Truly, we are doomed.
If you thought that art was the last bastion that humans would hold over the machines, you were wrong. It seems that artificial intelligence can now take better photographers than most people, and even do so without using a camera. We have Google to thank for this travesty.
You see, in a project called Creatism, Google researchers have built an AI that can recognise a beautiful vista from a landscape photograph, and then crop and edit it to appear professional. The programme uses the enormous wealth of images from Google Street View cars, scanning data from across the world. Once it spies a scene that could be considered beautiful, the AI then edits the photo to make it seem even more appealing; as if captured by a pro human photographer using a DSLR.
The top half of the image above is what the Creatism AI created, using the panoramic photo from Street View; the original being placed below it. If you saw the top image on a website you would automatically assume that a human saw that scene, considered it pretty, and then used skill and technical know-how to take a great photo. Not so anymore, it seems.
As Google continue to capture even more of the planet in Street View (including many places nowhere near a street) you could see gorgeous photos cropping up of mountains and distant lakes, carefully edited to a professional standard. By a robot.
Creepy.
See more of the images at google.github.io/creatism