Nathan Shipley is a San Francisco-based graphics artist who used artificial intelligence (AI) to reimagine a handful of historical figures and famous paintings as modern-day people.

The artist loves to create impossible images and explore new technology. Nathan has a background in animation and visual effects and once he saw the possibilities that AI and machine learning tools open up, he realized that there are many things that could be done using them that would otherwise be impossible. “Even some things that may be technically possible with VFX and CG could still be very time-consuming or expensive, whereas AI enables entirely new possibilities,” says the artist.

Nathan says it’s fascinating to explore how an AI model built on a particular dataset with a particular framework can ‘see’ the world and then transform images. “The AI ‘knows’ only what it has already seen and filters the world through this lens. Each little tweak to the dataset, the training parameters, the model, and the input imagery all have the possibility to change the output,” explained the artist. “This is a space to explore how artificial neural networks interpret the world in a way that can be similar to our own minds. I’m not saying that an image I created is what Mona Lisa actually looked like, but it is how the machine sees her based on this particular arrangement of variables. That, to me, is fascinating...