UK-based firm develops a new AI that turns sketches into paintings reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh's work

A UK-based company has developed a new **artificial intelligence** (AI) system that can turn your sketches into paintings reminiscent of the works by great Renaissance artists such as Vincent van Gogh. [caption id=“attachment_3974783” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image.[/caption] The system, dubbed Vincent, learned to paint by studying 8,000 works of art from the Renaissance (14th to the 17th century) up to the 20th century. “Vincent allows you to draw edges with a pen, edges of a picture you can imagine in your mind, and from those pictures, it produces a possible painting based on its training,” said Monty Barlow, director of machine learning at UK-based company Cambridge Consultants.

 Some previous attempts to produce AI-generated art delivered rather scary results, such as the human portraits that looked more like they were pulled from a horror movie.

While Vincent’s art does not look entirely realistic, it could pass for some of the more abstract creations of masters of the impressionist or expressionist era, such as Vincent van Gogh or Edvard Munch. “It has learned contrast and color and brushstrokes. It can bring all of that to play when you draw a picture, giving you access to all that artistic content,” Barlow told Live Science. “There is this concern that artificial intelligence will start replacing people doing things for them, but Vincent allows humans to take part in the decisions of the creativity of artificial intelligence,” said Barlow, who led the project.