The AI Art Revolution

If you’ve been online at all recently you’ve probably noticed the recent trend of images generated by artificial intelligence. These AI programs work by feeding a prompt to an algorithm which then renders what it thinks you’re describing. 

AI programs are trained on incredibly large datasets of reference images and use a process called Deep Learning to recognize what defines the individual elements of each image and the context in which each element is usually seen. It’s able to take these data points and apply them to the input you provide in a text prompt describing the content and style of the desired image.

For example, I created the image at the top of this post by giving an AI program the prompt: “An oil painting of an orange tabby cat wearing a spacesuit, dramatic lighting.” The AI recognizes the words “orange tabby cat” and “spacesuit” and has an understanding of what visual aspects are characteristic of an oil painting, based on its training with hundreds of millions of reference images. It generated three variations from my prompt.

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