In the eye of the beholder

Is this art or an artificial construct generated by Deep Dream, a Google derived AI with a viewpoint on the world both bizarre and wondrous depending on one's point of view. 

Artistic creation, defined as the production or expression of what is beautiful, appealing or provocative, appears to be well within the capability of machines. Some definitions of art explicitly characterise it as an expression of human skill and creativity, while others place more emphasis on the output as a catalyst for human reflection and contemplation, without saying anything about how it was produced.

Another way in which AI is already creating art is by remixing visual concepts. DeepDream is a computer visualisation tool created by Google engineers that uses convolutional neural networks, which are a type of network well adapted to reading images. It learns to find and enhance patterns in images, but in this case the algorithm was expanded to identify and exaggerate features of an image that have certain characteristics. Style transfer is another technique in which stylistic elements of one image are used to draw the content of another.

Image generated by the Creative Adversarial Network.
Copyright, The Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Rutgers University

Compare this piece with Diebenkorn's Large Light Blue. Eerie says it all.

Any questions?

Addendum: Here's a shot by yours truly using DD to do the deed.

Van Gogh anyone? Here's the original.

Emergence - NYC 2018.