There is no question that machines can appear to be and are creative. They can produce works of art, alone or in collaboration with humans. They can even judge and be aware of the quality of their artworks. But there is one crucial element of the creative process they don't possess, that of intent. So how about a new hybrid kind of creativity, where humans and machine are collaborating into creating artworks; the humans provide the intention and the initiative, and the machines their interpretation and vision.
This project investigates this new area of hybrid human-machine creativity. The human draws some simple sketches of faces on an iPad. Then, she provides a photograph of a person, depicting emotions. These two are given to a machine as an input to transform those sketches according to its own "qualia" ("how it feels like", intrinsic instances of experience) using a neural style transfer algorithm based on a pre-trained convolutional network. The results are surrealistic artworks, dark and dystopian at times, but with evident anthropomorphic features, where somehow the machine manages to enhance the feeling of simple drawings.
