New Masters: Software Has Painterly Technique Down Pat

An iOS app called Prisma has been taking 10 post-Soviet nations by storm, reaching the No. 1 spot in app stores in record time. At first glance, the software does nothing special: It's a collection of image filters that make photos look like paintings. But the technology is far more complex and troubling: It uses artificial intelligence to completely "repaint" images in any of 20 preset manners, taking a major step toward making painting technique even more irrelevant than it has already been rendered by contemporary art.

Post-Soviet developers are good at creating AI image manipulation software. In March, Facebook acquired a Belarussian startup called Masquerade, whose self-learning algorithm allows users to alter their faces in stills or videos. The artificial intelligence in the product, however, is largely limited to fitting effects to different facial shapes -- fun to play with but, in the end, it amounts to very smart tech in the service of silliness.