Crowdfunding launch at Trinity College Dublin. Pictured from left: Cofounders Neal O’Gorman and Eric Risser of Artomatix, Ltd. Picture Colm Mahady / Fennell Photography Copyright 2014

If you thought that artistic expression was the only thing Artificial Intelligence (AI) could never replicate, you might want to rethink that art degree. Nvidia Corp. has awarded the $100,000 prize for its recent Early Stage Challenge to Dublin-based deep learning start-up Artomatix, Ltd., which proves that even art can be automated … to a point.

Artomatix was founded in 2014 by Eric Risser, a Ph.D. and expert in computer science and AI, and Neal O’Gorman, a serial entrepreneur who had founded two previous companies. They bootstrapped Artomatix through Trinity College’s Launchbox student incubator before moving on to Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers Development program.

The startup’s product, which it calls “the first AI with an imagination,” is designed to lessen the workload of artists working in video games and animation by automating some of the more tedious aspects of character design. After being given a few base examples of the types of designs needed, the AI uses deep learning to extrapolate on their features and build entirely new designs.

“At a superficial level, our technology works kind of like a spreadsheet does,” Risser said in an April 2014 interview. “The same way an accountant would enter meaningful high-level data and the spreadsheet does all the tedious calculations, our system lets an artist enter their concepts as input and our system helps them quickly polish and improve those concepts, and then build a large virtual world with a level of detail and variety that mirrors the real world.”

In a video demonstration of the AI at work, Risser uses the example of creating Orcs, a race common to many fantasy series, including Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft. A couple of base Orc models were given to the AI, and then it proceeded to create hundreds of Orcs with unique features, many of which were not even present in the original models.

Its AI still needs some initial inspiration from non-robotic artists, but Artomatix could save them weeks of tedious work. For large game makers, this would save the company time and money, but for smaller game studios, this could open up a whole new scale of game creation previously unavailable to low budget developers.