Bang in a CAN

"'I am surprised by the output every time I run it,’ says Elgammal. ‘An interesting question is: why is so much of the CAN’s art abstract? I think it is because the algorithm has grasped that art progresses in a certain trajectory. If it wants to make something novel, then it cannot go back and produce figurative works as existed before the 20th century. It has to move forward. The network has learned that it finds more solutions when it tends toward abstraction: that is where there is the space for novelty.'

"This raises the intriguing notion that AI algorithms do not merely make pictures, they also tend to model the course of art history —as if art’s long progression from figuration to abstraction were part of a program that has been running in the collective unconscious for half a millennium, and the whole story of our visual culture were a mathematical inevitability.

"No AI researchers are claiming that much just yet. They are still addressing the fundamental question of whether the images produced by their networks can be called art at all."