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I love it. Unlike many machine learning examples this one does not highlight how good the model is, but highlights how poor the source material often is. Many o

by Cerium 5y ago

I love it. Unlike many machine learning examples this one does not highlight how good the model is, but highlights how poor the source material often is. Many of these are completely believable covers.

jhbadger 5y ago
Indeed. I have a soft spot for 1960s-1970s SF paperbacks and always end up with a few when I visit used book stores. These look uncannily like the covers of those.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
There was nothing poor about the source material. This actually highlights how this kind of AI simply smushes sources up randomly without any sense of content or meaning. It has a look - more horror than SF - but that's because distorted smushing with vague hints of distorted body parts is a look in itself. (See also artists like Francis Bacon.) Neither AI nor developers aimed for this look deliberately. It just happens to be what falls out of the process. (See also Wombo, which has a similar aesthetic.) What it doesn't do is evoke the imaginative narratives of the originals, which were consciously crafted to suggest a mood, setting, or context. Compare with (say) Bruce Pennington or Chris Foss and it's easy to see what's missing.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Thanks for mentioning some original artists. One thing I am realizing here is that the original artists who worked hard to create the source material for these algorithms are often totally overlooked. "I threw a bunch of book covers in to an algorithm and look at all this cool output!" Sure, but who are the people who created all that source material? Can we credit their names as we build off of their work? We can and should credit the algorithm developers too and the person who put all of it together. But I scanned through TFA and I don't see the names of any original artists or mention of the source material, and that seems like quite an unfortunate oversight.

by Cerium 5y ago

jhbadger 5y ago

Indeed. I have a soft spot for 1960s-1970s SF paperbacks and always end up with a few when I visit used book stores. These look uncannily like the covers of those.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

There was nothing poor about the source material. This actually highlights how this kind of AI simply smushes sources up randomly without any sense of content or meaning. It has a look - more horror than SF - but that's because distorted smushing with vague hints of distorted body parts is a look in itself. (See also artists like Francis Bacon.) Neither AI nor developers aimed for this look deliberately. It just happens to be what falls out of the process. (See also Wombo, which has a similar aesthetic.) What it doesn't do is evoke the imaginative narratives of the originals, which were consciously crafted to suggest a mood, setting, or context. Compare with (say) Bruce Pennington or Chris Foss and it's easy to see what's missing.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Thanks for mentioning some original artists. One thing I am realizing here is that the original artists who worked hard to create the source material for these algorithms are often totally overlooked. "I threw a bunch of book covers in to an algorithm and look at all this cool output!" Sure, but who are the people who created all that source material? Can we credit their names as we build off of their work? We can and should credit the algorithm developers too and the person who put all of it together. But I scanned through TFA and I don't see the names of any original artists or mention of the source material, and that seems like quite an unfortunate oversight.