Could a robot ever recreate the aura of a Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece? It’s already happening | Naomi Rea

AI is already capable of mimicking human creativity. Whether or not it makes artists obsolete will be down to how they use it

This month, the internet was flooded with stunningly ethereal digital art portraits, thanks to the work of the latest artificial intelligence-assisted application to go viral: Lensa. Users uploaded their photographs to the app and then - for a small fee - it used AI to transform their profile pictures into, say, a magical elfin warrior princess version of themselves, in no time at all.

This year has seen a breakthrough for AI-driven image generators, which are now better than ever in quality, speed and affordability. The AI models are trained" on millions of pieces of image and text data scraped from publicly available content online, and as in the case of Microsoft-backed DALL-E, can turn short text prompts such as Ronald McDonald performing open heart surgery" into unique images.