Artificial intelligence algorithms do not create something out of nothing... yet. They use what they learn from the vast repertoire of human knowledge that is fed to them. Algorithms that generate art have caused a mighty controversy in the art world as artists recognize their own work remixed and regurgitated by publicly-available programs such as Midjourney and DALL-E. You can understand the angst an artist feels when their work is plagiarized by a machine that doesn't know any better.
The Vienna Tourist Board is harnessing that exact controversy to promote the city's more than 100 art museums. The campaign UnArtificial Art used Midjourney to create AI-generated versions of classic paintings by long-gone artists featuring cats. Cat art is sure to get your attention. The image above shows us two cats, but you can see that it draws inspiration directly from the 1908 painting The Kiss by Gustave Klimt, housed at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. It's one of many paintings the tourist board generated to entice visitors to go see the originals that inspired them.
The Belvedere Museum found another way to us artificial intelligence to recreate art. Klimt's series called the Faculty Paintings were destroyed when the Nazis burned Schloss Immendorf, where they were stored, in 1945. The only evidence that they ever existed were some black and white photographs of the works, and one color photo showing a small section of one Klimt painting. The Belvedere partnered with Google Arts & Culture to harness a massive network of art experts and technicians to reproduce the Faculty Paintings through artificial intelligence. The project used not only the photographs of those works, but also the style and colors of Klimt's existing works and a depth of knowledge of the art of their time. Read about the project and see the reconstructed works in full color. The art of Gustav Klimt is front-and-center for the Belvedere's 300th anniversary celebrations. -via Everlasting Blort