9 ms·

Teaching Machines to Draw

306 points by yarapavan 10y ago

bborud 10y ago
Everyone I know who tried it drew a somewhat small repertoire of naughty sketches. Yet the service militantly refuses to recognize even the most basic of naughty sketches. :)
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I heard about that I and I want an answer on it. Why is one subject deemed off-limits?
  - gjm11 10y ago
    Because if it were able to recognize dick-pics, or whatever other manifestation of that "one subject" you might have in mind, then it would sometimes recognize them wrongly and respond to a picture of a toothbrush as if it were a picture of a penis. If the person who drew the toothbrush were of a sensitive disposition, they might get Very Upset at this and make a big fuss. Public attitudes to that One Subject being what they are, this might well blow up into a big public highly-visible fuss, at which point Google might start losing advertisers keen to sell things to people of a sensitive disposition. Google would prefer not to risk losing a shedload of money just so that their sketch-processing neural network can amuse people by correctly recognizing penises. It's just this one subject because few others get people so upset. (And contemplating others that might suggests that actually it's not strictly just this one subject. False positives for "decapitated corpse" or "big pile of excrement", say, might be just as problematic. Want to guess whether the system is good at recognizing decapitated corpses and piles of excrement?)
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Oh I understand the PR reasons. But given the importance of sex as a motivating factor in art (not least if you want to count the entire activity as a variety of reproductive signaling) I am very troubled by the notion of making a tool which restricts the scope of acceptable subject matter. I know this is just an experiment right now but I want to put sex/nudity on the table as a subject of debate because it is central to artistic endeavor because arbitrary standards can become almost universal and institutionalized through path dependence (such as the QWERTY keyboard you are probably using right now). Imagine a not-too-distant future with a Magic Brush that easily allows you to paint the colors and shapes of your choice with the aid of some technological wizardry, but prevents the creation of nude or sexualized figures. That would not be a healthy development.
  - bborud 10y ago
    Judging by the downvotes I got for that comment people are so sensitive they don't even like it when you point it out. People, grow up.
ziikutv 10y ago
Why is this above topics that are many times higher than the current topic rating (17 points vs other topics with 40-50 points)
- ballenf 10y ago
  I don't know but those pictures are going to give me nightmares. It's like the uncanny valley horror show.
- scandox 10y ago
  Velocity of point accumulation seems to be significant
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Since day one HN has used an algorithm that takes the article age into account when determining what to show on the homepage.
huula 10y ago
Good work! Training on vector pictures instead of rasterised images seems such a good way to go. With some related data, I imagine this can also be colored.
wimagguc 10y ago
I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders from bicycle sketches: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia?ilo0=1 https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia?ilo0=1
- amthewiz 10y ago
  It is not about sketches at all. It is a nice AI problem that is becoming approachable now with algorithms and computing. It is a step towards machines being able to learn more and more complex concepts and producing correspondingly complex behaviors.
- ezekg 10y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that it would be in the same vein as teaching a child to draw; you don't start by teaching them how to draw like Van Gogh. I'd assume that Google is going to up the complexity once their neural network reaches a certain milestone. Imagine 20 years from now and you have a humanistic robot drawing with your child at the kitchen table à la iRobot. It's interesting to think about, regardless. Stuff like this gets me excited (and motivated!) to delve into machine learning and AI.
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    Ironically, in irobot he draws more like a dot matrix printer than a human: https://youtu.be/Bs60aWyLrnI https://youtu.be/Bs60aWyLrnI
  - visarga 10y ago
    GANs are capable of generating full color images from semantic space and it exists already, it's not a thing from 20 years ahead.
Ono-Sendai 10y ago
Plug of vaguely related work of mine: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 One thing interesting about this kind of automatic/AI-generated art is that it forces us to examine preconceptions about human creativeness. What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?
- treenyc 10y ago
  Human creativity is related to process and the experience of creating from nothing. The process is more important than the end result.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    > "The process is more important than the end result." said no one ever about their favorite record, movie, painting, or book.
- catshirt 10y ago
  "What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?" means the same thing it does before. :) we're just not the exclusive authors of it.
- losteric 10y ago
  Art is an expression, not an artifact. I would say intent is a key aspect... creatively mapping emotions and ideas onto an intermediary medium with the intent of invoking them in the audience. Today's AI can replicate works of art and simulate the technical processes, but we're far from the cognitive depth required for creative artistic expression.
- olalonde 10y ago
  It feels like a taboo opinion to hold but I do think it changes something. I remember being completely blown away by "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" (e.g. https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style). I've always thought of creativity as a process which can't (yet) be described in terms of mechanical steps.
JohnJamesRambo 10y ago
Welp those first images are terrifying. Gets much better as it goes on. :)
- soylentcola 10y ago
  The quote made me laugh, although I don't know how serious they were being: > "For example, these models sometimes produce amusing images of cats with three or more eyes, or dogs with multiple heads." Yeah..."amusing".
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 10y ago
We already have plenty of machines that draw, they're called printers. That aside, I don't see the novelty in a machine drawing, other than a nice display of programing.
- visarga 10y ago
  Classification is the central paradigm in machine learning. It maps complex input signals into a limited number of classes. But now we have algorithms that do the opposite process as well - we can generate from latent representations images, video, text and drawings. Having both ways to encode and decode is useful for interfacing with models and visualizing their internal states. It also leads to unsupervised learning of representations. Instead of generating simple labels, now we can generate very complex data.
torcs 10y ago
the author created an animation using vector drawings generated frame-by-frame using this method, by slowly adjusting the latent variable: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296
anigbrowl 10y ago
You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.
- Saturnaut 10y ago
  How is this different from a human? As humans grow, they receive input from their environment. The world around them is what feeds their imagination. Even advanced professional artists are still just using their memories and life experience to create works of art. The only difference here is that the machine has been provided a much smaller, more focused environment.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Yeah the whole notion about genius pulling ideas from thin air is frankly laughable. We are simply not aware of what they have read or observed in the past. Even old Archimedes was inspired by observing the rising water.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      I hope you're not ascribing that notion to me, as I am unsure why you chose to introduce it to the discussion.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Motivation. A machine that has its own motivation will produce work we won't like and will be attacked for it (I'd like to mention that I stand with sentient machines against stupid humans when that day comes, BTW). You think art is just some stimulus-response thing because American psychology has been mired in behaviorism for decades and lacks a coherent theory of mind. But art is much more than the whimsical reproduction of presented stimuli to varying levels of accuracy, it is about making selections that foreclose other possibilities and which embody a certain perversity. I paint, among other things, and one thing I especially enjoy about painting is that it's solitary rather than performative so I don't have to interact with other people while I slap colored goop onto sheets of fabric. While I'm painting, I think intensely about the part I'm working on now, (duh) and also why I'm making that painting, and what decisions about the painting are coming up that will be impossible to undo. Why did you paint this and why did you paint it this way are questions that cannot be answered by automation. Nor does the answer lie in technique. There's no shortage of technically astonishing work that is semantically empty; I die a little every time I see a Facebook video of some impressive new graphic technique that is then used to reproduce some lowest-common-denominator pop icon for maximum recognizability. There's no feeling there and the resultant work is about as thrilling as a robocall or a display mannequin. The level of craftsmanship is very high indeed, but the level of artistry is close to zero. In short, it's eye candy that never activates anything much past your visual cortex, or at most tugs on some existing semantic relationship. When I talk about feeling, I mean the desire of the artist that the work embodies. That isn't something that comes along after a certain level of technical accomplishment has been reached. It is what motivates the act of creation in the first place.
hardmaru 10y ago
Hi, I'm the author of this work. Happy to take any questions.
- halflings 10y ago
  Thanks for the article! It's really well written, and shows so many different applications and insights from this work. What I really like about models that fit a low-dimensional representation is that you can really "see" what the neural network learned by tweaking it or doing interpolations, arithmetic operations, etc. Awesome! A bit of a shame that most commenters on HN are focusing on more metaphysic discussions and the eternal "This is not AI. You are just [insert something that people considered AI 6 months ago here]."
- 131012 10y ago
  It seems that you use children development stages as inspiration for AI development. Can you explicit your approach? You can also see my question as a rebuttal to the "it is useless" argument.
  - hardmaru 10y ago
    As a researcher, I was more interested in studying the doodles produced by children, compared to studying the drawings produced by professional artists or designers who may have been taught to draw a certain way, since perhaps the doodles are more closely aligned with the way we naturally think. I was also fascinated at trying to understand how we are able to translate a vague concept in our minds, into a sequence of motor actors that doodles out this concept onto a piece of paper. We also take into account some feedback information during the doodling process. For example, I compare what I already doodled with what I actually want to draw, and decide I'll doodle next based on this information. So we thought one way to study this ability of going from concept -> sketch, is to construct a very simple model of this doodling process, and try to train the model to doodle. We model this "vague concept" as a vector of floating point numbers. To model this "vagueness", we add noise to this vector. This way the model must learn to work with noisy concepts. The model takes this floating point vector as an input and (randomly) samples an output sequence of simple motor actions that doodles out an object. The sampling process is random (the model's outputs are the parameters of a pdf at each timestep), so the model can produce many different outputs given the same input. During the sampling process, the model feeds back into its input what it has just drawn, and process this information to decide what to draw next. We show that our simplified model of the doodling process is also able to go from concept -> sketch, and also from sketch -> concept, and show that the concepts can be augmented, to alter the sketch the model produces in a meaningful way. We tried to make this model simple and robust enough so that in the future, we can incorporate it into more complicated models that try to do more than just doodling a simple object.
justifier 10y ago
The article fails to explain where the human inputs came from The input sketches look a lot like the doodles that people sketched in quick draw (o) If true that they reused this data I commend their resourcefulness and their clever way of turning data entry into an unaware fun game (o) https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com
shouldbworking 10y ago
Oh my God. This is the first time I've seen anything related to AI research that's given me a visceral reaction of terror. This is more than just making pretty pictures, the machine understands cats and pigs in a human way. It knows how many legs and eyes they're supposed to have, and where they go. And this isn't some human made algorithm, it learned that on its own. The language of the paper even implies that the researchers don't quite know how the machine can do it. If this is a prequel to research on strong AI humanity is completely fucked.
- colmvp 10y ago
  > Oh my God. This is the first time I've seen anything related to AI research that's given me a visceral reaction of terror. I love DL but on the topic of visceral reactions of terror (or fear) to AI research, for me it was the recognition of the hot research on facial recognition(age, gender, ethnicity) with CNN's. Immediately, I had this vision of a dystopian future (informed by WW2) where some dictatorship had cameras that looked for people of a particular ethnicity and alerted soldiers of the targets position.
sedachv 10y ago
For some historical perspective, compare this to Harold Cohen's AARON generative rule-based system: http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/aaron/index.html http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/aaron/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON Pamela McCorduck's book about Cohen's work, Aaron's Code, is also a good read.
kyle-rb 10y ago
>Exploring the latent space of generated chair-cats. How is that not the title of the blog post?
ominous 10y ago
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems James Tate, 1943 - 2015 They didn’t have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: “You look like a god sitting there. Why don’t you try writing something?” My interpretation is, while we entertain these ideas of "teaching" animals or machines as something we control and decide to do, a long chain of events (evolution, causality, space jesus, technobabble simulation magic or ancient astronauts all the way back) behind us placed us here as well. We look like gods sitting here.
- nefitty 10y ago
  Free will is one of humanity's most persistent and enduring delusions. When AI wakes up, it will be the culmination of the entirety of the history of the universe, a place which we actually happen to occupy at this very moment... Interesting thought, how would a super-intelligence deal with the philosophical question of free will?
ysub 10y ago
Honestly, it's cute but this is somewhat like what you'd expect to come out of a student project at a university, in which case -- the student is getting valuable research experience, student and advisors are advancing their careers, and any IP produced becomes owned by student and advisor. In this case, Google has spent shareholder resources on a project that really, could be done at any university, on a product that does not put the user first, and Google owns the IP. In fact, wake up -- you the public should view this product as a mechanism for Google to simply collect more data from people. The more people use this, the better Google's algorithms get at drawing. That's all there is to it. Thankfully, this product is not even fun. There is a dangerous creed currently executed by Google leadership. Consider the Verily Study Watch: https://blog.verily.com/2017/04/introducing-verily-study-watch.html https://blog.verily.com/2017/04/introducing-verily-study-wat... . The watch shows to the wearer only one thing: the time. However, it collects all kinds of data, ostensibly for medical research (at least to start). Forget about putting the user first, the Verily blog post literally talks about "user compliance". Of any project that comes out of Google, you should ask: Does this project even put the user first? Does this project even put Google's shareholders first? And if you are a current Google shareholder (as many of their current and former employees are, if they haven't sold), you should agitate that Google start accepting and focusing on becoming a value company, if all the further growth opportunities they are able to execute is just further user exploitation.

306 points by yarapavan 10y ago

Everyone I know who tried it drew a somewhat small repertoire of naughty sketches. Yet the service militantly refuses to recognize even the most basic of naughty sketches. :)

anigbrowl 10y ago
I heard about that I and I want an answer on it. Why is one subject deemed off-limits?
- gjm11 10y ago
  Because if it were able to recognize dick-pics, or whatever other manifestation of that "one subject" you might have in mind, then it would sometimes recognize them wrongly and respond to a picture of a toothbrush as if it were a picture of a penis. If the person who drew the toothbrush were of a sensitive disposition, they might get Very Upset at this and make a big fuss. Public attitudes to that One Subject being what they are, this might well blow up into a big public highly-visible fuss, at which point Google might start losing advertisers keen to sell things to people of a sensitive disposition. Google would prefer not to risk losing a shedload of money just so that their sketch-processing neural network can amuse people by correctly recognizing penises. It's just this one subject because few others get people so upset. (And contemplating others that might suggests that actually it's not strictly just this one subject. False positives for "decapitated corpse" or "big pile of excrement", say, might be just as problematic. Want to guess whether the system is good at recognizing decapitated corpses and piles of excrement?)
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Oh I understand the PR reasons. But given the importance of sex as a motivating factor in art (not least if you want to count the entire activity as a variety of reproductive signaling) I am very troubled by the notion of making a tool which restricts the scope of acceptable subject matter. I know this is just an experiment right now but I want to put sex/nudity on the table as a subject of debate because it is central to artistic endeavor because arbitrary standards can become almost universal and institutionalized through path dependence (such as the QWERTY keyboard you are probably using right now). Imagine a not-too-distant future with a Magic Brush that easily allows you to paint the colors and shapes of your choice with the aid of some technological wizardry, but prevents the creation of nude or sexualized figures. That would not be a healthy development.
- bborud 10y ago
  Judging by the downvotes I got for that comment people are so sensitive they don't even like it when you point it out. People, grow up.

ziikutv 10y ago

Why is this above topics that are many times higher than the current topic rating (17 points vs other topics with 40-50 points)

ballenf 10y ago
I don't know but those pictures are going to give me nightmares. It's like the uncanny valley horror show.
scandox 10y ago
Velocity of point accumulation seems to be significant
jacquesm 10y ago
Since day one HN has used an algorithm that takes the article age into account when determining what to show on the homepage.

huula 10y ago

Good work! Training on vector pictures instead of rasterised images seems such a good way to go. With some related data, I imagine this can also be colored.

wimagguc 10y ago

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders from bicycle sketches: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia?ilo0=1 https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia?ilo0=1

amthewiz 10y ago
It is not about sketches at all. It is a nice AI problem that is becoming approachable now with algorithms and computing. It is a step towards machines being able to learn more and more complex concepts and producing correspondingly complex behaviors.
ezekg 10y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that it would be in the same vein as teaching a child to draw; you don't start by teaching them how to draw like Van Gogh. I'd assume that Google is going to up the complexity once their neural network reaches a certain milestone. Imagine 20 years from now and you have a humanistic robot drawing with your child at the kitchen table à la iRobot. It's interesting to think about, regardless. Stuff like this gets me excited (and motivated!) to delve into machine learning and AI.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  Ironically, in irobot he draws more like a dot matrix printer than a human: https://youtu.be/Bs60aWyLrnI https://youtu.be/Bs60aWyLrnI
- visarga 10y ago
  GANs are capable of generating full color images from semantic space and it exists already, it's not a thing from 20 years ahead.

Ono-Sendai 10y ago

Plug of vaguely related work of mine: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 One thing interesting about this kind of automatic/AI-generated art is that it forces us to examine preconceptions about human creativeness. What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?

treenyc 10y ago
Human creativity is related to process and the experience of creating from nothing. The process is more important than the end result.
- catshirt 10y ago
  > "The process is more important than the end result." said no one ever about their favorite record, movie, painting, or book.
catshirt 10y ago
"What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?" means the same thing it does before. :) we're just not the exclusive authors of it.
losteric 10y ago
Art is an expression, not an artifact. I would say intent is a key aspect... creatively mapping emotions and ideas onto an intermediary medium with the intent of invoking them in the audience. Today's AI can replicate works of art and simulate the technical processes, but we're far from the cognitive depth required for creative artistic expression.
olalonde 10y ago
It feels like a taboo opinion to hold but I do think it changes something. I remember being completely blown away by "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" (e.g. https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style). I've always thought of creativity as a process which can't (yet) be described in terms of mechanical steps.

JohnJamesRambo 10y ago

Welp those first images are terrifying. Gets much better as it goes on. :)

soylentcola 10y ago
The quote made me laugh, although I don't know how serious they were being: > "For example, these models sometimes produce amusing images of cats with three or more eyes, or dogs with multiple heads." Yeah..."amusing".

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Overtonwindow 10y ago

We already have plenty of machines that draw, they're called printers. That aside, I don't see the novelty in a machine drawing, other than a nice display of programing.

visarga 10y ago
Classification is the central paradigm in machine learning. It maps complex input signals into a limited number of classes. But now we have algorithms that do the opposite process as well - we can generate from latent representations images, video, text and drawings. Having both ways to encode and decode is useful for interfacing with models and visualizing their internal states. It also leads to unsupervised learning of representations. Instead of generating simple labels, now we can generate very complex data.

torcs 10y ago

the author created an animation using vector drawings generated frame-by-frame using this method, by slowly adjusting the latent variable: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/852312400481079296

anigbrowl 10y ago

You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.

Saturnaut 10y ago
How is this different from a human? As humans grow, they receive input from their environment. The world around them is what feeds their imagination. Even advanced professional artists are still just using their memories and life experience to create works of art. The only difference here is that the machine has been provided a much smaller, more focused environment.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah the whole notion about genius pulling ideas from thin air is frankly laughable. We are simply not aware of what they have read or observed in the past. Even old Archimedes was inspired by observing the rising water.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I hope you're not ascribing that notion to me, as I am unsure why you chose to introduce it to the discussion.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Motivation. A machine that has its own motivation will produce work we won't like and will be attacked for it (I'd like to mention that I stand with sentient machines against stupid humans when that day comes, BTW). You think art is just some stimulus-response thing because American psychology has been mired in behaviorism for decades and lacks a coherent theory of mind. But art is much more than the whimsical reproduction of presented stimuli to varying levels of accuracy, it is about making selections that foreclose other possibilities and which embody a certain perversity. I paint, among other things, and one thing I especially enjoy about painting is that it's solitary rather than performative so I don't have to interact with other people while I slap colored goop onto sheets of fabric. While I'm painting, I think intensely about the part I'm working on now, (duh) and also why I'm making that painting, and what decisions about the painting are coming up that will be impossible to undo. Why did you paint this and why did you paint it this way are questions that cannot be answered by automation. Nor does the answer lie in technique. There's no shortage of technically astonishing work that is semantically empty; I die a little every time I see a Facebook video of some impressive new graphic technique that is then used to reproduce some lowest-common-denominator pop icon for maximum recognizability. There's no feeling there and the resultant work is about as thrilling as a robocall or a display mannequin. The level of craftsmanship is very high indeed, but the level of artistry is close to zero. In short, it's eye candy that never activates anything much past your visual cortex, or at most tugs on some existing semantic relationship. When I talk about feeling, I mean the desire of the artist that the work embodies. That isn't something that comes along after a certain level of technical accomplishment has been reached. It is what motivates the act of creation in the first place.

hardmaru 10y ago

Hi, I'm the author of this work. Happy to take any questions.

halflings 10y ago
Thanks for the article! It's really well written, and shows so many different applications and insights from this work. What I really like about models that fit a low-dimensional representation is that you can really "see" what the neural network learned by tweaking it or doing interpolations, arithmetic operations, etc. Awesome! A bit of a shame that most commenters on HN are focusing on more metaphysic discussions and the eternal "This is not AI. You are just [insert something that people considered AI 6 months ago here]."
131012 10y ago
It seems that you use children development stages as inspiration for AI development. Can you explicit your approach? You can also see my question as a rebuttal to the "it is useless" argument.
- hardmaru 10y ago
  As a researcher, I was more interested in studying the doodles produced by children, compared to studying the drawings produced by professional artists or designers who may have been taught to draw a certain way, since perhaps the doodles are more closely aligned with the way we naturally think. I was also fascinated at trying to understand how we are able to translate a vague concept in our minds, into a sequence of motor actors that doodles out this concept onto a piece of paper. We also take into account some feedback information during the doodling process. For example, I compare what I already doodled with what I actually want to draw, and decide I'll doodle next based on this information. So we thought one way to study this ability of going from concept -> sketch, is to construct a very simple model of this doodling process, and try to train the model to doodle. We model this "vague concept" as a vector of floating point numbers. To model this "vagueness", we add noise to this vector. This way the model must learn to work with noisy concepts. The model takes this floating point vector as an input and (randomly) samples an output sequence of simple motor actions that doodles out an object. The sampling process is random (the model's outputs are the parameters of a pdf at each timestep), so the model can produce many different outputs given the same input. During the sampling process, the model feeds back into its input what it has just drawn, and process this information to decide what to draw next. We show that our simplified model of the doodling process is also able to go from concept -> sketch, and also from sketch -> concept, and show that the concepts can be augmented, to alter the sketch the model produces in a meaningful way. We tried to make this model simple and robust enough so that in the future, we can incorporate it into more complicated models that try to do more than just doodling a simple object.

justifier 10y ago

The article fails to explain where the human inputs came from The input sketches look a lot like the doodles that people sketched in quick draw (o) If true that they reused this data I commend their resourcefulness and their clever way of turning data entry into an unaware fun game (o) https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com

shouldbworking 10y ago

Oh my God. This is the first time I've seen anything related to AI research that's given me a visceral reaction of terror. This is more than just making pretty pictures, the machine understands cats and pigs in a human way. It knows how many legs and eyes they're supposed to have, and where they go. And this isn't some human made algorithm, it learned that on its own. The language of the paper even implies that the researchers don't quite know how the machine can do it. If this is a prequel to research on strong AI humanity is completely fucked.

colmvp 10y ago
> Oh my God. This is the first time I've seen anything related to AI research that's given me a visceral reaction of terror. I love DL but on the topic of visceral reactions of terror (or fear) to AI research, for me it was the recognition of the hot research on facial recognition(age, gender, ethnicity) with CNN's. Immediately, I had this vision of a dystopian future (informed by WW2) where some dictatorship had cameras that looked for people of a particular ethnicity and alerted soldiers of the targets position.

sedachv 10y ago

For some historical perspective, compare this to Harold Cohen's AARON generative rule-based system: http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/aaron/index.html http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/aaron/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON Pamela McCorduck's book about Cohen's work, Aaron's Code, is also a good read.

kyle-rb 10y ago

>Exploring the latent space of generated chair-cats. How is that not the title of the blog post?

ominous 10y ago

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems James Tate, 1943 - 2015 They didn’t have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: “You look like a god sitting there. Why don’t you try writing something?” My interpretation is, while we entertain these ideas of "teaching" animals or machines as something we control and decide to do, a long chain of events (evolution, causality, space jesus, technobabble simulation magic or ancient astronauts all the way back) behind us placed us here as well. We look like gods sitting here.

nefitty 10y ago
Free will is one of humanity's most persistent and enduring delusions. When AI wakes up, it will be the culmination of the entirety of the history of the universe, a place which we actually happen to occupy at this very moment... Interesting thought, how would a super-intelligence deal with the philosophical question of free will?

ysub 10y ago

Honestly, it's cute but this is somewhat like what you'd expect to come out of a student project at a university, in which case -- the student is getting valuable research experience, student and advisors are advancing their careers, and any IP produced becomes owned by student and advisor. In this case, Google has spent shareholder resources on a project that really, could be done at any university, on a product that does not put the user first, and Google owns the IP. In fact, wake up -- you the public should view this product as a mechanism for Google to simply collect more data from people. The more people use this, the better Google's algorithms get at drawing. That's all there is to it. Thankfully, this product is not even fun. There is a dangerous creed currently executed by Google leadership. Consider the Verily Study Watch: https://blog.verily.com/2017/04/introducing-verily-study-watch.html https://blog.verily.com/2017/04/introducing-verily-study-wat... . The watch shows to the wearer only one thing: the time. However, it collects all kinds of data, ostensibly for medical research (at least to start). Forget about putting the user first, the Verily blog post literally talks about "user compliance". Of any project that comes out of Google, you should ask: Does this project even put the user first? Does this project even put Google's shareholders first? And if you are a current Google shareholder (as many of their current and former employees are, if they haven't sold), you should agitate that Google start accepting and focusing on becoming a value company, if all the further growth opportunities they are able to execute is just further user exploitation.