On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a MacBook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google data center in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio.

Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits.

I may reasonably be considered “good” with computers, but I’m no coder; I flunked out of Codecademy’s easy-on-beginners online JavaScript course. And though I like visual arts, I’ve never shown much aptitude for creating my own. My foray into AI art was built upon a basic familiarity with the command line, and a recent encounter with 19-year-old Robbie Barrat.

Barrat doesn’t have formal qualifications in programming either, but he’s become an accomplished AI artist, and shares code and ideas on GitHub. I decided to try them after talking with Barrat in the course of writing about self-taught AI experts in the December issue of WIRED, and learning that a Parisian art collective called Obvious used his recipes and code to create a work that sold at Christie’s for $432,500.

Barrat makes art using artificial neural networks, webs of math that have spawned the recent AI boom by enabling projects like self-driving cars and automated cancer detection. Neural nets can learn to do useful or artistic things by processing large volumes of example data, such as photos. Barrat enabled my explorations, along with a nice payday for Obvious at Christie’s, by sharing the code and instructions to train image-generating networks with images collected from the giant art encyclopedia WikiArt.

Training neural networks is notoriously computationally demanding. It’s why graphics chipmaker Nvidia has seen its stock appreciate more than tenfold in the past five years, and Google has begun to design its own chips for machine learning. Not having a graphics processor—or $2,000 spare to get one—I used the $300 of credits Google offers new users of its cloud computing service to boot up a virtual computer that did. I picked one preconfigured with machine learning software. Because Barrat’s project is now more than a year old, I also had to install a machine learning tool called Torch, used by researchers at companies including Facebook and IBM that has been overshadowed by newer packages since.