50 AI Art Fails That Are Both Horrifying And Hilarious

While AI art has become increasingly popular in recent years, it has likely been around much longer than you realize. According to TechTarget, some of the first versions of artificial intelligence art appeared in the late 1960s. However, the first notable program came about in 1973 when Harold Cohen developed Aaron. Aaron “was an AI assistant that used a symbolic AI approach to help Cohen create black-and-white art drawings,” Sean Michael Kerner at TechTarget explains. But following Aaron, it took many decades for AI art to find its way into the mainstream.

In 2014, discussions started about GANs, a foundation of generative AI technology, and in 2015, Google released DeepDream, which uses “a convolutional neural network (CNN) as an experimental approach to AI art,” Kerner says. And over the past 5 years, AI art has only become more and more prevalent, as Ganbreeder was released in 2018 (later rebranded as Artbreeder), using GAN models to allow us to use AI technology to edit existing images and even create new ones.

AI art also made headlines in 2018 after an artist going by the name of Obvious auctioned off a painting titled Edmond de Belamy, that he created using GAN models, for a whopping $432,500. “Sold in an original gilded wood frame, the portrait depicts a man dressed in a dark frock coat with a plain white collar showing underneath,” Dezeen reported at the time. “The work looks unfinished, with indistinct, blurry facial features and large areas of canvas left blank.” This was the first AI-generated piece of artwork to be sold by a major auction house, but there will likely be many more in the future.

In May 2022, Google launched its Imagen technology as a new way to create AI art, which uses text-to-image. Since then, various other programs have popped up, including Stability AI, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, Prisma and more. And while AI art has long been a controversial topic among those in the art community, TechTarget notes that some of the ways artists can utilize AI are for art therapy, democratization, education, enhancing their existing creations, to create completely new pieces and for inspiration for new pieces.