GANksy: disturbing AI-powered street art

GANksy is an AI trained on the work of Banksy, the UK-based street artist. The results have the mangled and uncanny quality of similar bots (cf. Hopefully This Is Not A Cat) but also something sublimely disturbing. I said to creator Matt Round that it made me think "Francis Bac-sy", to which he replied: "I'm increasingly convinced that neural networks will be able to really mess with our perception, imagine one trained on distressing imagery & optical illusions."

We trained a StyleGAN2 neural network using the portfolio of a certain street artist to create GANksy, a twisted visual genius whose work reflects our unsettled times.

GANksy was born into the cloud in September 2020, then underwent a strenuous A.I. training regime using hundreds of street art photos for thousands of iterations to become the fully-formed artist we see today. All of GANksy's works are original creations derived from its understanding of shape, form and texture. GANksy wants to be put into a robot body so it can spraypaint the entire planet.

Tell Rob about something weird.