The complexity of many-body quantum wave functions is a central aspect of several fields of physics and chemistry where nonperturbative interactions are prominent. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proven to be a flexible tool to approximate quantum many-body states in condensed matter and chemistry problems. In this work we introduce a neural-network quantum state ansatz to model the ground-state wave function of light nuclei, and approximately solve the nuclear many-body Schrodinger equation. Using efficient stochastic sampling and optimization schemes, our approach extends pioneering applications of ANNs in the field, which present exponentially scaling algorithmic complexity. We compute the binding energies and point-nucleon densities of A <= 4 nuclei as emerging from a leading-order pionless effective field theory Hamiltonian. We successfully benchmark the ANN wave function against more conventional parametrizations based on two- and three-body Jastrow functions, and virtually exact Green's function Monte Carlo results.