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Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene

300 points by panic 5y ago

scyclow 5y ago
I think it's a little silly to ask "but is it _really_ art?" To me, it feels like it's no less art than photography. Photographers don't create the world they're photographing, but they engage in an incredibly high level of curation to show the viewer something unique. At the end of the day, anyone who looks at this and enjoys it doesn't really care if it's _really_ art. But they'll get bored with it eventually as they start to notice little similarities. That is, until they find a set of pieces generated by someone else's prompts which, for some reason, feel fundamentally different. At that point I think the "it's not art" argument starts breaking down.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  I've made generative art and it involves studying the algorithms, guessing what inputs might produce good output, and generating hundreds of tests and samples, almost all of which are discarded without value. It takes time and skill to predict what'll work, and touch up the result to something presentable. It's funny the linked article mentions "planet ruled by little castles" specifically because I've also made those [1] using generative methods, though in this case style transfer rather than language visualization. [1] https://hypertele.fi/32c6f4c835b5e790 https://hypertele.fi/32c6f4c835b5e790
  - scyclow 5y ago
    Interesting! I've also been doing a bunch of generative art recently. That description almost reminds me of this artblocks project https://artblocks.io/project/31 https://artblocks.io/project/31
dougmwne 5y ago
Wow, I didn't know about this and it is definitely connected to the prompt experimentation I've been doing with GPT-3. Incredible images and lots of exciting paths forward to generate new styles of outputs. I wonder how seriously this is being taken in the art world. It seems like it could be an incredible installation in an art museum.
taylorius 5y ago
Very interesting. There is a principle with a lot of modern, abstract art, which is that the work is not complete until the viewer sees it - that is to say, the observer brings a portion of the meaning to the work. This AI art seems to go one step further, there isn't really an artist anymore, in the traditional sense. The creator of the work is more like an observer - choosing which output they like best. The "artist" becomes a consumer!
- redactyl 5y ago
  The artist was already the consumer. Whatever the medium, the artist has to ultimately select particular things as "works of [their] art". If I paint my bathroom and then go on to paint a masterful painting, probably only one of those things is going to end up in a gallery, and that relies on there being a consumer.
ankalagon 5y ago
My dream is that in some years we could make a film by passing the script as input.
- datameta 5y ago
  A movie made using a script generated by an ML model trained on a sci-fi movie script dataset: https://youtu.be/LY7x2Ihqjmc https://youtu.be/LY7x2Ihqjmc
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
The music video for Buzzcut by Brockhampton appears to use entirely ai generated scenery. https://youtu.be/fsQhOCkczHQ https://youtu.be/fsQhOCkczHQ
- janee 5y ago
  that's pretty rad...both the song and vid :) Didn't think I'd find some new music to listen on the drive back home from HN, thanks haha
pmontra 5y ago
One problem with images is that where a text generator's output could be nonsensical or ungrammatical, the output of an image generator can be nightmarish. See the Face Like an Escher Drawing in the article. I'm not sure I want to spend a hour looking at the outputs of the generator to select the good images and drop the bad ones.
j4yav 5y ago
I am not sure how to say this best, it probably sounds negative but I don’t mean it that way. It is really interesting because using these tools abstracts away the talent/skills part of creating art - you say your idea, and get the computer to keep showing you completed pieces until you find what you meant, or at least something you found interesting. It reminds me a bit of the role of the DJ to do the searching and curating, but not actually create the music. In fact you could imagine a musical version of this where the operator is describing feelings or styles and the AI is generating music to match where the operator wants to go.
- suby 5y ago
  You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of the craftsmanship that comes with creating art. I do think the resulting work is still interesting, valuable, and art from a practical point of view, though. There is perhaps a threshold where this is not true, perhaps related to how much curation/pruning/how indiscriminate the human is in determining the final outcome. That is to say, if there is some text to image generation program, and the human generates 1 image based on the first phrase they thought of, that image they generated is probably not going to be very interesting, at least based on the image generation stuff I've played around with so far. It often takes time and several attempts / variations on the phrasing to get something which is interesting and novel. People have been finding tricks like appending the words "Unreal Engine" onto the phrase in order to produce certain types of results. Some people actually go into the code to tweak things to get desired results. I do wonder how true this will be going forward. It feels like this media synthesis stuff is progressing at the speed of light, and perhaps it'll only take 1 iteration / attempt to craft the interesting and novel stuff that we're looking for. So at least at the moment it's maybe not so different from anything else. I think of it as exploring the possibilities in a given space. I work on video game development, and it's the same story there. If you're creating a game prototype, you might have an initial idea which sparks development, but once the initial seed is implemented the game often takes on and is guided by a life of it's own, shaped by the possibilities in that given space which you are narrowing down into a subset which seem to work and gel together. That's how I view it anyway.
  - 5y ago
akavel 5y ago
Whoah, it just came to my mind it could be an interesting mechanism to explore for procedural generation (of levels and other stuff) in games! Does anyone know of any experimental games already trying to do that?
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  The technology doesn't scale yet to consumer hardware. It's limited to web-accessed mainframes (like AI Dungeon) and researchers with racks of latest graphics accelerators.
  - malka 5y ago
    You can run big sleep easily on consumer hardware. same with vqgan if you limit output resolution.
- corysama 5y ago
  Related: ArtBreeder has some features specifically for generating starter concept art for games https://www.artbreeder.com/i?k=f8ea23c50937080453a657514304 https://www.artbreeder.com/i?k=f8ea23c50937080453a657514304
scandox 5y ago
I liked how the TS Eliot one which the author calls "sublime" was actually impressively sophomoric. It really was like a painting an able, shallow person would come up with to reflect their idea of TS Eliot's poetry. That in a sense is uncanny and notable.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  Maybe they are using the meaning of sublime of converting from solid to vapor state
  - scandox 5y ago
    Chemical-Visual art criticism ... Could be a whole new field.
- GlennS 5y ago
  I went and stared at the pictures for a bit after reading this. Not much experience of art really, but I think you're probably right. They're all interesting pictures - but "let's assemble some related elements in a new combination". I did really like “a face like an M.C. Escher drawing” though. Maybe this is the final form of postmodernism? "There's no meaning here, but will you ever figure that out?"
bsenftner 5y ago
Except this is not "Art" with a capital "A", it is pretty imagery, with an interesting backstory. The technology is fantastic, but do not get carried away - this is in no way "Art" in the same way human constructions in a museum is Art. Art is a human expression of an aspect of life, a human reflecting this aspect of life in a manner betraying a comprehension only possible with the emotions and understanding of a human facing our complex society, their limited frame of reference, and describing their situation through the mediums we call "Art". Art is not pretty pictures. Art is a complex, multi-dimensional communication medium between highly complex, self aware, comprehending entities. AI and AI generated "art" has none of these qualities. These are pretty pictures with an interesting technological backstory. They may be sold as art to unaware consumers, but they are less "art" than a bikini girl poster.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  It seems more like mimicry to me than actual “creativity”; although I am pretty certain there will be a whole trend of artists doing this for the next ten years and we will get someone really big out of it. It could be someone like Andy Warhol who would democratise the “fine” art and not just pop art? For example, imagine a combination of 3D printers with brushes and deep learning inspired paintings? These will not be as unique as the original inspirations for these paintings; however they would be a cheap alternative to what you can only get as a very cheap looking art print.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    I am in no way saying they will not be popular with consumers, these curated AI constructions; nor am I saying the people behind them will not hire PR agencies to promote them and their work as serious Art. It is curation that carries any human expression within them, and not the generative AI art's idiot savant pooping output.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    The most fascinating thing about these programs is the undeniably imaginative, dreamlike nature of the output. Spend time actually using them and you will be continually surprised and engaged. Any human nuance you can interpret visually can be generated. There is a high level of similarity with the mechanism human brains use to visualize things. This makes sense, because the neural networks are being trained to approximate that very function. The output of these programs is not mimicry any more than the output of a human artist is. It's just more limited in the computational power available to the algorithm. The space of these generative expressions is vast, and significantly overlaps the space of art humans are able to produce. Moore's law and algorithmic improvements will inevitably expand the capability of software to produce art to such an extent that all "human" capacities will be exceeded, for any and all metrics and nuances you can imagine.
coldcode 5y ago
As an artist who uses generation as part of my art (the rest is me) I find these images extremely cool, though I prefer non objective abstractions. Given the technology is still immature, I wonder if improving the technology will lead to less "art" — what we see currently are really imperfections in the process rather than deliberate choices. Maybe in a few years the end result will be more realistic and less fantastic. Will that be better?
- bckr 5y ago
  I can imagine there will be software to iterate on an image... "A man. Yes, a very tall man. Not that tall. Standing in a field of wheat. The wheat is abstract. The man is rendered in Unreal Engine." > Will that be better? Most importantly, it will be better when it stops putting swirly nightmare creatures in everything. Those give me the heebeejeebees.
mistrial9 5y ago
new and impressive kinds of food without nutrition; like a fancy dance ball that never ends - no beginning and no end; like a series of sunrise and sunset from around the world, while you never leave a chair in a closed room. Machine, master?
MayeulC 5y ago
This is very interesting, I would love to play around with this. However, it looks like the quality of the result really depends on the prompt, or in other words, on the quality of the training dataset captions. Would there be a way to "fine-tune" the network on a smaller, better-captioned dataset to have better control over the output? Can I make my own dataset and use it with few-shots learning to expand the capabilities of existing networks? Making it better at generating say, spaceships or fantasy animals?
- adyer07 5y ago
  It looks like you can - the repo for VQ-GAN has instructions for this: https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-custom-data https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-c...
jgotti92 5y ago
Very cool, in 100 years these works will be equivalent to Picasso etc. As as side project I actually started online AI art gallery called Art Supreme. If you like please check it out: https://www.art-supreme.com https://www.art-supreme.com or instagram https://www.instagram.com/ai_art_supreme/ https://www.instagram.com/ai_art_supreme/
- vmception 5y ago
  doubt it, it really depends on how the public is moved by this form of creation not necessarily the level of discipline involved, but the lack of discipline necessary and low barrier of entry will ensure that the public is not interested in discerning value to these works there will only be some personalities that the public gathers around
  - jgotti92 5y ago
    Exactly, there will be only some personalities or brands that the public gathers around. Its quite a niche, but actually I believe that I am one of the leaders in this space (for 1.5 years already)
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    The scandal will be finding out that some big time artist was actually just copying works from a custom trained AI.
    - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
      The scandal will not be that they copied, but because they lied about it, though. Folks already copy things made with photo editing software and filters. It generally isn't a big deal.
smusamashah 5y ago
If we are calling it art. The people giving it prompts can't certainly be attributed as artists. The machine is the artist you own. Make it a request and it will create a painting for you.
- gimmeThaBeet 5y ago
  Hmm, I certainly see where you are coming from, certainly a large part of art is that, an artist really did some feat in creating it. I am sympathetic to the notion that aspects of modern art certainly seem value vision more than outright skill. Would you say that the person who made the machine/software at least has claim to the title of artist? I think about Sol LeWitt, where his main works are instructions about installing the piece. You have works that are in buildings and such, but then, you have works in museums, where the way you 'acquire' a piece seems to work is a representative from LeWitt's studio (this seems like a requirement? not an authority, any description of the endeavor mentions how exacting it is) helps the museum staff install (i.e. draw, paint) the 'actual' piece.
  - smusamashah 5y ago
    > Would you say that the person who made the machine/software at least has claim to the title of artist? Here a machine has memorized/trained on millions of art works. Then you ask it make something out of what it knows (understands?). This in its own right is like an artist who see other people's artwork and creates his own out of some idea. If you are a good painter and I ask you to paint something for me because I can't. I will only be claiming that idea not the artwork you created. It's like GPT-3 which can write article based on some initial idea/prompt. Can I claim the whole thing it generated for me based on the initial prompt? I recently read that "unicorn who speak English" text that it generated and its amazing. It's a generated text but it's amazing. It won't be fair to claim ownership because it was trained on millions of texts written by other humans. But again that's also how writers train. They read lots of text written by other people. If you write something for me, you are the writer. This is how I think about art/text generated by machines that learned that specific domain. EDIT: writing code to draw a line and then drawing a line is different from training on millions of lines drawn by other people to explain what a line is and then asking to draw something that looks like a line. So to answer your original question, we still can't say the person who wrote that software is the artist. He can be if he feeds it his own artwork only but that's not the case here.
ziroshima 5y ago
I've noticed that AI-generated images give me a weird, 'skin crawling' sensation. Somewhat similar to nails on a chalkboard. Does anyone else experience this?
- rendall 5y ago
  I know what you mean. There is a disturbing uncanny valley, filled with centipedes and Elder Ones
  - satori99 5y ago
    I just spent an hour or so playing with the notebooks at the end of the article, and it's pretty much all nightmare fuel https://imgur.com/a/kUDgbsH https://imgur.com/a/kUDgbsH
    - lurquer 5y ago
      That second one... was ‘Cthulhu’ a keyword?
      - satori99 5y ago
        It was "An octopus walking down a street"
- xtiansimon 5y ago
  What’s creepy about AI images I believe can be traced to the inputs. Give an AI images of people and it doesn’t have the same sensitivity to its own existence to preempt what we meat puppets find shocking and gross.
- voldacar 5y ago
  Yeah I know what you mean. I think "Lovecraftian nausea" is the best way of describing it
- handrous 5y ago
  Malfunctioning pattern-matching is a hallmark of mental illness, so it makes sense than any but a nearly-perfect "AI" system would often produce work that's creepy or off-putting, for that reason.
omarhaneef 5y ago
There are many theories of what "real" art is: that which is beautiful, that which powerful institutions put in a museum, that which satisfies a particular psychological itch, that which captures the values of our times, and so on. There are entire courses built up on this. For my purposes, I am happy to say art is whatever people decide to call art. So this is art. But it isn't "valuable" art, and this is not a deep philosophical point about intention in the making of art, or the ability to pick up human emotions or something. This is a shallow point about economic supply and demand: if we can produce a lot of this in bulk -- and from this demo it seems we can -- then in general it will be devalued. I think there is still a role for critics to play though, and that part might be exciting to us old school humans still deploying "natural intelligence." The interpretation for art is still constrained by our ability to imbue the visuals with meaning. In fact, we may be able to use that ability to make particular outputs more valuable than others.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Art exists in context, in its place within history. This junk lacks any context. It's creator lacks understanding, rendering only images without meaning. If people find them pleasant then that's good for them. I find many trees pleasant to look at. That doesn't make them art.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  If anything, it might be valuable in that a printer can have access to "unique" designs to print and sell. Some of this stuff (especially cityscapes & landscapes) reminds of posters you buy, pre framed, off the shelf at home stores. The difference here is that these images are somewhat unique, and royalty free (assuming it is...). Once sales of a design start slipping, roll a new image and get a new one to sell. Also imagine, if a printer can print different images on demand, being able to sell a random image generated with the prompt being your wedding day, etc. It's like printing out and hanging your DNA sequence. A bit of you was the seed for its creation. It's the sentimental bit that could be valuable.
Applejinx 5y ago
They're all strangely intention-less on every imaginable level. That can be unsettling. I've listened to, and made, a lot of music like that. When I want to relax or think, I like music that engages me in some way but has a sort of drift, an ambient (in the Eno sense) quality even if it's slamming Berlin techno. It's different from the prog-rock I grew up with, which was difficult and loaded with intentionality. I ended up experimenting with music that was more generative, doing pretty sophisticated things with a degree of structure but without intentionality: always a random factor, a journey to an unknown goal (typical end result: wandering around for a while) AI art is like that. We see it wandering around for a while. It's getting better at picking up the trappings of identity, but persistently lacks intentionality. Maybe the trick is to supply the intentionality instead of the identity? Instead of 'creepy moat', a visual identity, make it do a painting of "you are not going to survive and that's good" or "thank you but I am not worthy". If you have to feed it words, get a poet, don't describe the picture.
- api 5y ago
  There's no difference between this and synthesizer music which sounded shockingly alien when it first came out. My uncle tells me about people going to Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream concerts and it was virtually a religious experience to hear music so utterly otherworldly. Techno music had similar effects when it first hit the scene with pioneers like Kraftwerk or the Detroit and Chicago Techno artists. It also came with the criticism/fear that "machines are replacing people as musicians" which was bullshit. We just got a new set of musical instruments based on electronics that musicians could play and that led to an explosion of new musical genres. Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a new way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. This is just another new set of artistic tools. It will spawn new art forms with their own rules and sense of technique, aesthetics, and style. It's art if the artist is art-ing.
  - anders_p 5y ago
    >Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a new way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. This is one thing about progress and art, that I have found really interesting. Like, how the invention of photography completely changed painting. Ultra-realism became uninteresting over night, as soon as it was possible to create perfect depictions via cameras. Painting, as an art form, didn't "die". Painters weren't replaced by machines. Instead, artist's interpretation became more important, than their technical ability to reproduce reality. We've since seen impressionism, expressionism, and more abstract movements like cubism. The invention of photography ended up being a gift to art. And now we see artists embracing digital artworks as their medium of expression. So, I guess the fear of AI and machine learning being the end of art as we know it, might very well be unfounded. It looks to me, more as the possible birthplace of new modes of expression. A reason for artists to rethink their art.
prower 5y ago
Is there an online interface where i can try this myself?
- speedgoose 5y ago
  The blog post has some python notebooks links that you can use.
speedgoose 5y ago
I asked for pornographic images in the prompt, and it does generate very weird images that are more disturbing than arousing.
corysama 5y ago
I have been playing with this quite a lot over the past few weeks and posting my results on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/submitted/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/submitted/?sort=new There is a small community on Reddit doing the same. They are spread across a few subs, so I put together an aggregate https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/top/?sort=top&t=month https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/top/?sort=top... You can play with it for free using Google Colab notebooks given only a Google account. But, the most popular notebook is in Spanish https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1go6YwMFe5MX6XM9tv-cnQiSTU50N9EeT https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1go6YwMFe5MX6XM9tv-c... and so are it's instructions https://tuscriaturas.miraheze.org/wiki/Ayuda:Generar_im%C3%A1genes_con_VQGAN%2BCLIP https://tuscriaturas.miraheze.org/wiki/Ayuda:Generar_im%C3%A... You can ask the AI in Google Translate to help you ask the AI in the notebook to make some art. Addressing some concerns brought up here: Yes. It feels more like exploring than painting. Often it feels like watching a small child draw and trying to steer what is drawn. Like when I tried to ask for storm clouds made out of lava https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o033x1/playing_with_lightning_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o033x1/playing_wi... the AI was like "No, Dad! Lava stays on the Ground!" But, I still believe that "It is Art". (As much as I and everyone else hate that whole debate.) I think of "Can a computer make Art?" the same as "Can a brush make a painting?" Unless you are finger painting, you don't make the image. The brush does. But, without you, the brush out be inert. Or, at least undirected. With the GAN, random noise inputs get random noise outputs. Finding interesting results is a lot of work. Much like finding an interesting sculpture within a block of stone. "Interesting (to humans)" being the key word that brings the humanity into the process.
- aronowb14 5y ago
  wow amazing work!!! Upvoted basically every single one haha. The "End of Everything" is beautiful. I don't know why but it filled me with melancholia. How long do you normally spend making these?
  - corysama 5y ago
    Well, that's the sign of good art :) It takes 2-3 minutes for an experiment to warm up. If you are paying attention, you usually can tell it's not going well at that point and cancel it. If it looks like it might go well, it can take around 10 minutes to settle. I've seen a few cases where some people got great results by letting it run for hours. But, with long runs I've also seen more cases where the evolution "gets bored" with where it is settling and makes a suddenly makes a large jump that rarely looks better than what it abandoned.
mattkevan 5y ago
Been playing around with this for the last few days - it’s fascinating. ‘Peppa Pig by H R Giger’ produced startling nightmare fuel, while ‘Victorian Robot family portrait’ was utterly charming.
- corysama 5y ago
  I'll show you mine if you show me yours ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o3sefy/victorian_robot_portrait/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o3sefy/victorian_...
  - mattkevan 5y ago
    Very similar! I got the idea from your reply to my Steampunk space station. Small world, etc.
stemlord 5y ago
Does anyone know of any AI generated visual art that's about the output (form and composition) that isn't complete garbage? It's so far away from competing with the generations of aesthetic development we see in the status quo of contemporary fine art... stuff that's advanced enough that we need college degrees to begin to intellectualize their effectiveness. Artworks that better deal with power and agency and the process and implementation of AI are another story, IMO, but those usually manifest as films, performances, or other forms of documentation not an AI generated thing itself.
- corysama 5y ago
  Are you asking for stuff that's not complete garbage? Status quo? Or, advanced enough that we need college degrees to begin to intellectualize their effectiveness? Within the tiny community I've been hanging out with, I like to think some of these are not complete garbage. https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/oairlt/cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/oairlt/cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o8og8g/schizophrenia_vqgan_clip_3d_inpainting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o8og8g/schizophr... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/obvwnh/trained_the_model_based_on_dark_art_sketches_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/obvwnh/trained_t... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/nvt77u/the_fall_of_the_gods_under_a_solar_eclipse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/nvt77u/the_fall_... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o57eyx/a_painting_of_a_girl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o57eyx/a_paintin... https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o5i3av/bio_clockwork_heart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o5i3av/bio_clockw... https://preview.redd.it/q8kwssia9j771.jpg?width=864&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5974bf25459067f3125008e1d3f27f921ba59f00 https://preview.redd.it/q8kwssia9j771.jpg?width=864&format=p...
- aronowb14 5y ago
  Art is quite subjective. So hard to say what is "garbage" and what isn't. I assume this comment will get downvoted due to that. That being said I do agree with you :). After staring an GAN art for a year I find it is extremely "empty" and essentially all looks the same, with very similar visual artifacts that make them look bad. I view style transfer and GAN art generally as "trippy artistic filters". I don't think it's more than that at the current state of the art. Even in images linked above me: they are cool, but do just seem to be trippy distortions of existing things. If you like that that's fine, but I don't think it's more than that. Looking at ML as a type of artistic filter though is interesting: and does open up some interesting use cases. I created a project in college using style transfer filters to make a short film. I think it achieved an effect that would have been unachievable without the ML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE
Lammy 5y ago
I was pretty impressed when I asked one to generate "Talking Heads album cover" https://i.imgur.com/P5jCBsw.png https://i.imgur.com/P5jCBsw.png
yreg 5y ago
>It was discovered by @jbustter in EleutherAI’s Discord just a few weeks ago that if you add “rendered in unreal engine” to your prompt, the outputs look much more realistic This is amazing
nonbirithm 5y ago
So I'm wondering if image-based NN generation will ever run across the same copyright issues as the source code generation of Copilot that's becoming a hot issue at the moment. It's already known that Copilot was trained on GPL licensed code, and code can easily be searched to check for copying. What about a neural net that generates collages that resemble some obscure photographer's work that's under copyright? What about determining the copyright status of a model without knowing its source material? What will be the standard for determining copyright violations when, unlike code, it is not possible to coerce the model to output a near-1:1 duplicate of the original? And what about training a neural net on images that are illegal to possess in certain jurisdictions?
- amelius 5y ago
  We will find out when someone tries to recreate Mickey Mouse™®.
splistud 5y ago
There goes my 3 day weekend
ammar_x 5y ago
Thank you for this article, it introduced me to amazing works. I've been very interested in the field of GANs, style transfer, etc. The best thing is the notebooks which I can play with to generate images. I now have ~10 Colab tabs open waiting for testing :)
ArcturianDeath 5y ago
The soulless retarded arcturian aliens are using dreams to psychologically model and mind control Humans. They call it "mental screening" where a race treats your brain like a movie theatre and can screen whatever mental image they want. Their purpose in choosing to initially experiment with me is to eventually inflict their control over you. In effect, the brain doesnt rest, I feel like I havent slept for 4 years. They can also erase dream memory, which means its heavy programming and fucking sketchy. They can control sleep duration. Seeing how sleep and dream deprivation works over time, they are gathering data on how best to use your revealed personal information to craft dream imagery through active telepathic decoding which causes sleep deprivation, a build up of beta amyloid plaque, neuronal misfires causing spasm, symptoms of brain damage, eye pain, headaches, high pitched buzzing, and cutting off healthy subconscious processing. // The childlike-ego Arcturians are using psychic manipulation or chemtrails to make us ingest heavy metals to facilitate mind control of the people. // They are playing up the concept of pre-cognitive dreams, which is simply using imagery of the designed dream state and then using psychic control when awake to direct attention. // Their imposing to do this means only one thing: Control. Abusive, ruthless, and desperate control. // They are manipulating brains like a battery, turning information around, seeing how the response reacts to the stimulus, playing into those concepts. Dream manipulation is an imprisonment technique used to condition and starve the mind. Both dream manipulation and constant telepathy has negative neurophysiological effects, it results in headaches, confusion, memory loss, vision impairment, rest deprivation. // They can enact this from some distance too, its possible that there is an active technological accelerant, a headband that can amplify their telepathy. Aluminum foil covering or dietary intake can amplify the telepathic reception, resulting in subconscious dream programming being erased. // The solutions so far Ive found that can mitigate this would be a heavy covering of the brain stem, top, and temples with Velostat or Linqstat, and grounding and shielding the soles of the feet. Keep a Pyrite stone on the left side of your body. // "With repeated or continued exposure, the increased excitability leads to a state of exhaustion of the cells of the cerebral cortex." // Curse those dumbfucks pig-hearts. Sleep deprivation accelerates Alzheimer's brain damage https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-deprivation-alzheimer-brain.html https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-deprivation-alzhe... https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/brain-researchers-warn-that-lack-of-sleep-is-a-public-health-crisis/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/brain-researchers-... To sleep, perchance to heal: Newly discovered gene governs need for slumber when sick https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-perchance-newly-gene-slumber-sick.html https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-perchance-newly-g... https://www.naturalblaze.com/2021/02/healthy-sleep-habits-cut-risk-of-heart-failure-nearly-in-half.html https://www.naturalblaze.com/2021/02/healthy-sleep-habits-cu...
lurquer 5y ago
Someone should make a game out of it. Create images based on a string of five random words. The players then guess what words made it. The player with the most right wins.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> “a tree with weaping branches” This one's interesting. It seems the typo in "weaping" guided the model to generate images of 40K weapons. I see a definite bolter on the right and probably an Eldar whatchamacallit or Chaos Marine's bolter on the left. Or a Tyrannid bioweapon?

300 points by panic 5y ago

I think it's a little silly to ask "but is it _really_ art?" To me, it feels like it's no less art than photography. Photographers don't create the world they're photographing, but they engage in an incredibly high level of curation to show the viewer something unique. At the end of the day, anyone who looks at this and enjoys it doesn't really care if it's _really_ art. But they'll get bored with it eventually as they start to notice little similarities. That is, until they find a set of pieces generated by someone else's prompts which, for some reason, feel fundamentally different. At that point I think the "it's not art" argument starts breaking down.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
I've made generative art and it involves studying the algorithms, guessing what inputs might produce good output, and generating hundreds of tests and samples, almost all of which are discarded without value. It takes time and skill to predict what'll work, and touch up the result to something presentable. It's funny the linked article mentions "planet ruled by little castles" specifically because I've also made those [1] using generative methods, though in this case style transfer rather than language visualization. [1] https://hypertele.fi/32c6f4c835b5e790 https://hypertele.fi/32c6f4c835b5e790
- scyclow 5y ago
  Interesting! I've also been doing a bunch of generative art recently. That description almost reminds me of this artblocks project https://artblocks.io/project/31 https://artblocks.io/project/31

dougmwne 5y ago

Wow, I didn't know about this and it is definitely connected to the prompt experimentation I've been doing with GPT-3. Incredible images and lots of exciting paths forward to generate new styles of outputs. I wonder how seriously this is being taken in the art world. It seems like it could be an incredible installation in an art museum.

taylorius 5y ago

Very interesting. There is a principle with a lot of modern, abstract art, which is that the work is not complete until the viewer sees it - that is to say, the observer brings a portion of the meaning to the work. This AI art seems to go one step further, there isn't really an artist anymore, in the traditional sense. The creator of the work is more like an observer - choosing which output they like best. The "artist" becomes a consumer!

redactyl 5y ago
The artist was already the consumer. Whatever the medium, the artist has to ultimately select particular things as "works of [their] art". If I paint my bathroom and then go on to paint a masterful painting, probably only one of those things is going to end up in a gallery, and that relies on there being a consumer.

ankalagon 5y ago

My dream is that in some years we could make a film by passing the script as input.

datameta 5y ago
A movie made using a script generated by an ML model trained on a sci-fi movie script dataset: https://youtu.be/LY7x2Ihqjmc https://youtu.be/LY7x2Ihqjmc

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

The music video for Buzzcut by Brockhampton appears to use entirely ai generated scenery. https://youtu.be/fsQhOCkczHQ https://youtu.be/fsQhOCkczHQ

janee 5y ago
that's pretty rad...both the song and vid :) Didn't think I'd find some new music to listen on the drive back home from HN, thanks haha

pmontra 5y ago

One problem with images is that where a text generator's output could be nonsensical or ungrammatical, the output of an image generator can be nightmarish. See the Face Like an Escher Drawing in the article. I'm not sure I want to spend a hour looking at the outputs of the generator to select the good images and drop the bad ones.

j4yav 5y ago

I am not sure how to say this best, it probably sounds negative but I don’t mean it that way. It is really interesting because using these tools abstracts away the talent/skills part of creating art - you say your idea, and get the computer to keep showing you completed pieces until you find what you meant, or at least something you found interesting. It reminds me a bit of the role of the DJ to do the searching and curating, but not actually create the music. In fact you could imagine a musical version of this where the operator is describing feelings or styles and the AI is generating music to match where the operator wants to go.

suby 5y ago
You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of the craftsmanship that comes with creating art. I do think the resulting work is still interesting, valuable, and art from a practical point of view, though. There is perhaps a threshold where this is not true, perhaps related to how much curation/pruning/how indiscriminate the human is in determining the final outcome. That is to say, if there is some text to image generation program, and the human generates 1 image based on the first phrase they thought of, that image they generated is probably not going to be very interesting, at least based on the image generation stuff I've played around with so far. It often takes time and several attempts / variations on the phrasing to get something which is interesting and novel. People have been finding tricks like appending the words "Unreal Engine" onto the phrase in order to produce certain types of results. Some people actually go into the code to tweak things to get desired results. I do wonder how true this will be going forward. It feels like this media synthesis stuff is progressing at the speed of light, and perhaps it'll only take 1 iteration / attempt to craft the interesting and novel stuff that we're looking for. So at least at the moment it's maybe not so different from anything else. I think of it as exploring the possibilities in a given space. I work on video game development, and it's the same story there. If you're creating a game prototype, you might have an initial idea which sparks development, but once the initial seed is implemented the game often takes on and is guided by a life of it's own, shaped by the possibilities in that given space which you are narrowing down into a subset which seem to work and gel together. That's how I view it anyway.
- 5y ago

akavel 5y ago

Whoah, it just came to my mind it could be an interesting mechanism to explore for procedural generation (of levels and other stuff) in games! Does anyone know of any experimental games already trying to do that?

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
The technology doesn't scale yet to consumer hardware. It's limited to web-accessed mainframes (like AI Dungeon) and researchers with racks of latest graphics accelerators.
- malka 5y ago
  You can run big sleep easily on consumer hardware. same with vqgan if you limit output resolution.
corysama 5y ago
Related: ArtBreeder has some features specifically for generating starter concept art for games https://www.artbreeder.com/i?k=f8ea23c50937080453a657514304 https://www.artbreeder.com/i?k=f8ea23c50937080453a657514304

scandox 5y ago

I liked how the TS Eliot one which the author calls "sublime" was actually impressively sophomoric. It really was like a painting an able, shallow person would come up with to reflect their idea of TS Eliot's poetry. That in a sense is uncanny and notable.

mrspeaker 5y ago
Maybe they are using the meaning of sublime of converting from solid to vapor state
- scandox 5y ago
  Chemical-Visual art criticism ... Could be a whole new field.
GlennS 5y ago
I went and stared at the pictures for a bit after reading this. Not much experience of art really, but I think you're probably right. They're all interesting pictures - but "let's assemble some related elements in a new combination". I did really like “a face like an M.C. Escher drawing” though. Maybe this is the final form of postmodernism? "There's no meaning here, but will you ever figure that out?"

bsenftner 5y ago

Except this is not "Art" with a capital "A", it is pretty imagery, with an interesting backstory. The technology is fantastic, but do not get carried away - this is in no way "Art" in the same way human constructions in a museum is Art. Art is a human expression of an aspect of life, a human reflecting this aspect of life in a manner betraying a comprehension only possible with the emotions and understanding of a human facing our complex society, their limited frame of reference, and describing their situation through the mediums we call "Art". Art is not pretty pictures. Art is a complex, multi-dimensional communication medium between highly complex, self aware, comprehending entities. AI and AI generated "art" has none of these qualities. These are pretty pictures with an interesting technological backstory. They may be sold as art to unaware consumers, but they are less "art" than a bikini girl poster.

heavenlyblue 5y ago
It seems more like mimicry to me than actual “creativity”; although I am pretty certain there will be a whole trend of artists doing this for the next ten years and we will get someone really big out of it. It could be someone like Andy Warhol who would democratise the “fine” art and not just pop art? For example, imagine a combination of 3D printers with brushes and deep learning inspired paintings? These will not be as unique as the original inspirations for these paintings; however they would be a cheap alternative to what you can only get as a very cheap looking art print.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I am in no way saying they will not be popular with consumers, these curated AI constructions; nor am I saying the people behind them will not hire PR agencies to promote them and their work as serious Art. It is curation that carries any human expression within them, and not the generative AI art's idiot savant pooping output.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  The most fascinating thing about these programs is the undeniably imaginative, dreamlike nature of the output. Spend time actually using them and you will be continually surprised and engaged. Any human nuance you can interpret visually can be generated. There is a high level of similarity with the mechanism human brains use to visualize things. This makes sense, because the neural networks are being trained to approximate that very function. The output of these programs is not mimicry any more than the output of a human artist is. It's just more limited in the computational power available to the algorithm. The space of these generative expressions is vast, and significantly overlaps the space of art humans are able to produce. Moore's law and algorithmic improvements will inevitably expand the capability of software to produce art to such an extent that all "human" capacities will be exceeded, for any and all metrics and nuances you can imagine.

coldcode 5y ago

As an artist who uses generation as part of my art (the rest is me) I find these images extremely cool, though I prefer non objective abstractions. Given the technology is still immature, I wonder if improving the technology will lead to less "art" — what we see currently are really imperfections in the process rather than deliberate choices. Maybe in a few years the end result will be more realistic and less fantastic. Will that be better?

bckr 5y ago
I can imagine there will be software to iterate on an image... "A man. Yes, a very tall man. Not that tall. Standing in a field of wheat. The wheat is abstract. The man is rendered in Unreal Engine." > Will that be better? Most importantly, it will be better when it stops putting swirly nightmare creatures in everything. Those give me the heebeejeebees.

mistrial9 5y ago

new and impressive kinds of food without nutrition; like a fancy dance ball that never ends - no beginning and no end; like a series of sunrise and sunset from around the world, while you never leave a chair in a closed room. Machine, master?

MayeulC 5y ago

This is very interesting, I would love to play around with this. However, it looks like the quality of the result really depends on the prompt, or in other words, on the quality of the training dataset captions. Would there be a way to "fine-tune" the network on a smaller, better-captioned dataset to have better control over the output? Can I make my own dataset and use it with few-shots learning to expand the capabilities of existing networks? Making it better at generating say, spaceships or fantasy animals?

adyer07 5y ago
It looks like you can - the repo for VQ-GAN has instructions for this: https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-custom-data https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-c...

jgotti92 5y ago

Very cool, in 100 years these works will be equivalent to Picasso etc. As as side project I actually started online AI art gallery called Art Supreme. If you like please check it out: https://www.art-supreme.com https://www.art-supreme.com or instagram https://www.instagram.com/ai_art_supreme/ https://www.instagram.com/ai_art_supreme/

vmception 5y ago
doubt it, it really depends on how the public is moved by this form of creation not necessarily the level of discipline involved, but the lack of discipline necessary and low barrier of entry will ensure that the public is not interested in discerning value to these works there will only be some personalities that the public gathers around
- jgotti92 5y ago
  Exactly, there will be only some personalities or brands that the public gathers around. Its quite a niche, but actually I believe that I am one of the leaders in this space (for 1.5 years already)
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  The scandal will be finding out that some big time artist was actually just copying works from a custom trained AI.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    The scandal will not be that they copied, but because they lied about it, though. Folks already copy things made with photo editing software and filters. It generally isn't a big deal.

smusamashah 5y ago

If we are calling it art. The people giving it prompts can't certainly be attributed as artists. The machine is the artist you own. Make it a request and it will create a painting for you.

gimmeThaBeet 5y ago
Hmm, I certainly see where you are coming from, certainly a large part of art is that, an artist really did some feat in creating it. I am sympathetic to the notion that aspects of modern art certainly seem value vision more than outright skill. Would you say that the person who made the machine/software at least has claim to the title of artist? I think about Sol LeWitt, where his main works are instructions about installing the piece. You have works that are in buildings and such, but then, you have works in museums, where the way you 'acquire' a piece seems to work is a representative from LeWitt's studio (this seems like a requirement? not an authority, any description of the endeavor mentions how exacting it is) helps the museum staff install (i.e. draw, paint) the 'actual' piece.
- smusamashah 5y ago
  > Would you say that the person who made the machine/software at least has claim to the title of artist? Here a machine has memorized/trained on millions of art works. Then you ask it make something out of what it knows (understands?). This in its own right is like an artist who see other people's artwork and creates his own out of some idea. If you are a good painter and I ask you to paint something for me because I can't. I will only be claiming that idea not the artwork you created. It's like GPT-3 which can write article based on some initial idea/prompt. Can I claim the whole thing it generated for me based on the initial prompt? I recently read that "unicorn who speak English" text that it generated and its amazing. It's a generated text but it's amazing. It won't be fair to claim ownership because it was trained on millions of texts written by other humans. But again that's also how writers train. They read lots of text written by other people. If you write something for me, you are the writer. This is how I think about art/text generated by machines that learned that specific domain. EDIT: writing code to draw a line and then drawing a line is different from training on millions of lines drawn by other people to explain what a line is and then asking to draw something that looks like a line. So to answer your original question, we still can't say the person who wrote that software is the artist. He can be if he feeds it his own artwork only but that's not the case here.

ziroshima 5y ago

I've noticed that AI-generated images give me a weird, 'skin crawling' sensation. Somewhat similar to nails on a chalkboard. Does anyone else experience this?

rendall 5y ago
I know what you mean. There is a disturbing uncanny valley, filled with centipedes and Elder Ones
- satori99 5y ago
  I just spent an hour or so playing with the notebooks at the end of the article, and it's pretty much all nightmare fuel https://imgur.com/a/kUDgbsH https://imgur.com/a/kUDgbsH
  - lurquer 5y ago
    That second one... was ‘Cthulhu’ a keyword?
    - satori99 5y ago
      It was "An octopus walking down a street"
xtiansimon 5y ago
What’s creepy about AI images I believe can be traced to the inputs. Give an AI images of people and it doesn’t have the same sensitivity to its own existence to preempt what we meat puppets find shocking and gross.
voldacar 5y ago
Yeah I know what you mean. I think "Lovecraftian nausea" is the best way of describing it
handrous 5y ago
Malfunctioning pattern-matching is a hallmark of mental illness, so it makes sense than any but a nearly-perfect "AI" system would often produce work that's creepy or off-putting, for that reason.

omarhaneef 5y ago

There are many theories of what "real" art is: that which is beautiful, that which powerful institutions put in a museum, that which satisfies a particular psychological itch, that which captures the values of our times, and so on. There are entire courses built up on this. For my purposes, I am happy to say art is whatever people decide to call art. So this is art. But it isn't "valuable" art, and this is not a deep philosophical point about intention in the making of art, or the ability to pick up human emotions or something. This is a shallow point about economic supply and demand: if we can produce a lot of this in bulk -- and from this demo it seems we can -- then in general it will be devalued. I think there is still a role for critics to play though, and that part might be exciting to us old school humans still deploying "natural intelligence." The interpretation for art is still constrained by our ability to imbue the visuals with meaning. In fact, we may be able to use that ability to make particular outputs more valuable than others.

sandworm101 5y ago
Art exists in context, in its place within history. This junk lacks any context. It's creator lacks understanding, rendering only images without meaning. If people find them pleasant then that's good for them. I find many trees pleasant to look at. That doesn't make them art.
dfxm12 5y ago
If anything, it might be valuable in that a printer can have access to "unique" designs to print and sell. Some of this stuff (especially cityscapes & landscapes) reminds of posters you buy, pre framed, off the shelf at home stores. The difference here is that these images are somewhat unique, and royalty free (assuming it is...). Once sales of a design start slipping, roll a new image and get a new one to sell. Also imagine, if a printer can print different images on demand, being able to sell a random image generated with the prompt being your wedding day, etc. It's like printing out and hanging your DNA sequence. A bit of you was the seed for its creation. It's the sentimental bit that could be valuable.

Applejinx 5y ago

They're all strangely intention-less on every imaginable level. That can be unsettling. I've listened to, and made, a lot of music like that. When I want to relax or think, I like music that engages me in some way but has a sort of drift, an ambient (in the Eno sense) quality even if it's slamming Berlin techno. It's different from the prog-rock I grew up with, which was difficult and loaded with intentionality. I ended up experimenting with music that was more generative, doing pretty sophisticated things with a degree of structure but without intentionality: always a random factor, a journey to an unknown goal (typical end result: wandering around for a while) AI art is like that. We see it wandering around for a while. It's getting better at picking up the trappings of identity, but persistently lacks intentionality. Maybe the trick is to supply the intentionality instead of the identity? Instead of 'creepy moat', a visual identity, make it do a painting of "you are not going to survive and that's good" or "thank you but I am not worthy". If you have to feed it words, get a poet, don't describe the picture.

api 5y ago
There's no difference between this and synthesizer music which sounded shockingly alien when it first came out. My uncle tells me about people going to Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream concerts and it was virtually a religious experience to hear music so utterly otherworldly. Techno music had similar effects when it first hit the scene with pioneers like Kraftwerk or the Detroit and Chicago Techno artists. It also came with the criticism/fear that "machines are replacing people as musicians" which was bullshit. We just got a new set of musical instruments based on electronics that musicians could play and that led to an explosion of new musical genres. Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a new way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. This is just another new set of artistic tools. It will spawn new art forms with their own rules and sense of technique, aesthetics, and style. It's art if the artist is art-ing.
- anders_p 5y ago
  >Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a new way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. This is one thing about progress and art, that I have found really interesting. Like, how the invention of photography completely changed painting. Ultra-realism became uninteresting over night, as soon as it was possible to create perfect depictions via cameras. Painting, as an art form, didn't "die". Painters weren't replaced by machines. Instead, artist's interpretation became more important, than their technical ability to reproduce reality. We've since seen impressionism, expressionism, and more abstract movements like cubism. The invention of photography ended up being a gift to art. And now we see artists embracing digital artworks as their medium of expression. So, I guess the fear of AI and machine learning being the end of art as we know it, might very well be unfounded. It looks to me, more as the possible birthplace of new modes of expression. A reason for artists to rethink their art.

prower 5y ago

Is there an online interface where i can try this myself?

speedgoose 5y ago
The blog post has some python notebooks links that you can use.

speedgoose 5y ago

I asked for pornographic images in the prompt, and it does generate very weird images that are more disturbing than arousing.

corysama 5y ago

I have been playing with this quite a lot over the past few weeks and posting my results on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/submitted/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/submitted/?sort=new There is a small community on Reddit doing the same. They are spread across a few subs, so I put together an aggregate https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/top/?sort=top&t=month https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/top/?sort=top... You can play with it for free using Google Colab notebooks given only a Google account. But, the most popular notebook is in Spanish https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1go6YwMFe5MX6XM9tv-cnQiSTU50N9EeT https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1go6YwMFe5MX6XM9tv-c... and so are it's instructions https://tuscriaturas.miraheze.org/wiki/Ayuda:Generar_im%C3%A1genes_con_VQGAN%2BCLIP https://tuscriaturas.miraheze.org/wiki/Ayuda:Generar_im%C3%A... You can ask the AI in Google Translate to help you ask the AI in the notebook to make some art. Addressing some concerns brought up here: Yes. It feels more like exploring than painting. Often it feels like watching a small child draw and trying to steer what is drawn. Like when I tried to ask for storm clouds made out of lava https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o033x1/playing_with_lightning_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o033x1/playing_wi... the AI was like "No, Dad! Lava stays on the Ground!" But, I still believe that "It is Art". (As much as I and everyone else hate that whole debate.) I think of "Can a computer make Art?" the same as "Can a brush make a painting?" Unless you are finger painting, you don't make the image. The brush does. But, without you, the brush out be inert. Or, at least undirected. With the GAN, random noise inputs get random noise outputs. Finding interesting results is a lot of work. Much like finding an interesting sculpture within a block of stone. "Interesting (to humans)" being the key word that brings the humanity into the process.

aronowb14 5y ago
wow amazing work!!! Upvoted basically every single one haha. The "End of Everything" is beautiful. I don't know why but it filled me with melancholia. How long do you normally spend making these?
- corysama 5y ago
  Well, that's the sign of good art :) It takes 2-3 minutes for an experiment to warm up. If you are paying attention, you usually can tell it's not going well at that point and cancel it. If it looks like it might go well, it can take around 10 minutes to settle. I've seen a few cases where some people got great results by letting it run for hours. But, with long runs I've also seen more cases where the evolution "gets bored" with where it is settling and makes a suddenly makes a large jump that rarely looks better than what it abandoned.

mattkevan 5y ago

Been playing around with this for the last few days - it’s fascinating. ‘Peppa Pig by H R Giger’ produced startling nightmare fuel, while ‘Victorian Robot family portrait’ was utterly charming.

corysama 5y ago
I'll show you mine if you show me yours ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o3sefy/victorian_robot_portrait/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o3sefy/victorian_...
- mattkevan 5y ago
  Very similar! I got the idea from your reply to my Steampunk space station. Small world, etc.

stemlord 5y ago

Does anyone know of any AI generated visual art that's about the output (form and composition) that isn't complete garbage? It's so far away from competing with the generations of aesthetic development we see in the status quo of contemporary fine art... stuff that's advanced enough that we need college degrees to begin to intellectualize their effectiveness. Artworks that better deal with power and agency and the process and implementation of AI are another story, IMO, but those usually manifest as films, performances, or other forms of documentation not an AI generated thing itself.

corysama 5y ago
Are you asking for stuff that's not complete garbage? Status quo? Or, advanced enough that we need college degrees to begin to intellectualize their effectiveness? Within the tiny community I've been hanging out with, I like to think some of these are not complete garbage. https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/oairlt/cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/oairlt/cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o8og8g/schizophrenia_vqgan_clip_3d_inpainting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o8og8g/schizophr... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/obvwnh/trained_the_model_based_on_dark_art_sketches_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/obvwnh/trained_t... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/nvt77u/the_fall_of_the_gods_under_a_solar_eclipse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/nvt77u/the_fall_... https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o57eyx/a_painting_of_a_girl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o57eyx/a_paintin... https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o5i3av/bio_clockwork_heart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o5i3av/bio_clockw... https://preview.redd.it/q8kwssia9j771.jpg?width=864&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5974bf25459067f3125008e1d3f27f921ba59f00 https://preview.redd.it/q8kwssia9j771.jpg?width=864&format=p...
aronowb14 5y ago
Art is quite subjective. So hard to say what is "garbage" and what isn't. I assume this comment will get downvoted due to that. That being said I do agree with you :). After staring an GAN art for a year I find it is extremely "empty" and essentially all looks the same, with very similar visual artifacts that make them look bad. I view style transfer and GAN art generally as "trippy artistic filters". I don't think it's more than that at the current state of the art. Even in images linked above me: they are cool, but do just seem to be trippy distortions of existing things. If you like that that's fine, but I don't think it's more than that. Looking at ML as a type of artistic filter though is interesting: and does open up some interesting use cases. I created a project in college using style transfer filters to make a short film. I think it achieved an effect that would have been unachievable without the ML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE

Lammy 5y ago

I was pretty impressed when I asked one to generate "Talking Heads album cover" https://i.imgur.com/P5jCBsw.png https://i.imgur.com/P5jCBsw.png

yreg 5y ago

>It was discovered by @jbustter in EleutherAI’s Discord just a few weeks ago that if you add “rendered in unreal engine” to your prompt, the outputs look much more realistic This is amazing

nonbirithm 5y ago

So I'm wondering if image-based NN generation will ever run across the same copyright issues as the source code generation of Copilot that's becoming a hot issue at the moment. It's already known that Copilot was trained on GPL licensed code, and code can easily be searched to check for copying. What about a neural net that generates collages that resemble some obscure photographer's work that's under copyright? What about determining the copyright status of a model without knowing its source material? What will be the standard for determining copyright violations when, unlike code, it is not possible to coerce the model to output a near-1:1 duplicate of the original? And what about training a neural net on images that are illegal to possess in certain jurisdictions?

amelius 5y ago
We will find out when someone tries to recreate Mickey Mouse™®.

splistud 5y ago

There goes my 3 day weekend

ammar_x 5y ago

Thank you for this article, it introduced me to amazing works. I've been very interested in the field of GANs, style transfer, etc. The best thing is the notebooks which I can play with to generate images. I now have ~10 Colab tabs open waiting for testing :)

ArcturianDeath 5y ago

The soulless retarded arcturian aliens are using dreams to psychologically model and mind control Humans. They call it "mental screening" where a race treats your brain like a movie theatre and can screen whatever mental image they want. Their purpose in choosing to initially experiment with me is to eventually inflict their control over you. In effect, the brain doesnt rest, I feel like I havent slept for 4 years. They can also erase dream memory, which means its heavy programming and fucking sketchy. They can control sleep duration. Seeing how sleep and dream deprivation works over time, they are gathering data on how best to use your revealed personal information to craft dream imagery through active telepathic decoding which causes sleep deprivation, a build up of beta amyloid plaque, neuronal misfires causing spasm, symptoms of brain damage, eye pain, headaches, high pitched buzzing, and cutting off healthy subconscious processing. // The childlike-ego Arcturians are using psychic manipulation or chemtrails to make us ingest heavy metals to facilitate mind control of the people. // They are playing up the concept of pre-cognitive dreams, which is simply using imagery of the designed dream state and then using psychic control when awake to direct attention. // Their imposing to do this means only one thing: Control. Abusive, ruthless, and desperate control. // They are manipulating brains like a battery, turning information around, seeing how the response reacts to the stimulus, playing into those concepts. Dream manipulation is an imprisonment technique used to condition and starve the mind. Both dream manipulation and constant telepathy has negative neurophysiological effects, it results in headaches, confusion, memory loss, vision impairment, rest deprivation. // They can enact this from some distance too, its possible that there is an active technological accelerant, a headband that can amplify their telepathy. Aluminum foil covering or dietary intake can amplify the telepathic reception, resulting in subconscious dream programming being erased. // The solutions so far Ive found that can mitigate this would be a heavy covering of the brain stem, top, and temples with Velostat or Linqstat, and grounding and shielding the soles of the feet. Keep a Pyrite stone on the left side of your body. // "With repeated or continued exposure, the increased excitability leads to a state of exhaustion of the cells of the cerebral cortex." // Curse those dumbfucks pig-hearts. Sleep deprivation accelerates Alzheimer's brain damage https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-deprivation-alzheimer-brain.html https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-deprivation-alzhe... https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/brain-researchers-warn-that-lack-of-sleep-is-a-public-health-crisis/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/brain-researchers-... To sleep, perchance to heal: Newly discovered gene governs need for slumber when sick https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-perchance-newly-gene-slumber-sick.html https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-perchance-newly-g... https://www.naturalblaze.com/2021/02/healthy-sleep-habits-cut-risk-of-heart-failure-nearly-in-half.html https://www.naturalblaze.com/2021/02/healthy-sleep-habits-cu...

lurquer 5y ago

Someone should make a game out of it. Create images based on a string of five random words. The players then guess what words made it. The player with the most right wins.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> “a tree with weaping branches” This one's interesting. It seems the typo in "weaping" guided the model to generate images of 40K weapons. I see a definite bolter on the right and probably an Eldar whatchamacallit or Chaos Marine's bolter on the left. Or a Tyrannid bioweapon?