Painters like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso transformed art by inventing new styles such as impressionism and cubism. Could a machine do the same? Perhaps, now that the public has given the thumbs up to unconventional images created by an artificial intelligence. The idea is to make art that is “novel, but not too novel”, says Marian Mazzone, an art historian at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who worked on the system. Mazzone and her colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey and Facebook’s AI lab in California modified what’s known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), pitting two neural nets against each other to get better and better outcomes. The general idea is that one of them creates a solution, the other judges it – and the algorithm loops until it attains the…