A decentralized organization is more than the sum of its parts — This is the 2nd article of a 4-part series introducing Abraham, an open project to study and build an autonomous artificial artist. The full series is as follows: • Artist in the Cloud — Towards the summit of AI, art, and autonomy • The Spirit of Decentralization • T̶h̶e̶ ̶C̶o̶l̶l̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶…

Towards the summit of AI, art, and autonomy — Abraham is an open project to make an autonomous artificial artist, a crowd-sourced AI that generates art. This article, the first in a 4-part series, gives an overview of the basic idea. Follow-up articles will examine each of the technical components in greater depth. The full series is as follows: …

An excavation of mathematics reveals the continuity of our knowledge — If deep learning is what used to be called machine learning, machine learning is what used to be called computational statistics. After all, few would have been familiar with the term in the early 1980s when they were already writing programs for logistic regression, principal component analysis, and other…

What I’ve learned from one year of workshops — Over the past year, I’ve been teaching a workshop I’ve usually called “machine learning for artists,” which is also the name of a free, online book I’m building with collaborators, containing supporting materials and educational resources about a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time which has received…

This spring I will be teaching a course at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) called “Machine Learning for Artists.” Since the subject is fairly uncommon outside of the realm of scientific research, I thought it would be helpful to outline my motivations for offering this class. There have been a…

How artistic experiments with deep learning guard us from hype — In recent months, a raft of art projects concerned with deep learning [1][2] have appeared, helping to popularize a branch of machine learning that has rapidly gained traction within the research community. Characterized by more complex architectures than previous generations of machine learning, large-scale deep learning methods have only recently…