Hong Kong digital artist Victor Wong Wang-tat, who practises traditional ink art as a hobby, was proud to show his work to his fellow practitioners at one of Hong Kong Ink Painting Society’s gatherings. A sturdy mountain, made up of steady, and powerful brushstrokes, sits in the centre of the rice paper; the changing black and grey gradation of the ink lines standing in stark contrast to the blank white space to create an ethereal landscape as if clouds are floating above the valleys. Wong recalls the Ink Painting Society chairman’s immediate puzzlement: “This painting shows the level of experience and skill that a senior painter has, but strangely the artist seems to paint far more steadily than most of us older artists are capable of now.”
The older man was astounded to learn that the painting had been created by AI Gemini, Hong Kong’s first AI robotic arm to specialise in ink art, designed by Wong. This revelation led fellow Ink Painting Society members to question which ink art masters’ works Wong had fed to AI Gemini’s machine learning system, and whether the resulting piece should be considered art.
Wong isn’t the
