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Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art
- bluetwo 7y agoAllow me to mix it with one of my projects to show you a better way to display: http://blueboxsw.com/labs/shogun/play.cfm?S_Key_Play=281C4366-E68B-E0A5-2A5D371157763A63 http://blueboxsw.com/labs/shogun/play.cfm?S_Key_Play=281C436...
- Fnoord 7y agoReminds me of Debris by a NullSoft employee. It would download random pictures using a search engine, and it would craft it together. The end result is unique, and allowed you to look into the details. You could even edit the search terms or the result, add cameos (some vague nudity, for example). What I found really funny though, is that the end results often had actual funny easter eggs. I guess if you add up all of this randomness, and you watch closely, the chances of something funny being included increase. It just might take a while till you find it.
- alainchabat 7y agoI love this idea of generated content. I'm wondering what artists thinks about that. There was a recent Show HN project about generate quotes having some great results having sense : https://machineswisdom.com https://machineswisdom.com
- sub7 7y agoThis is awesome. There's a business here somewhere.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoIt would be great if it would be :) At this moment is just an art experiment
- sub7 7y agoIf I were you, I'd build this: - An interface where people select a subset of artists they like. - Build a model on the fly with art just from those artists - Get HQ high res downloads of generated art Freemium model, with 1 HQ download free and the then $1 per download.
- dvh 7y agoI think modern art is not about creation, it is about ability to sell.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoGood point! So what it needs is a story then? How about the work, is it interesting?
- anigbrowl 7y agoI like the work very much. The art market is very much about story. Check out a documentary (I think available on Netflix') called Beltracchi: The art of Forgery which wrestles with this question.
- Rochus 7y agoThere are certainly cases where this might be true, but I doubt that this assumption is generally true; one would have to do some experiments and put these artificially generated paintings up for real auctions (for the purpose of scientific knowledge, of course, not to cheat).
- valentinvieriu 7y agoI've tried this around with some friends of mine and they could not spot the difference between Person generated and AI generated. None were art experts just people with good taste.
- Rochus 7y agoWell, there is a considerable difference between "good taste" and professional experience with the art market. A lot of art sales are made with things that are totally tasteless from my unprofessional perspective. It would therefore make a lot of sense to experiment with real art experts with experience of the market. Maybe you have heard of the experiments where they submitted machine generated publications to scientific conferences and succeeded with it ;-)
- valentinvieriu 7y agoAuthor Here: Just wanted to share some technical details. The code can be found here https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 The main code and modification were put together by https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2 https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2. I've started with the pretrained ffhq model, and I've trained it using come hand picked 1000 images of cubist Wikiart paintings. The frontend is Vuejs and it's using the amazing https://github.com/Akryum/vue-virtual-scroller https://github.com/Akryum/vue-virtual-scroller for the very fast infinite scroll option. The app runs on Cloudflare Workers, using https://github.com/l5x/vue-ssr-cloudflare-workers-template https://github.com/l5x/vue-ssr-cloudflare-workers-template Hope you guys enjoy the experience and would love to get some constructive feedback
- Rochus 7y agoGreat idea. Looks very convincing and aesthetic to me, but I am not an art expert. But I do know a lot about music and I am not yet convinced of the current offers of AI in this regard. So it would be very interesting to know how art experts react to these paintings.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoThe challenge is that the Latent Space ( the space of all the art pieces of this model ) is so HUGE ( technically is infinite ) that there could be masterpieces sitting there undiscovered. I was aiming to create an interface to allow for crowd sourcing this process of finding those masterpieces. Hope the ui and and easy to pick some favorite process will help
- Rochus 7y agoI wonder how art experts would assess these paintings in a blinded experiment ("blinded" figuratively, of course ;-)
- jan6 7y agoI'd bet most of them are quite "low quality art", but interesting anyway... plus, afaik, generally the image itself is not that important, as is the story behind it, if you have a story, a black square is a masterpiece, if you don't, it's junk...
- qaq 7y agoOK so next step train AI on story generation for the art :)
- CuriouslyC 7y agoThe "story" aspect of art is bullshit, unless the art itself tells that story in a tangible way. If there's a story behind a black square, it's still just a black square.
- Balgair 7y agoI disagree. A piece is more than just itself, there is a history to each one and that story adds to the piece. Some (honestly most) pieces and stories just are not very interesting, maybe even to the artist, and that is fine. And some are interesting to just some people at some times. Art 'speaks' to each person differently, or sometimes not at all. Art is what you make of it. If you make nothing of some forms of art, that is on you. If you make nothing of all forms of art, you may want to consider why so many other humans feel so strongly the other way. Though pretentious, ArtAssignment on YT is a great into to the wider world of art. I really think you should give it a try: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdGqz6dgvIzbBxo7XJHnOtHfBzid97rtl https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdGqz6dgvIzbBxo7XJHnO...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- FpUser 7y agohttp://www.sanbase.com/ http://www.sanbase.com/ - these were created long before AI became a household name. Actually no AI involved at all. All just pure math. Think it is called "generative art" or something to that tune
- valentinvieriu 7y agoThe process is a little different here. You can also put no Man Sky in the same category of procedural generated universes
- FpUser 7y agoI realize that. My point was that in my opinion AI in this case does not add anything more "artistically" speaking.
- satanspastaroll 7y agoI'd argue nobody can add anything not a combination of other things
- jan6 7y agogenerative art is of a completely different tune... even if for this style they might not be that different results, the neural net(s) here (the "AI") can have details and textures simple math cannot, such as I saw a horse head in one, some other things in others... but it's still very cool, even if the site may or may not be slightly deteriorating (top banner's broke for me, wouldn't be surprised if some other stuff was too)...
- FpUser 7y agoI myself did procedural texture generation at one point. There are also commercial packages. This was long time ago so I am not sure in what state those commercial offerings are now. Still you'd be amazed what kinds of textures can be generated procedurally. Definitely not anything less the AI can come up with. At least from what I saw on that AI site. "Site broke on me" - interesting I did not notice anything. Maybe because we might've used different browsers
- alharith 7y agoI get the appeal from a "it's fascinating we can make computers do this" stance. I don't get the appeal as trying to appreciate this as actual art (or music in the case of ai-generated tunes). Art for me is about the connection I can make with the person who made it. I can't make a connection with an algorithm. I view it and I am like "OK this is interesting" but that's about it. There's no desire to try and understand it because it was programmatically generated. Does anyone else feel this way?
- qmmmur 7y agoWhat about connecting with the person who wrote the algorithm? Imagine a time in which music was only heard when performed by the right group of people. Without that the appreciation was mostly for a cultural memory or written record of the music. There are more ways to connect with art and it's maker than playing back the audio or opening the image.
- alharith 7y agoI can appreciate the algorithm, and have appreciated in the past, if there are artful qualities to it, but in this case it isn't quite apt to say that as we are talking about the output of the algorithm, not the algorithm itself.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoI think Mario Klingemann said it the best. https://vimeo.com/298000366 https://vimeo.com/298000366 This becomes just a tool, like everything else
- jan6 7y agohow about... you pretend they're just from an infinite amount of anonymous authors? some of them feel pretty real to me, but then again, I don't know a thing 'bout this... were someone to make a catalogue of them, with random names and possibly authors, would you not enjoy it then, too, if you believe them to be made by humans?
- 7y ago
- bawana 7y agowarhol would have been all over this
- lsb 7y agoWhat do you like about the latent space that you are sampling from? :)
- valentinvieriu 7y agoIt's not a particular space, is just random. I'm hoping that by having more people randomly checking the space, more masterpieces will surface
- anigbrowl 7y agoNow we just need an infinite stream of AI generated art criticism to tell us how to talk about it at parties.
- kangnkodos 7y ago"It's a master stroke of heartache, brutality, and redemption." - Lexus book club commercial
- kengor 7y agoNot trying to denigrate the amazing technical skill needed to make this thing, but from the point of view of someone who makes art, this is a pastiche image maker. I have yet to see AI generate anything that's not a combination of existing images and techniques. Probably wading into murky philosophical waters here but I reckon art needs to be more than a nice 'arty' looking image to be considered any good. If you are going to make Art that is worth the capital 'A' on the front, then it has to mean something. However I suspect the days of actually making Art are in the past. We're on to something else now. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. Art is an old idea, not entirely relevant any more.
- eshaysadlay 7y agoWhen did art ever require purpose? Who decides what is and isn't art? Very tricky path to trod down.
- jp555 7y agoI thought one of the ideas was to build into this a way to let people pick the good stuff. Which is to ask if Audiences are never wrong?
- qzxvwt 7y agoit isn’t possible to create something that doesn’t serve a purpose. what “good” artists and other art professionals have that makes them experts is 1) an understanding of this fact, then 2) knowledge of semiotics and history among other related areas that afford as deep an understanding of potential meanings as possible — this is the tricky part, because it requires real work
- valentinvieriu 7y agoIn this case, you decide. You click that Favorite button and it's a decision you make. The AI artist has a set of rules that learned from the previous trained art pieces, but the final shape, and the final decision is yours. You like it or not, and it's quite personal too.
- iakh 7y ago
- dsco 7y agoThis is fantastic! Wrap it in a SmartTV app and sell it for a dollar or two as a monthly decorative art subscription!
- valentinvieriu 7y agoNoted down! Tv targeted app :) Is like a fireplace app, but with art
- finger 7y agoPerfect for the Samsung Frame for instance
- neetodavid 7y agoI like these. It feels like the paintings version of lying in the grass trying to find images in the clouds.
- neetodavid 7y agoThis is my grim little friend in green coveralls and a green hat. Maybe he is confiscating some masks. https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000213622.jpg https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000213622.j...
- starchild_3001 7y agoTo my untrained eye, many of these images are as good as anything else I've seen from humans. What qualities make me say that? Your images create a visceral response. They evoke a lot of interesting thoughts and feelings. If anything they remind me of 20th century modern art. Very impressive stuff. It'd be amazing to make these bigger, ensure texture is there, print them large like an oil painting.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThe lack of texture is the issue for me.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoI need more $$ to feed the GPU monster, and then you will get more texture :) This is more of technical issue that can be solved quite easy, but you are right, most of them lack details and texture.
- davidajackson 7y agoThey look great. If you make something where people can pick say paintings/styles they like, and then you generate custom for them until they choose one (and presumably then un-watermark or high res it), you may have a business here.
- tacheiordache 7y agoOk. What’s the point of that, original poster or canvas print? In a way training AI on existing art and generating some more amounts to vulgarizing abstract art or art in general and doesn’t add much to it, it is a gimmick. It certainly looks attractive but does it have any real value?
- davidajackson 7y agoHave you ever seen things like fractals on people's walls? They are curiosities. I guess you could call them gimmicks, but I would just call them interesting--gimmicks has kind of derogatory tone. Value is just what people will pay for it. Which is apparently, in some cases, more than 430k: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-c... The notion of vulgarizing art is what people said about jazz when it pulled people away from the "fine art" of classical (the "swamp of jazz"). How wrong they were. I don't think people will see beautiful art, albeit generated by an AI, as "vulgar" in the future.
- tartoran 7y agoNo no, fractals are not gimmicks. Theres a beauty in mathematical relationship that can be greatly appreciated and taken in. On the other hand this is stats of existing work remixed. Looks pretty but hasn’t got a lot of value. Yes, could be printed on canvas if that helps. Could eventually finds its way in IKEA because it does look pretty and does have some ornamental value. Question is, would anyone hold onto any particular piece for 100 years or more?
- tacheiordache 7y agoIm not saying the same thing, Jazz was still done by people within a context of its times. AI currently cannot do that. Maybe AGI will..
- gdubs 7y agoSite appears to be down at the moment. Some shameless self-promotion since there appears to be some interest in this, I recently trained a StyleGAN model on Fauvist artists: http://gregorywieber.com/art/a-walk-through-latent-space-making-art-with-neural-networks.html http://gregorywieber.com/art/a-walk-through-latent-space-mak...
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoThe results are really impressive. I have been studying art non-professionally for the past 5 odd years now and I would be hard pressed to tell you if any one of the pictures your software generated was created by a human artist or not. Nice work!
- zsz 7y agoIs this a portent of truth's final days? Is absurdism the only final, knowable truth, in a world where only fact carries meaning, as humanity has been deconstructed and rendered noumenal? The voices of a million potential future artists just cried out in agony and were silenced forever. The Tesla CEO has it right. AI is the end of humanity -- but (probably) not in a SkyNet sort of way, but one that is much worse because it renders the term "hope" itself meaningless.
- allovernow 7y agoThis is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum, and anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML. Honestly I would consider buying something like this, though I'd never waste my money on something so pretentious from a human. This, however, is an achievement, and there's beauty in that. Edit: in fact, if love to see two tests: a blind test with a series of humans, and a classifier trained to differentiate between machine and human generated art. I have no doubt that the humans would not score much better than chance - I bet only an artificial discriminator would be able to tell, and then only because of subtle differences in pixel distributions that humans won't perceive. Throw in a couple different GANs trained on different distributions and even a machine will have trouble telling the difference!
- staplers 7y agoImagine a forum of artists talking about how a WYSIWYG builder rivals anything a dev can build.
- thegabriele 7y agoYep, this. Think we should stick to the tech behind the idea.
- TheGallopedHigh 7y agoYou could always scale down the image so that the clsssifier “sees” on the same scale as a human...
- justanothersys 7y ago"This is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum." Haha, the exact opposite of my scroll through. I thought to myself: "These look like a clone stamp sampled and then vomited up all the lovely modernist paintings I've seen at art museums."
- tomxor 7y agoYes, my first thought was "reconstituted art"
- ramoz 7y agoImpressive on the surface. but, with a general idea of how the art was created, I fail to gain emotion, resemblance, or some form of appreciation that I've felt from certain art before. Still, I guess "art" is all subjective anyway & this is still great stuff.
- mattsahr 7y agoThe further down the page I scrolled, the more I got a kind of despair. To realize that the space was infinite, and I would never reach its end. Each individual image is pretty cool. As a collection, they're sad. What's funny is that I then tabbed back to HN, where I was deep down the comments tree, and momentarily I forgot that real humans make these comments. I thought "I shall never reach the end of the HN comments. It's all AI - generating a pastiche of plausible opinions and sentences-that-appear-sentient." Same despair. Quite a relief, then, to get to the end of the page.
- shironineja 7y agoIsn't that something a 'bot would say.
- kangnkodos 7y agoThese comments are not all made by people. I'm obviously a bot. Come on.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoInteresting, so would you say that the infinite aspect helped out the experience or damaged it? I've had doubts first when I've introduced it ( more from caching perspectives and data transfer costs ). But then I've wanted to showcase this amazing feature of those networks of generating an infinite amount of unique items, and also offer an unique experience to every user, the possibility of seeing unique art and bookmarking / printing it if considered
- mattsahr 7y agoI guess there's a time premise to a painting. The artist is not necessarily asserting -- but I implicitly assume -- that the artist deems any given painting "a thing upon which to dwell." A stamp of good aesthetic housekeeping -- trust me, says the painter, your viewer's mind and soul can rest herewithin. I mean, the painter certainly did. Day upon day of slowly creating the thing in which their visual cortex swam, lived, breathed and had its being. I am standing next to the artist. Seeing what she saw, imagining what it must be like to arrive from the other direction, without all the layers of preconception and intention that she baked in. And hopefully, from her direction and from mine, the good housekeeping seal, there is something "good" about this meeting of two perspectives. Your project throws that good-housekeeping seal out the window. Which is not to say that a given image is bad. Rather, that the social contract between one viewer and one artist, is missing. My viewer's eye keeps assuming it exists, and my brain reminds me -- no, this is all fake, there is no humanity behind the curtain. There is nobody to connect to. Maybe it's still art, but not the kind I... emotionally expect from a thing that looks, at first glance, beautifully painted? So, the infinite aspect definitely "helps" the experience. The exhaustion helps one feel viscerally how big is the problem space.
- mrcms 7y agoThis looks fantastic! Amazing that it is possible to make an AI output images that you want to hang on your walls.
- ecmascript 7y agoLooks exactly as "modern art" to me. I do not appreciate modern art anyway, but I love this since it will for sure upset some artists that think they're talented.
- dyadic 7y agoLiking something because it will negatively affect other people is a weird position to take
- lchiodi 7y agoI love cubism and this plain sucks. You see clearly that is not human work, there is no subject, there is no meaning, there aren't emotions...is garbage.
- maze-le 7y agoSo.. the very same sentiment people had when they first saw cubist art made by humans...
- jcims 7y agoThis one is amazing https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000086582.jpg https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000086582.j... It reminds me of those time slice type photos, where the bottom is when the little 'tree' on the right is young and each layer is a new year or three along the way, in which the environment gets a bit older and gnarlier over time. Absolutely wonderful work.
- ritwik310 7y agoDoesn't AI generated art violate the whole definition of art?
- jcims 7y agoDepends on how meta you want to be. This output requires skilled application of software development and aesthetic judgement. You could call that the 'art'. Or maybe it's synthetic art or simulated art. Either way I feel it has value.
- valentinvieriu 7y agoI think Mario Klingemann said it the best. https://vimeo.com/298000366 https://vimeo.com/298000366 This becomes just a tool, like everything else
- Yaa101 7y agoThis is a good question, I dunno really. On one hand is art really art without the bullshit story of the maker that defines the art? Sometimes we really want the creator to shut up making bullshit stories and just enjoy what has been made. On the other hand, is a AI algo really a form of being creative? Nature is an algo that creates things. Do things have to be art to appreciate their beauty? Is art about beauty? Is art about statements? etc. etc. Probably all answers are personal really.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThe written code to create these images has a copyright, but the generated images themselves do not.
- Jolter 7y agoJust an infinite stream of dead picture links, right now. I suppose something is down?