Chinmay Bidkar
Google researcher Douglas Eck showing off an AI-generated image at Moogfest. (Pic-Quartz/Mike Murphy)
23 May 2016, USA :
Google has been doing wonders in the field of Artificial Intelligence- Self-Drive cars, AlphaGo and now ‘Magenta’.
It is launching a new research project called Magenta which will test the creative capabilities of artificial intelligence.
Douglas Eck, a researcher on the Magenta project, said that the group will first tackle algorithms that can generate music, then move to video and then other visual arts.
Magenta is a research project to explore using artificial intelligence to create art, and make that process easier for TensorFlow users. The group has about six researchers now, and will invite other academics to help try to solve the problem of creative machines. The project exists within Google Brain group.
Magenta will be using the machine learning engine built by Google, TensorFlow to test if artificial intelligence could create original pieces of art, music or videos.
Like TensorFlow which was recently made open source by Google, Magenta will also make its tools available to general public and researchers to enable them to carry out their own similar research.
Douglas Eck, a researcher at Google, talks about Magenta during at panel at Moogfest. (Pic-Dave Gershgorn)
“There’s a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit,” said Eck.
Eck stated his inspiration for the project came from Google DeepDream, a way that researchers used to look at how their artificial intelligence algorithms perceived objects by asking them to generate examples.
He further mentioned, mentioned a potential Magenta app, which would showcase the music and visual art created out of the Magenta project. The app would aim to gauge whether people like the art because it’s novel or because it has inherent artistic value.
Check out the video grab of Magenta in action!