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Show HN: AI-Generated Illustrations of Plants
- sampsonferd 5y agoLooks so cool! Love it
- laibasidd 5y agoLoved it!! It's pretty amazing :)
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoCan you give us a summary/write up on your process? It's very impressive.
- Yenrabbit 5y agoHi HN, I've been playing around with AI art (who hasn't) and wanted to share the results of last nights run: 300 auto-generated plants in a big collage that you can zoom into and explore. My end-goal with this is to work on some sort of speculative biology project. GANs like the one I used here are great for generating nice-looking images in bulk, which could then be curated and refined into some sort of consistent work. Happy to answer any questions on how this was generated or on AI art in general :)
- fumblebee 5y agoThis is cool! Thanks for sharing. I've played around with some random Colab notebooks that have surfaced on HN but the results have been underwhelming compared with some of the polished AI Art I've seen in the wild. Some questions that popped into my head: What's your setup (Cloud/Colab/Custom hardware)? Did you borrow the code in its entirety or is there a secret source? How long did it take you to fiddle around with the hyper-parameters until you were happy with the results? How many iterations did you settle on before stopping? Thanks!
- Yenrabbit 5y agoIt can be hit-and-miss. With a bit of trial and error you start to see which prompts work well to generate pleasing images. Some people have done excellent work exploring ways to change the look, like https://imgur.com/a/SnSIQRu https://imgur.com/a/SnSIQRu As for hardware, a lot of my experimenting is done on Google colab. For this plant generation stuff I rented a GPU via vast.ai for ~$0.20 an hour and set it running overnight.
- thanatos519 5y agoThe '8k 3D' examples there are crazy red/blue analyphs. Total brainwarp.
- fumblebee 5y agoThat link is incredibly extensive, great resource! I find the "tattoo" effect to be extremely disturbing.
- Yenrabbit 5y agore: secret sauce, I tend to be in the 'sharing is caring' camp. The code for this was based on the popular notebook by @RiversHaveWings (VQGAN+CLIP) although I've edited it back and forth a few times. I usually run for a few hundred iterations (eg 250). EDIT: here's a Google Colab that replicates my plant generation: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfCbil0oAzuCcQ28?usp=sharing https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...
- fumblebee 5y agoThanks for taking the time to reply to my Qs; all useful insights and is much appreciated. Mostly I'm excited about the direction and innovation velocity that AI art is going, but partly I'm anxious about what the eventual implications will be for human artists.
- jcims 5y agoI'd like to humbly suggest that you give her CLIP guided diffusion model a try. It's blowing my mind. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12a_Wrfi2_gwwAuN3VvMTwVMz9TfqctNj#scrollTo=Altu7J5Dfqgv https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12a_Wrfi2_gwwAuN3VvM... Some recent output (prompts are summarized) max max alien craft in the desert - https://imgur.com/a/1R5UZQb https://imgur.com/a/1R5UZQb worshippers gather at mad max alien craft in the desert - https://imgur.com/a/acdbLVu https://imgur.com/a/acdbLVu vintage 70s alien spacecraft in the meadow - https://imgur.com/a/kwAVWG9 https://imgur.com/a/kwAVWG9 (note these are all upscaled with waifu2x) My guess is that you've solved this already but I run it in a loop by replacing do_loop() at the bottom of the last frame with the following: import random prompt='crystalline alien spacecraft on a flower' modifiers=['',' macro photography', ' with hyperrealistic 35mm depth of field'] original_prompt = prompt while True: for modifier in modifiers: prompt = original_prompt + modifier seed = random.randrange(1000) tqdm.write(f'Prompt {prompt}, Seed {seed}') do_run()
- Yenrabbit 5y agoHad a play the other day - I love it! But it's quite slow, so for most of my experiments (which involve video and motion) I haven't yet found a way to incorporate it into my workflows without slowing things down considerably. Thanks for sharing though, the work she's doing is so great!
- ak391 5y agothere is also a easy to use web demo here on huggingface with some presets https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/VQGAN_CLIP https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/VQGAN_CLIP
- Yenrabbit 5y agoThis is what I send to non-technical folks who want to dabble - thank you for making that available :)
- graderjs 5y agoLooks very alien! Great!
- lyaa 5y agoI love these so much! How did you direct the GAN to generate them?
- Yenrabbit 5y agoI made a prompt generator that creates descriptions like 'A biological illustration of an alien plant near sand, watercolor'. A model called CLIP gives a way to compare an image with a text prompt and then I can optimise the image to match the prompt
- datameta 5y agoYou've been able to get some interesting output! I've been playing with the following notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1oA1fZP7N1uPBxwbGIvOEXbTsq2ORa9vb https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1oA1fZP7N1uPBxwbGIvO... but my results are not quite so well put together as yours. What are some tweaks you've made to the model? I'd like to better understand what is going on under the hood.
- Yenrabbit 5y agoThe big difference is the model used to generate the images. VQGAN (which I use) tends to look a lot nicer to my eye than some of the other approaches.
- baxtr 5y agoAwesome. Could you also do fruits? PS: thanks for not calling it „this plant does not exist“
- Yenrabbit 5y agoI'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered setting up a website at thisplantdoesnotexist.com haha luckily I changed my mind. I could try some fruits - let me set a smaller run going and see that it comes up with.
- Yenrabbit 5y agoI tried generating some fruit - you can see some outputs in the notebook I just shared (https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfCbil0oAzuCcQ28?usp=sharing https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...). Not quite as pleasing as the plants but I'm sure with a bit of fiddling with the prompt we could get a few good ones.
- skinkestek 5y agoTo me this is probably the most interesting / delightful. The one with persons is useful, this one is something I'd like to order as a print or maybe even as a wallpaper for my company headquarters (haha, it is currently <<10m2) sometime in the future :-)
- Yenrabbit 5y agoI'm happy to share the original JPEG if you want to print this out :) I have it in A2 on my wall although at that scale the individual pictures are a little small.
- ectopod 5y agoPlease do, that would be brilliant.
- Yenrabbit 5y agoHere you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EJofIqhvHhh2Oa1GFokBIBIJlBg-wabh/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EJofIqhvHhh2Oa1GFokBIBIJlBg... A1 size recommended, although A2 works (they're about stamp-sized)
- ectopod 5y agoThank you, that's lovely. Many of them are reminiscent of the covers of 50s scifi novels. Converted to a direct download link: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1EJofIqhvHhh2Oa1GFokBIBIJlBg-wabh https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1EJofIqhvHhh2...
- Yenrabbit 5y agoThanks :)
- thanatos519 5y agoI love how the plants seem to flow into the landscape in many of these!
- totetsu 5y agoAm I a curmudgeon for wanting to call most of these ai art projects ai illustration projects?
- Yenrabbit 5y agoNo, I think that's fair in this case. Most of my stuff involves a lot more post-processing, tweaking, editing etc to convey something specific, in which case I claim 'art' more liberally :)
- totetsu 5y agohttps://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ nice stuff
- Yenrabbit 5y agoSo many talented artists! I have a couple of collections there - https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/johnowhitaker/creations https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/johnowhitaker/creations has most of my experiments and https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/flow_jw/creations https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/flow_jw/creations has some higher-effort pieces adding motion to GAN stuff.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoFantastic stuff! I love the painted over pieces (assuming they are painted over). The pronounced details and refined features almost add another level of "dreaming" on top of the AI nightmare. Gloriously creepy and fun.
- eqbridges 5y agoReminds me of the work called “Herbarium” by Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta: https://www.juanmagonzalez.com/fontcuberta/herbarium.html https://www.juanmagonzalez.com/fontcuberta/herbarium.html
- namero999 5y agoAnd to me, it reminds of the Codex Seraphinianus
- fsiefken 5y agoand to me the voynich manuscript, perhaps this AI plant generation could provide an additional clue to the meaning of the fantasy plants in the manuscript!
- Yenrabbit 5y agoThis was one of the things that got me hooked on the idea of an encyclopedia for an imagined world! Such a fascinating and fun work.
- illegalmemory 5y agoThanks for sharing, this is cool! But in most of such projects I have seen is lack of continuity in generated content. From a bird eye view things look natural but as soon as you observe the content, a little closer, things start to fall apart.
- Yenrabbit 5y agoAgreed. When I'm using this as part of a larger workflow I'll sometimes use the GAN to generate a starting point and then manually edit things to remove weird inconsistencies. The output is also quite low-res so it needs tweaking. Of course both problems can be avoided by making the individual images so small that the weirdness is hidden - as I did for this project :)
- smusamashah 5y agoThey look like drawings in Codex Seraphinianus. See these images https://images.google.com/search?q=codex+seraphinianus+plants https://images.google.com/search?q=codex+seraphinianus+plant...
- 6174 5y agoCool , thx for sharing, if these image can be generated by AI, that will be pretty interesting
- baltimore 5y agoA lot of them seem to be growing out of books :-)
- Yenrabbit 5y agoMy fault for including 'nature journal' in some prompts!
- sajeeb14 5y agore: secret sauce, I tend to be in the 'sharing is caring' camp. The code for this was based on the popular notebook by @RiversHaveWings (VQGAN+CLIP) although I've edited it back and forth a few times. I usually run for a few hundred iterations (eg 250). EDIT: here's a Google Colab that replicates my plant generation: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...
- mkl 5y agoThis is just a copy-paste of the creator's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286869
- ramigb 5y agoTIL AI thinks plants and reproductive organs look a like
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWait till you hear about orchids.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- psfourplusone 5y agoCool, reminds me of Codex Seraphinianus
- valyagolev 5y agocheck out also Algorithmic Botany, that tries to use algorithmic creation for research http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/ http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/
- IncRnd 5y agoNow we know the origins of the Voynich Manuscript.
- ryandvm 5y agoI'm curious what the state of AI generated music is. I heard a quote once that "music is math for people that don't like numbers" which struck me as particularly insightful. All the things that people appreciate about the instrumental aspect of music are mathematical in nature (rhythm, chords, progressions, etc.), at least at a superficial level. Apart from vocals and lyrics (yet), it seems that AI ought to be particularly well suited for creating artificial music that actually sounds decent. Sure it's not going to be pushing any boundaries, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't able to churn out some catchy melodies.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThe result of that is what is played up and down the charts, learned from what sells 'records', and embedded into almost anything new to be more and more refined to the taste of the majority/masses. Also the stuff playing in supermarkets to make you buy more.
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoReally? My initial reaction is to disagree, though I do think I understand your point. While the medium is music is purely physical, and physical things can be abstracted to mathematics, what do you think about the generation/composition of music. Most music isn't really composed of instruments playing single notes; it's composed of things like phrases phrases and expressions. The math is just an obtuse way of representing the phrases, emotions, and expressions. What do you think of this perspective?
- Yenrabbit 5y agoSome sounds OK, most sounds like a series of plausible notes that nevertheless don't actually go anywhere. Most generative models tend to do OK at predicting the immediate next note, say, but they can't keep a macro-level structure unless you force that as a constraint. For me what has worked best is generating music and then re-interpreting that with some manual post-processing to get it into a less jarring form. A fairly recent project that is close to the state of the art: https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ One of my own experiments: https://datasciencecastnet.home.blog/2021/05/13/whistlegen-generating-traditional-irish-music-with-ml/ https://datasciencecastnet.home.blog/2021/05/13/whistlegen-g...
- popotamonga 5y agoGame art illustrators will be the first to get replaced with AI. At least on non premium titles.
- aetherspawn 5y agoThese would make a cool postage stamp set.