A Computer Paints A Rembrandt, And It Looks Just Like The Real Thing

Fast Design reports;

The new project, The Next Rembrandt, is technically a commercial. As TNW points out, ING Bank, working with Amsterdam-based advertising agency J Walter Thompson, footed the bill.

With the help of coders and academics, over 300 original Rembrandt portraits were scanned, from which image analysis specialists analyzed both stroke style and face shapes. With this data, they built an algorithm that could recreate an entirely new, hypothetical subject that Rembrandt may have painted, in his own style. Then the image was painted, layer by layer, by a 3-D printer, so that the final product had all of the texture of a real painting, applied stroke by stroke. Ambitious work for an ad.

The final result is certainly convincing to my eye—and you can take a closer look at this superb, interactive landing page—but I’m a plebe who only studied his work in Art Appreciation 101. Still, it seems likely that in the future, algorithms—now capable of copying other masters like Van Gogh—will take the lead on highly convincing forgeries. Maybe more interestingly, they could do exactly what these crazy, unearthed master works have always done: offer us a way to see new work from an artist who’s been gone for hundreds of years.

From Fast Foods restaurants to Factories floors to Politics speeches to Cooking Robots, what role and function was not possible for Robots and AI to do better or at least comparable to humans? Who was being replaced and whose obsolescence was being planned?

We were unleashing forces beyond our control and forces that would soon be ruling over us. What percentage of the population knew how to program the machines that would be ruling over us and what would happen when the machines began to program themselves and design their own algorithms? We were the masters and architects of our own oppression and destruction.

Sources: