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It works completely contrary to what it pretends. There is no creativity and creative collaboration happening here. Everything I draw is turned into a predefine

It works completely contrary to what it pretends. There is no creativity and creative collaboration happening here. Everything I draw is turned into a predefined shaped. Everything unique is translated into something generic. I think there is a serious misunderstanding about the value of creativity happening here, and I very much hope this is not the future Google is imagining for us.

fermentation 8y ago
This is probably the most dramatic reply I can think of
- baumgarn 8y ago
  Hahaha, thanks. I remembered this site i used to spend time on where people actually collaborated on weird quilt paintings back around 2000 - now this was a lot of fun. Sadly not functional anymore and only as a gallery http://www.ice.org/tiles/ http://www.ice.org/tiles/ The paintings might be a bit uglyish, but I prefer them any day to the kind of tech fetishization Google is presenting here.
  - ademi2 8y ago
    It's an idea for a new open project, something like Github but with creative artistic designs! Where people can use similar version control ideology for an art project!
    - tartoran 8y ago
      Art doesn't work like that, it could be a bit more disorganized, spontaneous, fluid, etc. As soon as it is pinned down it looses its vitality, becomes boring fast. Artists spend a lifetime to end up settling in some very personal ways.
  - tartoran 8y ago
    I actually like this art quite a bit, don't find it uglish at all. Sad that it's not functional anymore, how did the collaboration take place? It could not have been real time at the time could it?
    - baumgarn 8y ago
      It was actually a pretty cool site. You would reserve one of the free square "tiles" and would only see a thin stripe of the neighboring tile that you'd paint next to. You'd get a png image with something like 10 pixels of the neigboring tiles on the edges, that you had to blend into, and given 24 hours I think to reupload to the site. Only when all 4 neighboring tiles were completed a tile would be revealed. It was a lot of fun. They also had stuff like imaginary gold coins for X number of painted tiles, not for yourself, but that you could award to a tile you especially liked somebody else made. I also like the art in the sense that it allows all kinds of perspectives to flow into the image, and there is a way greater complexity than somebody alone could create. It would be worthwhile to recreate the site - maybe I'll do it some day (-:
      - tartoran 8y ago
        That sounds very fun and I'd like to see things going in the direction of creative "social" platforms/communities/ games/experiments made for humans to play with not dumbed down and yet simple. This idea could be turned into a phone app, and experimented with real time aspects of drawing concurrently, layers, sounds, video frames. Imagine stitching together a film edited and directed by 50 people in the similar vein as the tiles site. I think we have amazing possibilities and the technology for real time collaboration is here already, we just have to have a different vision than what the big companies want from us.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    drawball.com is still going I think.
benatkin 8y ago
I've seen withgoogle.com before. withgoogle.com is supposed to invoke collaboration, but with google's reputation as a cold, impersonal corporation where everything is automated and there's hardly ever any technical support, I just mentally shrug it off when I see it. and we also have abc.xyz and domains.google and other domain shenanigans that I forget about. I just learned that alphabet.com is different company. I wonder if they've clung to the domain as tightly as nissan.com has clung to theirs or if google doesn't want it that much.
- gboudrias 8y ago
  Not sure if I understand your comment. Alphabet is google's parent company, allegedly created to assuage the fear of a giant entity by turning it into multiple quite big entities.
  - gpm 8y ago
    Alphabet, the owner of alphabet.com appears to be some sort of fleet (as in company car) management service, unrelated to Alphabet the owner of Google.
    - gboudrias 8y ago
      Right, I see. Thank you for the clarification.
- rollcat 8y ago
  Back in the time when I was working on jobs for Google (they were my employer's client), withgoogle.com was a domain where we hosted things like "über-doodles", all the funky gizmos, etc. It's basically so that they don't run "experimental" / "untrusted" code in the same cookie domain as google.com; same thing goes for googleusercontent.com, where they store user-uploadable media. It was always my impression that coolproject.withgoogle.com is meant to be understood as "company X made a cool project with Google".
- bduerst 8y ago
  Think of withgoogle.com as an off-google.com domain place for experiments and ad-hoc programs/campaigns. There are still the same privacy and security standards, but a little bit more lax branding rules to allow for more ambitious projects. (Disclaimer: I work in Google and have launched some projects on withgoogle.com)
zeroname 8y ago
Exactly. I was hoping for something like /r/place. It's just a demonstration of the impressive but ultimately rather useless "drawing -> shape classification" machine learning application. It would be massively better if I could just choose from the shape classes and place them myself. That would allow at least for some amount of creativity. Of course then they don't get to show off their gimmick AI...
- mav3rick 8y ago
  But it's someone else's vision, why does it have to conform to yours ? Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use case.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > But it's someone else's vision, why does it have to conform to yours ? I didn't say it does. I'm giving an opinion. > Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use I disagree. Classic user interfaces are superior here as well. Just pick the tool you want instead of convincing some shape recognition system that whatever you just scribbled is some class of basic shape. You could just pick that shape from a shelf of tools.
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      I find choosing shapes from a toolbox to be a pain. I can focus on my train of thoughts and links to pieces when I am drawing freely and not having to context switch to moving and selecting using a cursor. I can also use this interface on a tablet. Many people are wired differently to your preferences, it's worth trying new approaches to old tools.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        > I can focus on my train of thoughts and links to pieces when I am drawing freely and not having to context switch to moving and selecting using a cursor. Do you really know that for a fact or do you just assume that? What program with a scribbly interface are you actually using on a regular basis? > I can also use this interface on a tablet. You can also use toolshelfs (and many other interface elements) on a tablet. > Many people are wired differently to your preferences, it's worth trying new approaches to old tools. This is not a new approach, this is a very old approach that has been summarily rejected as a good way of going about things.
sieabahlpark 8y ago
That's how you get a lot of dicks drawn unfortunately.
- zeroname 8y ago
  If you can classify houses, trees and boats, you can classify "problematic" things. That would actually be somewhat useful. In practice though, if somebody wants to deface something, they'll find a way to do it. You can't sacrifice creativity to preventing that. /r/place has shown that people (or redditors) are cooperative enough to maintain a reasonably "clean" environment, without any form of external moderation.
mav3rick 8y ago
Jeez, it's just a cool demo. If you don't like it don't use it. No one is forcing anyone to use this.
- deleted 8y ago
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jayd16 8y ago
But its not really pretending to be what you're describing. Its just a web toy they made to show off their doodle-to-thing ai with the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  "Draw the world together", "Nice! you made a house". Even when Google make a "web toy", they just can't help but ooze infantilization and saying one thing while doing another. > the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map. The added fun of it being dropped, or dropping it? I don't know, since for me on Firefox, it hung at the "finding a place in the world" stage.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    They can't help it. Their entire employee base is terminally infantilized.
izacus 8y ago
Is that the same thing you say when a kid gets LEGO's? It's all predefined shapes anyway, no creativity anywhere. Why on earth did you write your post? What does your negativity bring to the world?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- starbeast 8y ago
  Lego is a lot more fun when you add hacksaws and p38.
varjag 8y ago
I just wish they'd focus on fixing Gmail instead.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  I'm sure they shut down the entire Gmail organization in order to work on this tool, rather than have a separate engineering team work on it. This is akin to complaining about bugs in a game when they release new artwork. Artists aren't working the bug queue.
  - varjag 8y ago
    I only know that Gmail has degradation of quality they apparently are unable to fix. From the outside, it does appear Google has shortage of talent, their famed interview process notwithstanding. This demo site though is more responsive and slick than their mainline product. Just as Gmail it encompasses Web UI, data storage and a machine learning backend. Maybe all people who can code have moved to the doodle lab.
worldsayshi 8y ago
Woah, slow down a bit. This feels very much like a toy project with a toy budget that had optimistic ideas about how easy it would be to create something that could be dynamic in an interesting new way. To think that it somewhat represents future direction of Google seems over the top. Dynamic creation in the way they are hinting at in the description seems like a very difficult but interesting endeavour that requires a lot of iterating to get anywhere on.
- flycaliguy 8y ago
  I think you are both right. It’s a tech demo which unintentionally perfectly encapsulates a disturbing direction we could slowly evolve into... unintentionally. This thing could be placed in an art gallery. Visitors submit an original drawing and watch it transform into a cookie cutter contribution, stripping away everything that makes them unique. Its actually a pretty played out concept artistically, the whole “white picket fence” vibe.
- tdb7893 8y ago
  I think it's just how people view large tech companies on this site. The view of those large companies is very negative in general here.
amingilani 8y ago
I agree. It promised to let me "draw the world", and then immediately turned all my creative phalluses into mushrooms and trees. What's the point of spending all that making users draw stuff if you're going to replace it with ready-made art? Such a waste of users and traffic. The things any number of the projects at indiehackers or product hunt could do with the traffic!

fermentation 8y ago

This is probably the most dramatic reply I can think of

baumgarn 8y ago
Hahaha, thanks. I remembered this site i used to spend time on where people actually collaborated on weird quilt paintings back around 2000 - now this was a lot of fun. Sadly not functional anymore and only as a gallery http://www.ice.org/tiles/ http://www.ice.org/tiles/ The paintings might be a bit uglyish, but I prefer them any day to the kind of tech fetishization Google is presenting here.
- ademi2 8y ago
  It's an idea for a new open project, something like Github but with creative artistic designs! Where people can use similar version control ideology for an art project!
  - tartoran 8y ago
    Art doesn't work like that, it could be a bit more disorganized, spontaneous, fluid, etc. As soon as it is pinned down it looses its vitality, becomes boring fast. Artists spend a lifetime to end up settling in some very personal ways.
- tartoran 8y ago
  I actually like this art quite a bit, don't find it uglish at all. Sad that it's not functional anymore, how did the collaboration take place? It could not have been real time at the time could it?
  - baumgarn 8y ago
    It was actually a pretty cool site. You would reserve one of the free square "tiles" and would only see a thin stripe of the neighboring tile that you'd paint next to. You'd get a png image with something like 10 pixels of the neigboring tiles on the edges, that you had to blend into, and given 24 hours I think to reupload to the site. Only when all 4 neighboring tiles were completed a tile would be revealed. It was a lot of fun. They also had stuff like imaginary gold coins for X number of painted tiles, not for yourself, but that you could award to a tile you especially liked somebody else made. I also like the art in the sense that it allows all kinds of perspectives to flow into the image, and there is a way greater complexity than somebody alone could create. It would be worthwhile to recreate the site - maybe I'll do it some day (-:
    - tartoran 8y ago
      That sounds very fun and I'd like to see things going in the direction of creative "social" platforms/communities/ games/experiments made for humans to play with not dumbed down and yet simple. This idea could be turned into a phone app, and experimented with real time aspects of drawing concurrently, layers, sounds, video frames. Imagine stitching together a film edited and directed by 50 people in the similar vein as the tiles site. I think we have amazing possibilities and the technology for real time collaboration is here already, we just have to have a different vision than what the big companies want from us.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  drawball.com is still going I think.

benatkin 8y ago

I've seen withgoogle.com before. withgoogle.com is supposed to invoke collaboration, but with google's reputation as a cold, impersonal corporation where everything is automated and there's hardly ever any technical support, I just mentally shrug it off when I see it. and we also have abc.xyz and domains.google and other domain shenanigans that I forget about. I just learned that alphabet.com is different company. I wonder if they've clung to the domain as tightly as nissan.com has clung to theirs or if google doesn't want it that much.

gboudrias 8y ago
Not sure if I understand your comment. Alphabet is google's parent company, allegedly created to assuage the fear of a giant entity by turning it into multiple quite big entities.
- gpm 8y ago
  Alphabet, the owner of alphabet.com appears to be some sort of fleet (as in company car) management service, unrelated to Alphabet the owner of Google.
  - gboudrias 8y ago
    Right, I see. Thank you for the clarification.
rollcat 8y ago
Back in the time when I was working on jobs for Google (they were my employer's client), withgoogle.com was a domain where we hosted things like "über-doodles", all the funky gizmos, etc. It's basically so that they don't run "experimental" / "untrusted" code in the same cookie domain as google.com; same thing goes for googleusercontent.com, where they store user-uploadable media. It was always my impression that coolproject.withgoogle.com is meant to be understood as "company X made a cool project with Google".
bduerst 8y ago
Think of withgoogle.com as an off-google.com domain place for experiments and ad-hoc programs/campaigns. There are still the same privacy and security standards, but a little bit more lax branding rules to allow for more ambitious projects. (Disclaimer: I work in Google and have launched some projects on withgoogle.com)

zeroname 8y ago

Exactly. I was hoping for something like /r/place. It's just a demonstration of the impressive but ultimately rather useless "drawing -> shape classification" machine learning application. It would be massively better if I could just choose from the shape classes and place them myself. That would allow at least for some amount of creativity. Of course then they don't get to show off their gimmick AI...

mav3rick 8y ago
But it's someone else's vision, why does it have to conform to yours ? Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use case.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > But it's someone else's vision, why does it have to conform to yours ? I didn't say it does. I'm giving an opinion. > Also, the classification is super useful for technical flowcharts and designs that can be doodled easily. That's at least one use I disagree. Classic user interfaces are superior here as well. Just pick the tool you want instead of convincing some shape recognition system that whatever you just scribbled is some class of basic shape. You could just pick that shape from a shelf of tools.
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    I find choosing shapes from a toolbox to be a pain. I can focus on my train of thoughts and links to pieces when I am drawing freely and not having to context switch to moving and selecting using a cursor. I can also use this interface on a tablet. Many people are wired differently to your preferences, it's worth trying new approaches to old tools.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      > I can focus on my train of thoughts and links to pieces when I am drawing freely and not having to context switch to moving and selecting using a cursor. Do you really know that for a fact or do you just assume that? What program with a scribbly interface are you actually using on a regular basis? > I can also use this interface on a tablet. You can also use toolshelfs (and many other interface elements) on a tablet. > Many people are wired differently to your preferences, it's worth trying new approaches to old tools. This is not a new approach, this is a very old approach that has been summarily rejected as a good way of going about things.

sieabahlpark 8y ago

That's how you get a lot of dicks drawn unfortunately.

zeroname 8y ago
If you can classify houses, trees and boats, you can classify "problematic" things. That would actually be somewhat useful. In practice though, if somebody wants to deface something, they'll find a way to do it. You can't sacrifice creativity to preventing that. /r/place has shown that people (or redditors) are cooperative enough to maintain a reasonably "clean" environment, without any form of external moderation.

mav3rick 8y ago

Jeez, it's just a cool demo. If you don't like it don't use it. No one is forcing anyone to use this.

deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jayd16 8y ago

But its not really pretending to be what you're describing. Its just a web toy they made to show off their doodle-to-thing ai with the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map.

PavlovsCat 8y ago
"Draw the world together", "Nice! you made a house". Even when Google make a "web toy", they just can't help but ooze infantilization and saying one thing while doing another. > the added fun of dropping the thing onto a cartoon google-map. The added fun of it being dropped, or dropping it? I don't know, since for me on Firefox, it hung at the "finding a place in the world" stage.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  They can't help it. Their entire employee base is terminally infantilized.

izacus 8y ago

Is that the same thing you say when a kid gets LEGO's? It's all predefined shapes anyway, no creativity anywhere. Why on earth did you write your post? What does your negativity bring to the world?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
starbeast 8y ago
Lego is a lot more fun when you add hacksaws and p38.

varjag 8y ago

I just wish they'd focus on fixing Gmail instead.

jhall1468 8y ago
I'm sure they shut down the entire Gmail organization in order to work on this tool, rather than have a separate engineering team work on it. This is akin to complaining about bugs in a game when they release new artwork. Artists aren't working the bug queue.
- varjag 8y ago
  I only know that Gmail has degradation of quality they apparently are unable to fix. From the outside, it does appear Google has shortage of talent, their famed interview process notwithstanding. This demo site though is more responsive and slick than their mainline product. Just as Gmail it encompasses Web UI, data storage and a machine learning backend. Maybe all people who can code have moved to the doodle lab.

worldsayshi 8y ago

Woah, slow down a bit. This feels very much like a toy project with a toy budget that had optimistic ideas about how easy it would be to create something that could be dynamic in an interesting new way. To think that it somewhat represents future direction of Google seems over the top. Dynamic creation in the way they are hinting at in the description seems like a very difficult but interesting endeavour that requires a lot of iterating to get anywhere on.

flycaliguy 8y ago
I think you are both right. It’s a tech demo which unintentionally perfectly encapsulates a disturbing direction we could slowly evolve into... unintentionally. This thing could be placed in an art gallery. Visitors submit an original drawing and watch it transform into a cookie cutter contribution, stripping away everything that makes them unique. Its actually a pretty played out concept artistically, the whole “white picket fence” vibe.
tdb7893 8y ago
I think it's just how people view large tech companies on this site. The view of those large companies is very negative in general here.

amingilani 8y ago

I agree. It promised to let me "draw the world", and then immediately turned all my creative phalluses into mushrooms and trees. What's the point of spending all that making users draw stuff if you're going to replace it with ready-made art? Such a waste of users and traffic. The things any number of the projects at indiehackers or product hunt could do with the traffic!