Machines might one day replace human laborers in a number of professions, but surely they won’t ever replace human artists. Right?

Think again. Not even our artists will be safe from the inevitable machine takeover, if a new development in artificial intelligence(AI) by a team of researchers from Rutgers University and Facebook’s AI lab offers a clue of what’s to come. They have designed an AI capable of not only producing art, but actually inventing whole new aesthetic(美学的) styles similar to movements like impressionism or abstract expressionism. The idea, according to researcher Marian Mazzone, was to make art that is “novel, but not too novel”.

The model used in this project involves a generator network, which produces the images, and a discriminator network, which “judges” whether it’s art. Once the generator learns how to produce work that the distributor recognizes as art, it’s given an additional instruction: to produce art that doesn’t match any known aesthetic styles.

“You want to have something really creative and striking — but at the same time not to go too far and make something that isn’t aesthetically pleasing,” explained Ahmed Elgammal.

The art that was generated by the system was then presented to human judges alongside human-produced art without showing which was which. To the researchers’ surprise, the machine-made art scored slightly higher overall than the human-produced art.

Of course, machines can’t yet replace the meaning conveyed in works by human artists, but this project shows that artist skill sets certainly seem reproducible by machines.

What will it take for machines to produce content with meaning? That might be the last AI frontier. Human artists can at least hang their hats in that field for now.

“Imagine having people over for a dinner party and they ask, ‘Who is that by?’ And you say, ‘Well, it’s a machine actually.’ That would be an interesting conversation starter,” said Kevin Walker.

【小题1】What is implied in the second paragraph?

A．Artists won’t be replaced by AI.	B．AI can produce new styles of art.
C．AI is totally at a loss about impressionism.	D．AI fails to reflect abstract expressionism.

【小题2】What did Marian find in his study?

A．AI can please human judges with its art.	B．AI can combine content with meaning.
C．AI can make art aesthetically unpleasant.	D．AI can create high quality arts.

【小题3】What does the underlined phrase “hang their hats” mean?

A．Discover.

B．Hold.

C．Struggle.

D．Appear.

【小题4】What Kevin said in the last paragraph tells us that         .

A．she uses machines to cook for a party	B．she likes to join in a dinner party
C．she expects the arrival of AI	D．she cares about the starter of a chat