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Understanding Aesthetics with Deep Learning
- phreeza 10y agoI wonder how much our sense of aesthetics has to do with the perceived scarcity or effort of creation needed. I remember the first HDR photos looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, but now, as the process has been automated and is ubiquitous, it just looks tacky.
- Grazester 10y agoHDR only looks tacky when it's done tacky, ridiculously amping up the saturation and removing all the shadows
- samlevine 10y ago"fashion is clothing so terrible we have to change them every six months"
- Govannon 10y ago"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
- zaaakk 10y agoread adorno
- phreeza 10y agoCare to elaborate? Does he go into this?
- yusee 10y agoHave you read him? If so, why not synthesize his arguments so we can all understand?
- mccoyspace 10y agoHere goes: Aesthetic Theory is a posthumous book by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and is one of the most important works on aesthetics in 20th century philosophy. In it, he combines elements from Kant, Hegel and Marx. From Kant's 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, he draws on the idea of the Sublime and the notion that art has formal autonomy (which Adorno modifies). From Hegel, he takes a dialectical understanding of the ultimate goal or aim of art, and from Marx he approaches art as being inseparable from society as a whole. He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx). Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre-categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability. edit: links.... http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theory http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theo... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/
- ibuildthings 10y agoAuthor here. Just to clarify, motive of this work is to ease curation, with the massive amount of content being created; but by no means an attempt at creativity or originality. The work is not at all contradictory to Adorno, especially in the sense that it is explicitly trying to as non-reductionist as possible, and assuming notion of aesthetics is a dynamic entity . There is a finite pattern in the dataset; more interesting, it has its interesting share of subtleties ( for example, as opposed to a image classification problems), and the technological question is whether we can capture these. But there is another interesting data question. For our work, we curated our training set with the help of expert curators. But the dataset itself is a metamorphising entity; i.e. it is subject to revision ( it is a continuous process for us at the moment), but more interestingly it is a chance for open debate between our curators. In some sense, technology allow to codify and challenge our notion of aesthetics ( especially with the evolution in our training sets) at a given point of time.
- BanzaiTokyo 10y agoI believe that there are factors that go beyond visible composition. Just a though experiment, I imagine that the brain would evaluate easthetics of two similar images differently depending on whether it is an image of an object it recognizes or not - when evaluating the image with an object other qualities of the object (that are not necessarily visible in the image) will be taken into account.
- maldusiecle 10y agoYeah, exactly. No good critic of photography thinks that subject matter is irrelevant, that you can understand pictures as if they were abstract compositions of light and color. You'd might as well try to read a poem in an unknown language. This algorithm might learn to identify certain cliches, but it'll never learn what makes a picture powerful.
- posterboy 10y agoWe listen to foreign music a lot and still find pleasure in the voices. Although I'm mostly speaking from my experience with English before I had learned it, which is yet rather close to German, so YMMV >No True Scotsman thinks that subject matter is irrelevant fixed that for you
- maldusiecle 10y agoNo idea what the No True Scotsman fallacy has to do with this; it involves dismissing an example, but no example was offered. You're welcome to offer one, if you'd like. We listen to foreign music and find pleasure in the voices because a voice itself is expressive, independent of language: a cry, a laugh, an imprecation. The same is true of light, shape, etc., but artists who work with these qualities independent of their reference to objects tend to choose media other than photography, for obvious reasons.
- posterboy 10y agoI was just pattern matching.
- controll 10y agoI don't think computers would be able to understand aesthetics. It is a really high-level concept. Plus, I think deep-learning is a marketing mambo-jambo and does not perform much better than a linear SVM.
- visarga 10y agoThen why are we using deep convolutional networks for state of the art vision and speech when we could just plug an SVM with handcrafted features? From what I know, error rates in vision dropped from 25% to less than 5% since deep learning. That's no trifle, especially at the higher end of the accuracy scale. It's very hard to conquer those last few percents.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yusee 10y agoAesthetics is a game of cat and mouse. Artists create some new things. Then critics and theorists observe the patterns of composition, color, proportion, etc., that are popular. These rules are canonized in books. Then artists challenge the rules. The comparisons to music theory in this thread are apt. Music theory is always behind music production. How can you understand aesthetics without understanding creativity?
- saltenhav 10y agoJurgen Schmidhuber has an interesting perspective on the rewarding aspects of art and music. To paraphrase, "Artists (and observers of art) get rewarded for making (and observing) novel patterns: data that is neither arbitrary (like incompressible random white noise) nor regular in an already known way, but regular in way that is new with respect to the observer's current knowledge, yet learnable (that is, after learning fewer computational resources are needed to encode the data)". In other words, enjoyment of art is about learning (easy) patterns. Schmidhuber likens "fun" to the improvement of an observer's ability to compress a scene. The source is worth the read: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
- kafkaesq 10y agoA better title would have been "Using ML to rank and classify images according to aesthetics." Which in itself is quite impressive. But nowhere do we see indications that these algorithms "understand" the images, in any meaningful sense.
- ibuildthings 10y agoThe author here. I used the term "understanding", not as in machines understanding the images, but more as scientific attempt in understanding aesthetics. ( <snippet from the text>"empowering me to develop systems for understanding images from a computational and scientific perspective"</snippet ends> ).
- kafkaesq 10y agoFair enough -- thanks for clarifying.