Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience.

Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....

The idea pops into my mind almost immediately. For weeks, amid my dad’s barrage of doctor’s appointments, medical tests, and treatments, I keep the notion to myself.

I dream of creating a Dadbot—a chatbot that emulates not a children’s toy but the very real man who is my father. And I have already begun gathering the raw material: those 91,970 words that are destined for my bookshelf....