
This striking abstract painting is by an up-and-coming artist named Taylor; you can bid on it for $200 or more soon, in hopes it becomes a rare collectors’ item that symbolizes the start of a new art movement.
Because the thing is, “Taylor” is not an artist and this is not a “painting” as we typically understand those terms. The painting was generated by artificial intelligence… as was the painter herself.
You can see more works by “Taylor” here, part of a fascinating project by rising technologist August Rosedale, whose development I’ve been casually following since the early 2000s.
Starting soon, Rosedale’s Mirage Gallery will auction off AI paintings like this to the highest bidder, and confirm their authenticity by registering them on a blockchain.
“I think that people will bid on AI-made paintings for the same reason people bid on human-made paintings,” August tells me. “People enjoy having beautiful art pieces around them and also can be invested in the idea of the artist's work increasing in value over time.”
The painting, to be sure, is not actually painted, and will come with a blockchain token.
“For the physical pieces, it will be a 24x24 inch canvas print. Each buyer can choose to sell the token and canvas print separately but the value will come from keeping them together.”

To create Taylor’s work, August compiled ten thousand or so abstract art paintings in a wide variety of styles, then fed them into a generative adversarial network, or GAN:
“The GAN works by having something called a discriminator whose job is to determine if an input image was from the original dataset or not. What this means is that the model that is training will create an image, and then feed it into the discriminator and see if it can convince the discriminator that the inputted image was from the original dataset. Over time, the model is able to create more convincing outputs that start to trick the discriminator.”
The only human input in their creation happened at the beginning, when August curated the datasets the AI then worked from:
“It is important for the datasets to have similarities in the images or else the outputs will be much more difficult to interpret,” as he explains. “Once the dataset has been made, the GAN plays a sort of game with itself to try to trick itself into believing that its own creations were from the original dataset. With powerful GPUs and lots of computing time, this process can result in amazing pieces of art. The Mirage Gallery artists will continue to refine their art with more hours of training as time goes on.”
Same goes for the personae and appearance of Taylor and “Alejandro”, the Mirage Gallery’s current representational artist:
Metaverse Viewing: Readers Recommend Wild Palms & The Peripheral
Virtual world experience from Wild Palms starts around 45 minutes in
I asked readers for favorite depictions of the Metaverse/virtual worlds in movies and TV besides Ready Player One, and they delivered -- starting with this oddball post-Twin Peaks TV classic from the 90s recommended by Ariane Barnes:
Of course! Watch episode 1 above. I vaguely remember the show, mostly for Kathryn Bigelow directing a later episode, and William Gibson doing a cameo appearance somewhere in there. Anyway, pretty amazing there was buzz around VR literally 30 years ago.
Speaking of Gibson, Soda Sullivan recommends a much more recent example based on a novel by him:
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Posted on Monday, June 19, 2023 at 02:08 PM in Comment of the Week, New World Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)
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