A Test: Can You Tell Which Of These Paintings Was Painted By A Machine?

All six artists participating in the experiment were commissioned to paint a piece inspired by the same collection of 20th-century American abstract expressionists. For Cloudpainter, a painting robot developed by Virginia-based artist Pindar van Arman, the collection became a dataset to train its algorithm. Its final output (painting F above) is a far cry from the geometric, color-between-the-lines art you might imagine from a robot artist. Instead, with dripping colors and blurred lines, the piece looks surprisingly, well, human.