Unfinished Chinese landscape painting completed by AI auctioned for 1.1 million CN¥ (150,000 €)

https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1751749274980609166&wfr=spider&for=pc

http://j.people.com.cn/n3/2022/1129/c95952-10177515.html

The female painter LU Xiaoman who passed away in 1965 had left an unfinished classic landscape painting “Summer mountain dwelling”. The descendants of LU Xiaoman had asked a famous contemporary landscape painter, LE Zhenwen, from the same school as LU Xiaoman, to finish the painting. While Le Zhenwen was still studying the brushwork of LU Xiaoman, an electronic version was sent to the software house Baidu, and an AI-based painting program began to start work as well. To better assist AI in learning the characteristics of traditional Chinese landscape painting, all of LU Xiaoman’s paintings, calligraphic works, letter strokes, a large amount of traditional Chinese landscape painting and AI poem generation software were supplied to the program.Hierarchical processing and super-resolution technologies were used to achieve an extremely high resolution of 8K.

In the end, the Baidu software and Le Zhenwen each completed a version of “Summer Mountain Dwelling”, jointly titled “Unfinished – To Be Continued”, which were auctioned together on the evening of December 8, 2022 by the auction house Duoyunxuan.

The Baidu developers belief that AI painting may form a new school of art and will not completely take away the work of human painters, but will instead form new opportunities. “The last time in the history of art that triggered “anxiety” among painters was the invention of photography, and as we have seen, photography has not completely replaced painting, but has become a specialized branch of art. ”

Middle: the original uncompleted work, right: the AI-based painting, left: the painter’s Le Zhenwen’s artwork

Unfinished Chinese landscape painting completed by AI auctioned for 1.1 million CN¥ (150,000 €)
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