People love looking at images and memes of cats. This gave the Vienna Tourist Board in Austria an idea for a marketing campaign. It used artificial intelligence (AI) to reimagine classic artwork in Vienna’s museums with cats as the subjects. The board hoped the amusing images would attract visitors to the city’s many museums.
AI is the use of machine learning technology and algorithms to mimic human learning. Members of the tourist board instructed the AI to generate an image replacing the two figures kissing in Gustav Klimt’s 1907-08 painting The Kiss, above left, with felines. The result: An image of two cats cuddling, above right, in a style that imitates Klimt’s use of pattern and color.
As part of the campaign, the board released a video that humorously explores the AI-generated images’ compositions. The narrator jokes that “maybe this cat, like all the other cats on the internet, wants to tell us, ‘Look at me’.” The video invites viewers to come to Vienna and see the masterpieces that the AI cat versions are based on.
The tourist board’s decision to use AI-created art in its campaign comes at a time when the technology is being heavily criticized. Some people are alarmed by the rise of art-generating AI programs like DALL-E and Midjourney. Both create images from users’ prompts and information gathered from analyzing millions of images on the internet. Some critics of AI argue that this amounts to plagiarism and threatens the livelihoods of artists.
But instead of shying away from the controversial technology, the Vienna Tourist Board chose to embrace AI as a fun and educational tool.