Artificial intelligence exposed Picasso – Hi-Tech – Kommersant

by time news

London-based startup Oxia Palus has managed to recreate a painting by Pablo Picasso, which for over a hundred years remained hidden under a layer of paint from another painting – the famous “Breakfast of the Blind”. The reproduction, created by artificial intelligence, is to be exhibited in the online gallery MORF. However, the managers of the great artist’s legacy felt that this was unacceptable.

Oxia Palus has been in existence for only two years. It was founded by two PhDs in machine learning from University College London (UCL) – George Kann and Anthony Burached. The startup is engaged in the restoration of lost works of art, and in its collection there are already two dozen paintings, recreated using X-ray and infrared scanning, neural networks and 3D printing. Of these, only two were presented to the general public. This fall, there could be three of them, but the latest creation of artificial intelligence from a British startup caused discontent among the successors of Pablo Picasso and, as a result, never made it to the exhibition. For now, anyway.

Back in 2010, it turned out that under the painting “Breakfast of the Blind” there is another painting, called “Lonely Seated Nude”. The same woman in a similar pose can be seen in another painting by the artist – “Life”. All three works belong to the “blue period” of the artist’s work, when blue and green-blue colors prevailed in his works. This period falls on 1901-1904, when Picasso was young and poor, and he did not always have enough funds to buy canvases and paints. Most likely, it is for this reason that the image of a woman was hidden from everyone for more than 100 years.

The very discovery of ten years ago did not allow us to see the hidden picture in full – only rough outlines revealed by X-ray fluorescence analysis.

Scientists from UCL decided to bring what they started to the end and give the world the picture the artist intended. Well, or a copy as close as possible to the original.

To do this, scientists at Oxia Palus used digital imaging to separate the lower and upper layers of the image from each other. They then trained a neural network to mimic an artist’s drawing style by loading hundreds of images of Picasso paintings into it. Finally, the resulting model of the painting was recreated on canvas using 3D printing, even imitating the manner of the artist’s brushstroke.

The result was presented by the company on October 11th. Scientists even managed to agree with the online gallery MORF that the painting will be presented from October 13 as part of the Deeep exhibition, which unites paintings created using artificial intelligence.

But a few hours before the start of the exhibition, scientists received a letter from the British branch of the Picasso Heritage Administration, which said that scientists should immediately cancel the display of the painting at the exhibition and stop using the artist’s works for their own purposes, citing copyright infringement.

“The disclosure of Picasso’s work is a matter of copyright and, in particular, moral rights,” said Claudia Andrei, head of the legal department of the Picasso Heritage Administration. “This is an eternal right that belongs only to the author’s heirs. Moreover, this artificial intelligence, which “learned” to paint “like Picasso,” will never have the subtle perception of the artist, whose skill is expressed on every blank canvas. “

“To be honest, I think it’s a little sad that our innovation was stifled in this way,” Mr. Cannes said after that.

As a result, at the MORF exhibition there is now only one AI creation from Oxia Palus – a recreated portrait of Beatrice Hastings, which was hidden under Amedeo Modigliani’s “Portrait of a Girl” (1917). The startup created 64 copies of the portrait of Hastings, with whom Modigliani had a romantic relationship until 1916. Each of the paintings, drawn by artificial intelligence, sells for $ 22,222.22.

Kirill Sarkhanyants

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