Introduction

At the Colorado State Fair in 2022, the winning entry was a fantastical sci-fi landscape created by video game designer Jason Allen titled Théâtre D’opéra Spatial (Figure 1.1). The first prize art was remarkable both from the dramatic subject matter, but also due to the unusual origin of this image. Unlike the majority of other artworks entered into the competition, the Théâtre D’opéra Spatial was not painted using oil or watercolors, nor was its “creator” even human; rather, it is an entirely digital image produced by a sophisticated machine learning algorithm called Midjourney. Jason used Midjourney, which has been trained on diverse images, along with natural language instructions to create the image, rather than a brush and canvas.

Figure 1.1: Théâtre D’opéra Spatial (Ref 1)

Visual art is far from the only area in which machine learning has demonstrated astonishing results. Indeed, if you...