of four disabilities: blindness, dwarfism, cerebral palsy or a spinal cord injury.
Computer algorithm picks the world's most creative art
Who would you trust to determine history's most creative art? A room full of seasoned critics? Rutgers University researchers think a machine can do the job. They've developed a computer vision algorithm that ranks the creativity of art based on how similar it is to earlier works in terms of everything from color and texture to the presence of familiar objects. The code treats art history as a network -- groundbreaking pieces are connected to later derivatives, and seemingly unique content may have a link to something produced in the distant past.
Your social networks discourage you from speaking out on politics
The internet is supposed to be a bastion of self-expression, where you're free to speak your mind knowing that someone, somewhere shares your feelings. However, Pew Research and Rutgers University have published a study showing that many social network users feel compelled to keep their mouths shut on sensitive topics. While the majority of those studied say they'd be willing to discuss a political issue like US government surveillance at dinner or at work, they're very shy about doing the same on Facebook or Twitter. Effectively, the internet is mirroring the real world -- people face a "spiral of silence" where they're afraid to share opinions that differ from those of their friends. That's borne out by additional findings that people suspect they have more disagreements with their online buddies than their personal acquaintances.
Big Ten Network carriage agreements may be motivating conference expansion
It's no secret that college football is big business and that a major contributing factor is revenue from television. The influential reach of that revenue is a hot debate in organizations that are supposed to put more ideal values above capitalistic ones -- the two are not always at odds, though. So when a collegiate organization like the Big Ten Conference is motivated to expand, most would like to think it's a school's academic, or even athletic, merits that put said institution at the top of the want list. However, Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports believes the reason the Big Ten courted the University of Maryland and Rutgers University really just comes down to finding a way to sell an additional 14.6 million residents the Big Ten Network. The economics of sports networks on cable television is well documented -- the majority pay so that the vocal minority may watch -- but sculpting an amateur sports league to ensure your cable TV channel gets carriage in America's largest media markets might be a new twist.
Rutgers' underwater roboglider crosses the Atlantic, claims to be on business trip
The so-called Scarlet Knight robot has this week completed a 225-day journey from the shores of New Jersey to the sandy beaches of Baiona in Spain -- fittingly the same port Christopher Columbus returned to after his first visit to the Americas -- aided only by a battery, ocean currents and its innate intelligence. Built by Rutgers University, the youthful robotic trailblazer performed a number of data gathering tasks as it went along, furnishing climate change researchers with more info on temperature levels, water salination and currents within the Atlantic Ocean. Now that it has been handed back to the US, the machine will be put up on display in the Smithsonian, so if you want a peek at the future of globetrotting that'll be the place to go.
Xbox and P5 glove modified to help stroke patients
Researchers at Rutgers University don't seem to have lost any of their homebrew skills, taking an Xbox and an Essential Reality P5 gaming glove to create a low-cost alternative to traditional virtual reality rehabilitation systems -- systems which can cost up to ten times as much. This project uses some custom-made software to deliver exercises designed to help stroke patients regain hand movement, with one "game" consisting of wiping "dirty pixels" off four vertical bars, while another asks the patient to make a fist fast enough to scare a butterfly off the screen. Of course, the system isn't quite up to snuff with the more expensive options -- it has poorer accuracy and no force feedback, for instance -- but the researchers say it could still be a boon to clinics that can't afford the pricier gear and could even potentially be further modified to allow for home-care with monitoring via an Internet connection.[Via BoingBoing]
