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My wife is a portrait artist, and when she usually does a commissioned portrait for someone, I am astounded by the amount of time that she spends purely working

My wife is a portrait artist, and when she usually does a commissioned portrait for someone, I am astounded by the amount of time that she spends purely working on the eyes. (ex. [1],[2]) Looking at these in comparison to her work, it is definitely true that the eyes are the windows into the soul, and define a LOT about a person's face. (Or even an animal - she does pet portraits too). Even in looking at her very early work in art school - I can forgive the odd crooked nose or askew mouth as long as the eyes tell the story. Looking at these AI generated portraits, I find the facial features really interesting, but it is the artificial, dead quality of the eyes that make me somewhat uncomfortable with them, and induce a slight feeling of horror, as exceptional as the artwork is. [1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/BRhU7fKjdhS/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BRhU7fKjdhS/ [2] - https://www.instagram.com/p/BRZormMDyB3/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BRZormMDyB3/

serhei 9y ago
The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely squick out some people while other people don't seem to notice what the problem is and think we'll be drowning in 4k procedurally-generated Ghibli movies on Netflix in a few decades from now (see [2]). Clearly the two groups are looking at the pictures in two completely different ways. (Personally, I tend to fall into the 'squicked out' category. I don't like the way objects in [1] melt into each other, like the artist is a lobotomy patient who can no longer separate objects, or like the picture is depicting a hideous Lovecraftian fractal dimension. The faces are actually better because the author iteratively upscales something that looks like a face at every stage, instead of just running one step to generate an alien blob of too many eyes and noses that happens to pass the neural network. Besides dead eyes, they tend to suffer from the problem of the two halves of the face trying to make completely different expressions.) [1] - https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-d... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453

serhei 9y ago

The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely squick out some people while other people don't seem to notice what the problem is and think we'll be drowning in 4k procedurally-generated Ghibli movies on Netflix in a few decades from now (see [2]). Clearly the two groups are looking at the pictures in two completely different ways. (Personally, I tend to fall into the 'squicked out' category. I don't like the way objects in [1] melt into each other, like the artist is a lobotomy patient who can no longer separate objects, or like the picture is depicting a hideous Lovecraftian fractal dimension. The faces are actually better because the author iteratively upscales something that looks like a face at every stage, instead of just running one step to generate an alien blob of too many eyes and noses that happens to pass the neural network. Besides dead eyes, they tend to suffer from the problem of the two halves of the face trying to make completely different expressions.) [1] - https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-d... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453