An AI Eerily Recreated The Mona Lisa In The Ruins Of Humanity And Skynet Is Pleased
When IBM's Watson defeated two of the greatest Jeopardy players of all time with a $1 million pot up for grabs, we applauded. And when AI started beating up flesh and blood players at games like Quake III Arena and Gran Turismo, we stood by and watched in amazement. But have we been witnessing marvels of technological advancements all this time, or missing the warning signs that went right over our head? A recreation of the Mona Lisa has us seriously considering the latter.
Posted on Reddit and a few other places, there's a collection of nine paintings cobbled together by AI to look like the famous Mona Lisa that Leonardo da Vinci painted in the early 1500s. Sounds innocent enough, right? It would be, except this one is titled "Desolate Civilization" and is built on fragments depicting the ruins of humanity.
"Is this a threat?," someone commented on 9Gag. Another person wrote, "So an AI just fantasized about a wrecked civilization, drew it and compared to art, and no one gets the hint?"
At worst, AI isn't even threatening humankind, it's outright mocking us. Like when Larry Bird told an opponent (Xavier McDaniel) exactly where and how he was going to shoot the game winning shot, and then did exactly that (true story). And we only have ourselves to blame—we created AI, then showcased our disrespect for artificial beings by beating robots with a hockey stock (literally), then taught those same robots ninja skills. What the hell were we thinking?
Let's hope that's all an overreaction to something much more innocent. There's a canvas of this artwork for sale on Redbubble where the designer and seller describes it as "concept art of beautiful architectural ruins from a future civilization, with another hidden image." The designer, known as tdraw_ai_art on Instagram, appears to have created the piece with NightCafe Studio, a free online tool that can create custom pieces just from text or a collection of images.
We tried it ourselves with much different results...
Both images are it created when we inputted "post-apocalyptic Mona Lisa" with different modifier options. Neither of those results have the same ominous foreboding of Desolate Civilizations (or Abandoned Civilizations, as it's labeled on Reddit). It seems pretty clear that tdraw_ai_art fed a collection images from their Instagram page into NightCafe Studio, but can we even be sure the designer is actually human?
Side note, people have been drawing comparisons to Ron Swanson when squinting and looking at the recreated Mona Lisa painting. We kind of think it looks like Genghis Khan, who know a thing or two about conquering civilizations.
Yeah, sleep well Hot Hardware readers...
