Okay, I never claimed this would be good art. None of what I’m going to show you is. I think some of it is visually interesting in a kind of impressionistic poster art sort of way but that’s about it.

So what’s going on here? The shorthand description is that these images are created by a genetic algorithm controlled painting process with selection fitness provided by an image classifier neural network. That’s lot of concentrated jargon to digest so I’ll step through it and try to translate it into non-technobabble English.

The individual images in the group are created by drawing simple geometric shapes: ellipses, capsules, triangles, rectangles. Each drawing is described by a series of numbers that give the order, position, colour and so on of these shapes.

A genetic algorithm is a process that can take a set of parameters (like the numbers describing our drawings) and apply the evolutionary concepts of selection and reproduction with variation to search for combinations that produce the best “fitness” by whatever selection criteria we choose. In terms of our drawings this reproduction and variation is a process of copying the numbers from one of the better scoring images and then randomly changing a few values or adding new random shapes. Roughly speaking, we can use the genetic algorithm to “breed” images that display characteristics we want.

This concept of “what we want” is provided by the image classifier network. Image classifiers are increasingly common in apps and places like Google’s image search and you probably use them without even knowing. They read images and attempt to identify the subject matter. Behind the scenes most of these classifiers will produce a set of confidence scores for a number of possible subjects. It’s these confidence scores that this art generator uses as fitness for the purposes of selecting images to “breed”.

To sum up, I ask for pictures on the theme of “hotdog” and the genetic algorithm will generate populations of images and use the classifier’s confidence that there’s a hotdog in them to guide an evolutionary search for a more “hotdoggy” image.

There is no human involved in this process as it takes place. I’m sure there are readers just dying to point out the human involvement in the construction of the whole machinery, and I’ll get to that, but its important to recognise that the generation of the images is not actively guided. As the human my involvement is to set the subject matter and to decide if I like the output. I think the analogous role for art production in the normal way of things would be a editor or a client.

I did, of course, have input outside of this generation process that can’t be ignored. I decided to pick three images in a theme. I set the titles, bringing in a cultural reference. That reference might lead you to spot the capsule shaped elements in the “Not Hotdog” images and wonder if they are hotdogs too, which would bring another level of meaning to the image. You could even say that my act of placing it in this article gives it the context of a piece of art. “Art is what you hang in a gallery” is an argument with some worth and the AI isn’t showing anyone what it did — that’s all me.