Although Deep Dream (Google) was the first AI used to create art, Generative Adverserial Networks (GANs) that followed in the same year of 2016 are today the result of millions of AI-generated Art.
In 2014, Ian Goodfellow’s paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661] that was not made popular until its selection at the NEURIPS in 2016 and thus became the foundation of 99.99% of the AI-generated art you see today.
Using Deep Learning for Image Classification, I came across the paper in 2015 but did not think of splitting between the generator and the discriminator until 2016, when I had access to my first 4GB VRAM GPU.
I trained it on 1001 portraits I have photographed while traveling around the world and in my Frankenstein Lab, I generated 10000 unique portraits of people that do not exist. I called them “Children of the Cloud” [Learn more].
For better or for worse, the art market had different plans for who can profit from my serendipity, especially with all the profit it has seen coming.
Nevertheless, it was a huge lesson about how things work and who are the few to stand for the truth and fight for it.
I have met many wonderful people on this path and have no regrets and I hold no grudges against fate. For I know in the long run, what goes around comes around and time is the best revelator.
Regardless, Decades before the AI Art Buzz hit the fan, it was possible to create higher resolutions of the same art with generative & fractal art, but the journalists did zero research before speculating & dumbing every curious soul.
People are not ignorant and the truth sooner or later will surface. I was especially motivated to publish these posts after having art critics point out these striking similarities of works similar to mine that got all the media attention only years or decades after….
Today, AI ART has become accessible to any typing fingers with the advances of AI and the chipsets that host it and it is no longer fair to give credit to the prompt author as much as it is to the artists who authored the training data of millions of artworks the the AI (midjourney, dall-e, stable diffusion, and others).
Thank you for your support and attention.