Ahmed Elgammal of Rutgers University wondered whether making artistic creation into a competitive game might spur computers into new and more interesting artistic territory. His idea was to create one algorithm whose job was to disrupt known styles of art, and another
one tasked with judging the output of the first. There is some evidence that this adversarial model is applicable to the way the human code channels creativity. This was suggested by the curious case of Tommy McHugh. In 2001, Tommy had a stroke. Before the stroke he had been happily leading his life as a builder in Liverpool. But after the stroke something strange happened. Tommy suddenly had an urge to create. He started writing poetry and bought paints and brushes and began to fill the walls of his house with pictures. The trouble was he couldn’t control this urge to create. He became a hostage to this drive to cover the walls of his house in paint. Research by neuroscientists has discovered that, like the algorithms driving the generative adversarial networks at Google Brain, our own brains have two competing systems at play. One is an exhibitionist urge to make things. To create. To express. The other system is an inhibitor, the critical alter ego that casts doubt on our ideas, that questions and criticizes our ideas. We need a very careful balance of both in order to venture into the new. A creative thought needs to be balanced with a feedback loop which critiques the thought so that it can be refined and generated again. It seems that Tommy’s stroke knocked out the inhibitor part of his brain. There was nothing telling him to stop.
Elgammal’s strategy was to write code to mimic this dialogue between the generator and discriminator that takes place, generally subconsciously, in an artist’s mind. The trick was to be new and surprising without drifting so far from the expectation that arousal turned to aversion because the result was just too strange. The discriminator algorithm would be tasked with feeding back to the generator algorithm whether it was too derivative or too wild to be considered art.

The artworks generated by the algorithm were shown to a pool of 18 people to judge mixed with 50 images. of real paintings half by famous abstract expressionists and half shown at Art Basel 2016, the results show that human subjects could not distinguish art generated by the proposed system from art generated by contemporary artists and shown in top art fairs. Human subjects even rated the generated images higher on various scales
participants believed that the generated images were made by artists 75% of the time, compared to 85% of the time for the collection of Abstract Expressionist artworks, all made between 1945 and 2007. In terms of the Art Basel paintings, participants thought that humans had made them just 48% of the time. In general, the participants praised the generated images more than those made by real artists in both the Abstract Expressionism and the Art Basel sets
The fact that subjects found the images generated by the machine intentional, visually structured, communicative, and inspiring, with similar, or even higher levels, compared to actual human art, indicates that subjects see these images as art!.

Ahmed Elgammal of Rutgers University wondered whether making artistic creation into a competitive game might spur computers into new and more interesting artistic territory. His idea was to create one algorithm whose job was to disrupt known styles of art, and another
one tasked with judging the output of the first. There is some evidence that this adversarial model is applicable to the way the human code channels creativity. This was suggested by the curious case of Tommy McHugh. In 20016, Tommy had a stroke. Before the stroke, he had been happily leading his life as a builder in Liverpool. But after the stroke, something strange happened. Tommy suddenly had an urge to create. He started writing poetry and
bought paints and brushes and began to fill the walls of his house with pictures. The trouble
was he couldn’t control this urge to create. He became a hostage to this drive to cover the walls of his house in paint. Research by neuroscientists has discovered that, like the algorithms driving the generative adversarial networks at Google Brain, our own brains have two competing systems at play. One is an exhibitionist urge to make things. To create. To express. The other system is an inhibitor, the critical alter ego that casts doubt on our ideas, that questions and criticizes our ideas. We need a very careful balance of both in order to venture into the new. A creative thought needs to be balanced with a feedback loop that critiques the thought so that it can be refined and generated again. It seems that Tommy’s stroke knocked out the inhibitor part of his brain. There was nothing telling him to stop.
Elgammal’s strategy was to write code to mimic this dialogue between the generator and discriminator that takes place, generally subconsciously, in an artist’s mind.
The trick was to be new and surprising without drifting so far from the expectation that arousal turned to aversion because the result was just too strange.
The discriminator algorithm would be tasked with feeding back to the generator algorithm whether it was too derivative or too wild to be considered art.
These works were shown at Art Basel 2016.