Robbie Barrat (b. 1999) is a Dublin-born, West Virginia-raised artist who trains neural networks on curated datasets, using the resulting misinterpretations and distortions as his primary material. At nineteen, he gained attention for AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 (2018), a GAN trained on nude paintings so that it would never fully learn the human figure, producing surreal, semi-abstract bodies instead.
Barrat grew up on a farm in West Virginia, and a Nam June Paik exhibition he saw at age thirteen reshaped how he thought about computers as artistic tools. During his senior year of high school, he trained a neural network to write lyrics in the style of Kanye West, a project that led to a 2017 internship at NVIDIA working on neural networks for self-driving cars. He has said the internship cemented his sense of himself as an artist. He went on to conduct machine-learning research on drug discovery at Stanford before pursuing independent art projects in New York and attending art school in Saint-Nazaire, France.
