This AI Creates Art From Instagram Posts With Zero Likes

Ah, the Instagram algorithm. How does it work? We just don’t know. No matter how many followers you have, sometimes the likes don’t appear. And that strange feeling of online rejection was what motivated Melbourne artist and coder Sam Hains to create Zero Likes, an AI trained to respond only to those lost and lonely images that miss out on attention.

Hains describes the project as “a meditation on the aesthetics of nothingness.” He trained an AI to respond to more than 100, 000 Instagram posts that received zero likes, as part of an ongoing series “investigating the potential for machines to respond to abstract, human questions”. He then trained another AI to respond to the images generated by the first. The result is glitchy, unsettling artwork accompanied by disconcertingly straightforward, automated captions.

“The inspiration came about as a friend of mine posted a photo on Instagram that received no likes at all, and for someone with a relatively popular Instagram I thought this was fascinating,” he explains to Creators. “What was it about this post that provoked no emotional response?”

Read the rest of the interview on Creators.