We asked an AI app to paint pictures of famous Black Country locations - these were the results
It has been said that Artificial Intelligence will overtake the human brain within a decade or two, so we've done a rather unscientific experiment to see how A.I. is getting on in 2022.
We downloaded one of the most-famous A.I. Painting apps and asked it to produce artworks of some well-known Black Country and Staffordshire locations to see how it squares up against reality.
A.I. painting apps work by analysing thousands of images to learn a certain aesthetic and an algorithm then tries to generate an image based on a prompt written by the user.
We asked the app Wonder to produce watercolour paintings of Walsall Town Hall, Walsall FC's Bescot Stadium, Wolverhampton's St. Peter's Collegiate Church, Molineux, Dudley Zoo Castle, Wednesbury's Ikea, The Hawthorns, Aston Villa stadium Villa Park, Stafford Castle and Lichfield Cathedral.
The results are below, and we've included real photos so you can compare the A.I.'s artistic efforts with the real thing.
Molineux Stadium, Wolverhampton
St. Peter's Collegiate Church, Wolverhampton
Dudley Castle, Dudley
Walsall Town Hall, Walsall
Bescot Stadium, Walsall
Ikea Wednesbury, Sandwell
The Hawthorns, West Bromwich
Lichfield Cathedral, Staffordshire
Stafford Castle, Staffordshire
Villa Park, Birmingham
It's worth mentioning that the A.I. app is really learning painting styles as opposed to sweeping the Internet for location information. If you feed it a photograph, it'll produce an incredibly accurate representation.
As you can see, that's often not the case with prompts, but I think we can all agree the technology is still incredibly impressive.