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When I see the style transfers, I'm reminded of the early days of Photoshop, and whatever else was a commonplace photo editing application of the mid-90s (like

When I see the style transfers, I'm reminded of the early days of Photoshop, and whatever else was a commonplace photo editing application of the mid-90s (like Fractal Painter). It was fun to play with the idea of oil painting, or watercolor, or to simulate paper textures. How is style transfer an improvement? Undoubtedly, it's more sophisticated and requires more computational resources. Can it be used for artistic purposes, or is it only skin deep like those old filters? It looks to me as if this is pure imitation, your images of a night with friends at the street cafe, or stacking bails of hay can look like a Van Gogh when you upload it to Instagram. Am I missing something?

jordanwallwork 9y ago
What do you mean? It is what it is. You can use it for artistic purposes if you can think of some creative way of using it, but if you're just uploading images and spitting out altered versions I don't suppose many people would consider that to be particularly artistic
math0ne 9y ago
I don't know if the un-repurposed output is artistic, but surely creating these algorithms is.
themcaffee 9y ago
Sure, for example https://imgur.com/a/HUN9G https://imgur.com/a/HUN9G. Just by playing around with drawing different textures, I was able to get the above with the wave model. I just see it as another digital tool like you do, but with creative use I could see some pretty cool applications in modern art.
- h2rra 9y ago
  Wow, that is actually super cool!
- michrassena 9y ago
  After seeing this, and thinking through what I wrote yesterday, I have a bit of a different take. I don't like the style transfers of famous art-piece, to user-provided image. A skin-deep transfer of the look of Van Gogh, or Katsushika Hokusai, or Renoir, or whatever doesn't make art (in my opinion). I realize these tools are just a proofs-of-concept, which is something I forgot yesterday. What I'd like to be able to do is style transfer between arbitrary images, whether it's my own work or that of others. That would open up the creative possibilities.
  - reiinakano 9y ago
    Fast Neural Style transfer is a variation of a "regular" Neural Style algorithm. With regular Neural Style, you can do style transfer between any two arbitrary images. The disadvantage is it takes longer so doing it in the browser might be unfeasible for now. See https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style Anyway, even with Fast Neural Style, you can use any arbitrary image as a Style, but you'll have to train it first (4-6 hours on a GPU).
robbrown451 9y ago
Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation. What it creates is not novel. It's just doing what the programmer told it to do. Blah blah blah. In my opinion, it is one step -- and an impressive step -- in the direction of computers being able to actually be creative. The areas where humans can do something that computers can't is shrinking. You can dismiss it if you want, but at what point will you acknowledge that what the computer is doing isn't simply imitation? I guess you can keep moving the goalposts, but to me, this is pretty impressive.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  This assumes creativity is anything more than copying from multiple sources.
  - musage 9y ago
    If it's not more, how come there is anything to copy from?
    - reiinakano 9y ago
      Copying from nature with tiny little variations I guess?
      - musage 9y ago
        Little compared to what? They're infinitely big compared to no variations. Ignoring that part because it's unclear is like throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater to me.
- vacri 9y ago
  > Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation. I take it that you've never worked in IT support :)
- tbabb 9y ago
  What is your definition of "creative"?
JacobiX 9y ago
As you can see from the output, the model can simplify the shape, alter the geometry, put a texture on an object (projecting a texture like UV mapping) without being explicitly programmed to do so. It is inherently different from Photoshop filters that apply a fixed transformation on the pixels. The fundamental difference is that the model is able to abstract away from the pixel representation of the image and it can decorelate content and style. Also, it is not necessarily more computationally intensive in the generation / forward phase.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  It still looks like Poor Photoshop Art Imitation++ though. Outside of the developer community, no one cares how this works. They only care about whether or not they connect with the result. And a good historical hint is that no one uses those old Photoshop filters now, because they're uniformly cheesy and terrible. Artistically, this is similar. The Deep Dream output was an interesting novelty, for a while, but to most people this style transfer process is going to be Just Another Photo Filter Effect. Technically, it's not abstracting shape and texture in an intelligent way. It's applying a mechanical effect in a mechanical way with absolutely no insight into texture or spatial geometry. Even in abstract art, shapes mean something. They're not just a set of coordinates. This process doesn't understand that meaning - and generally, developers who think "art" means "I made an image with my computer" don't understand it either. Sometimes this process gets lucky and something passable falls out, but mostly the results are mediocre.
  - reiinakano 9y ago
    Dunno about you, but when I first saw some of the results, I was amazed. Here are a few more examples: https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style https://github.com/lengstrom/fast-style-transfer https://github.com/lengstrom/fast-style-transfer Admittedly, though, I haven't seen the Photoshop filters you speak of. Could you link to some of them that show these same effects?
    - notahacker 9y ago

jordanwallwork 9y ago

What do you mean? It is what it is. You can use it for artistic purposes if you can think of some creative way of using it, but if you're just uploading images and spitting out altered versions I don't suppose many people would consider that to be particularly artistic

math0ne 9y ago

I don't know if the un-repurposed output is artistic, but surely creating these algorithms is.

themcaffee 9y ago

Sure, for example https://imgur.com/a/HUN9G https://imgur.com/a/HUN9G. Just by playing around with drawing different textures, I was able to get the above with the wave model. I just see it as another digital tool like you do, but with creative use I could see some pretty cool applications in modern art.

h2rra 9y ago
Wow, that is actually super cool!
michrassena 9y ago
After seeing this, and thinking through what I wrote yesterday, I have a bit of a different take. I don't like the style transfers of famous art-piece, to user-provided image. A skin-deep transfer of the look of Van Gogh, or Katsushika Hokusai, or Renoir, or whatever doesn't make art (in my opinion). I realize these tools are just a proofs-of-concept, which is something I forgot yesterday. What I'd like to be able to do is style transfer between arbitrary images, whether it's my own work or that of others. That would open up the creative possibilities.
- reiinakano 9y ago
  Fast Neural Style transfer is a variation of a "regular" Neural Style algorithm. With regular Neural Style, you can do style transfer between any two arbitrary images. The disadvantage is it takes longer so doing it in the browser might be unfeasible for now. See https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style Anyway, even with Fast Neural Style, you can use any arbitrary image as a Style, but you'll have to train it first (4-6 hours on a GPU).

robbrown451 9y ago

Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation. What it creates is not novel. It's just doing what the programmer told it to do. Blah blah blah. In my opinion, it is one step -- and an impressive step -- in the direction of computers being able to actually be creative. The areas where humans can do something that computers can't is shrinking. You can dismiss it if you want, but at what point will you acknowledge that what the computer is doing isn't simply imitation? I guess you can keep moving the goalposts, but to me, this is pretty impressive.

SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
This assumes creativity is anything more than copying from multiple sources.
- musage 9y ago
  If it's not more, how come there is anything to copy from?
  - reiinakano 9y ago
    Copying from nature with tiny little variations I guess?
    - musage 9y ago
      Little compared to what? They're infinitely big compared to no variations. Ignoring that part because it's unclear is like throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater to me.
vacri 9y ago
> Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation. I take it that you've never worked in IT support :)
tbabb 9y ago
What is your definition of "creative"?

JacobiX 9y ago

As you can see from the output, the model can simplify the shape, alter the geometry, put a texture on an object (projecting a texture like UV mapping) without being explicitly programmed to do so. It is inherently different from Photoshop filters that apply a fixed transformation on the pixels. The fundamental difference is that the model is able to abstract away from the pixel representation of the image and it can decorelate content and style. Also, it is not necessarily more computationally intensive in the generation / forward phase.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
It still looks like Poor Photoshop Art Imitation++ though. Outside of the developer community, no one cares how this works. They only care about whether or not they connect with the result. And a good historical hint is that no one uses those old Photoshop filters now, because they're uniformly cheesy and terrible. Artistically, this is similar. The Deep Dream output was an interesting novelty, for a while, but to most people this style transfer process is going to be Just Another Photo Filter Effect. Technically, it's not abstracting shape and texture in an intelligent way. It's applying a mechanical effect in a mechanical way with absolutely no insight into texture or spatial geometry. Even in abstract art, shapes mean something. They're not just a set of coordinates. This process doesn't understand that meaning - and generally, developers who think "art" means "I made an image with my computer" don't understand it either. Sometimes this process gets lucky and something passable falls out, but mostly the results are mediocre.
- reiinakano 9y ago
  Dunno about you, but when I first saw some of the results, I was amazed. Here are a few more examples: https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style https://github.com/lengstrom/fast-style-transfer https://github.com/lengstrom/fast-style-transfer Admittedly, though, I haven't seen the Photoshop filters you speak of. Could you link to some of them that show these same effects?
  - notahacker 9y ago