PARIS — Robots can do many of the jobs previously performed by humans, but could they ever replace artists? A team of French entrepreneurs who believe so have written a computer algorithm that can create original paintings with some resemblance to works by Old Masters such as Rembrandt. The pictures of an imagined “Baron of Belamy” and his aristocratic relations have a smudgy, blurred finish that would not have impressed Rembrandt’s clients, but are good enough for the auction house Christie’s to put one of them on sale in New York in October with a price estimate of $7,000 to $10,000. — AP “We are artists with a different type of paintbrush. Our paintbrush is an algorithm developed on a computer,” said Hugo Caselles-Dupre, a computer engineer who founded the group with childhood friends Gauthier Vernier and Pierre Fautrel, who both have a business background. The artworks are created by the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), an algorithm that learns to generate new images by being fed a database of existing paintings - 15,000 portraits in the case of the “Belamy” pictures. Some artists are unconvinced that a machine can make real art. “There’s always a feeling behind a painting, always - whether it’s anger, yearning, desire. And artificial intelligence is - well, you have the word ‘artificial’ in it - there you have it!” said painter Robert Prestigiacomo. — AP