Google wants to find the art in artificial intelligence

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art.

In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art.

Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures.

"There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If so, how? If not, why not?'," he said. "The goal of Magenta is to produce open-source tools and models that help creative people be even more creative. I’m primarily looking at how to use so-called 'generative' machine learning models to create engaging media."

The project will initially attempt to create music, before moving onto images and then video

Algorithms already exist to create art – in 2015, a group of researchers in Germany created a "convolutional neural network" that was able to turn images into imitations of Van Gogh paintings in under an hour. British artist Dan Tapper has also used algorithms to transform images into abstract art.

The results of the project will be available on TensorFlow, an open source program for machine learning. Eck hopes the openness of the project will encourage others to improve on the system.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK