[Posted on 10/2018]

With the advancements in computing technology and artificial intelligence, computers have started to perform human activities from factory operations to driving. Following this trend, an intriguing question arises: can computers create art?

To answer this question, perhaps, we should first answer: can computers understand art?

As a conceptual art enthusiast, I have played with the idea of testing the ability of machine learning in understanding different illustration styles from realism to abstract.

For the following tests, a freely available image recognition tool, Google Cloud’s Vision API, is used to find labels describing each picture. 

After this small experiment, what can we say about the first question: Can computers understand art?

It is important to note that the used API tool is a pre-trained machine learning model. The outcome of the model heavily depends on the training set, of course. While a comprehensive training set can improve some aspects of art recognition (for instance for realism and impressionism styles,) there are some other aspects that seem to remain hard to be fully recognized by machines (for instance for expressionism and abstract styles.)

The silver lining is that, despite all its limitations, the API is able to detect some figures, as seen in the last test, that a human may not be able to recognize (at least at first glance).

So, maybe the answer to the above questions is not a YES-NO type of answer, but something in the middle. Maybe computers can complement human's understanding of art...