When it comes to shepherds, people usually think of men or boys. That's because the sheep have typically been watched by men, but now that is changing. A new school to train women to be shepherds is opening in Spain.

The aim for the school isn't just about gender equality by giving women a job, but it's also about reviving the countryside. Many small towns are becoming depopulated as more young people are going to the cities. Women have been abandoning the countryside in greater numbers than men and the population is aging. Many towns are taking measures to attract new residents but few of them focused only on women.

While there are other shepherd schools that accept women, the new school is different because it is being run through a woman's perspective(角度). They also have to care for their family during their work. "That's why we're talking about work-life balance, creating networks of each other's support and cooperation," said Susana Pacheco, the organizer of the school.

The course will run for nine months and include nearly 500 hours of online training and an additional weekend a month of training in Cantabria——a mountainous area of the country.

While shepherding is a traditional job, the school will use the latest technological advances to track the sheep. There are also hands-on training classes that include beekeeping, cheese making, and eco-tourism that will allow the women a chance for extra income.

While the idea of a school separated by sex has not been fully accepted_, Pacheco said that the condition in some villages is terrible with 149 seniors for every 100 children. "If we want generational change, women are fundamental," she said. "We see this school as a social transformation project—we want to empower women and respect this work."

“Is it art?” Tyka, an artist and software engineer, asked the audience at Christie's 2019 Art + Tech Summit in New York in June 2019. The event's theme was “The A. I. Revolution”, and Tyka was referring to artwork created using artificial intelligence. He flashed an image of urinal （小便池） on two large screens at either side of the stage —Marcel Duchamp's famous and controversial sculpture Fountain. The audience laughed. “Obviously, it can be,” he said.

However, many in the art community are wrestling with several unanswered questions after an algorithm-produced （演算法） print that resembled 19th century European portraits was sold for $432, 500. For example: when artwork is accomplished by means of the algorithm, who is the artist—the programmer or the computer? Because many works of AI art are digital, how do you value a creation that's designed to live natively on the Internet and be widely shared? There are few clear answers.

Claire Marmion, the founder and CEO of Haven Art Group, says collectors are still trying to figure out where the market for AI art is heading, and that it may not be the disruptive （破坏性的） force that some think it will be. Or, at least, the industry will adapt to it.

Mario Klingemann, whose work was sold by Sotheby's, prefers the term “generative art”, which includes all works created using algorithms, and believes the current buzz will eventually die down, otherwise AI art isn't going anywhere. Instead, he thinks it will one day be viewed as simply another tool of the artist.

“Just like photography never goes away, or making movies doesn't, I'm pretty sure it will establish itself as a new media format,” he says. “Right now, of course, it's all this mystery about AI, but I expect this to become really just a normal thing, where people will focus on what artists are actually saying with their art.”

Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci....the art world has never lacked talent. And now, a new painter is ready to join the list, although this one isn’t even human.

Next month, auction house Christie’s Prints and Multiples will make history by offering the first piece of art created by artificial intelligence for sale. The painting is a portrait of a man called Edmond de Belamy, and is expected to be sold for up to $10,000. The work, which features a man with a mysterious look on his face, was created by software developed by the French art group Obvious. Laugero-Lasserre, an art collector from France, called the work “fantastic and amazing at the same time”. This isn’t the first example of A I-produced art work, as AI has already been used to write poems and compose songs. However, many people doubt whether it should be called art at all. According to Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), art is about evoking emotion. It’s “a means of...joining people together in the same feelings”, he once said.

So, if the emotion behind art is what makes it, the ability to create and use tools is what makes human beings different from other species. And as a tool itself, the A I technology used to create the portrait is the result of a lot of effort made by several designers. Together, they “fed” the A I with a huge collection of paintings from the 14th to the18th centuries, until it was able to work out how to make similar paintings of its own.

The introduction of A I art could be the beginning of a new artistic movement. However, not everyone is ready to welcome these high-tech artists just yet.