Beauty is in the eye of the machine

TitleBeauty is in the eye of the machine
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsZhang, M, Kreiman, G
JournalNature Human Behaviour
Volume5
Issue6
Pagination675 - 676
Date Published05/2021
Abstract

Ansel Adams said, “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” Is it possible to predict our fickle and subjective appraisal of ‘aesthetically pleasing’ visual art? Iigaya et al. used an artificial intelligence approach to show how human aesthetic preference can be partially explained as an integration of hierarchical constituent image features.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made rapid strides in a wide range of visual tasks, including recognition of objects and faces, automatic diagnosis of clinical images, and answering questions about images. More recently, AI has also started penetrating the arts. For example, in October 2018, the first piece of AI-generated art came to auction, with an initial estimate of US$ 10,000, and strikingly garnered a final bid of US$ 432,500 (Fig. 1). The portrait depicts a portly gentleman with a seemingly fuzzy facial expression, dressed in a black frockcoat with a white collar. Appreciating and creating a piece of art requires a general understanding of aesthetics. What are the nuances, structures, and semantics embedded in a painting that can provide us with an aesthetically pleasing sense?

URLhttp://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01125-5
DOI10.1038/s41562-021-01125-5
Short TitleNat Hum Behav

Associated Module: 

CBMM Relationship: 

  • CBMM Funded