The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely squick ou

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