Art v Intelligence

I like playing around with the various free bits of low level AI art creation that are available for home use. You can modify your own images or start from scratch using words, descriptions, prompts etc. to inspire the cogs and wheels somewhere out there in cyber-space. The results are of course variable, often surprising and insightful, sometimes just weird and wide of whatever the mark might have been. It's a free tool but a bit of a blunt instrument in most ways. Real artists must hate these programs I guess but for me it's like noodling with bits of Lego. Anyway I decided to use as prompts the names of some artists, just to see how AI might recognize or render them and of course for fun, here's the results.

This is what you get using the name of the 50s/60s artist Cy Twombly. I was expecting some crazy scribbles and fierce brush strokes, not what looks like cotton plants in a dark room. I'm not familiar with all that is in his back catalogue so it may be on point.

This is Norman Rockwell, pretty obviously despite the sinister undertones. A little distorted and freaky but still true to twentieth century Americana and strangely quaint (almost). Just try not to focus on the fingers.

So this is using Roy Lichtenstein as a prompt, all style but no actual content. Maybe this AI isn't so dumb. Is there a critical and observed piece of machine code in there that likes to comment in it's own wry and subtle way? Pop art but not as we know it. 

Next there's Leonardo da Vinci morphing into a facial mash up that strangely has no background. I expected more, at the very least some sketch work, scrawled writings or a few purple hills in the distance. The hair and the beard are a bit much. Leonardo also has a fierce bum chin.

I thought I'd end on a kind of high by trying Caravaggio, a name that should challenge the sparks and pixels. I got this familiar looking, peculiar but dramatic piece. I doubt that it would ever fool anybody. It does contain a cutting implement of some sort so the normal brooding and violent content is suggested or is it just a medieval cocktail mixer he's holding? The composition isn't bad but the overall execution is as clunky as you'd expect.