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Comment by wimagguc | Hacker News Reader

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list:

  * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels  
  * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point?

It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders from bicycle sketches: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35437979/Velocipedia?ilo0=1

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Surely it's because this is an aspect of intelligence? Being able to generalize an image is like being able to summarize a text. It reduces something individuated and complex to a set of shared properties.

So the Why seems self-evident to me: if you want to understand intelligence, try to make machines do intelligent things.

That's not to say I think that approach will necessarily lead to a system capable of general intelligence. But I'm assuming that is their current approach.

TLDR: The point is to correct a known flaw with image recognition algorithms.

I'm not a professional researcher, but here's what I gather from reading other articles:

One major problem with image recognition in machines is that while they are generally able to recognize real images correctly, they are 1) Easily fooled 2) Unable to have human-type image understanding. For example, you can recognize an animated character as a human, even though you may never have seen that particular style of drawing before.

One major problem that people realized is that deep neural networks have a tendency to recognize individual facets, for example, a nose. So if you want a neural network to believe something is a human, pepper it with as many noses as you can. It knows that humans have noses so the more noses the more human it must be. Of course, if we saw an image like this we wouldn't think that it was a human because we know a human has only one nose.

To me it seems the primary thrust of this research is to generate a NN that can recognize, like a human, that if an entity has 10 eyes, it's probably not a cat. This is alluded to with the house of horrors cat photographs at the beginning of the article. You can see that when passed an image of a cat with 3 eyes, this neural network correctly removed one of the eyes to make it more realistic.

Here is an article explaining this problem: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897.pdf

> Fun facts: Some diversities are gender driven. Nearly 90% of drawings in which the chain is attached to the front wheel (or both to the front and the rear) were made by females. On the other hand, while men generally tend to place the chain correctly, they are more keen to over-complicate the frame when they realize they are not drawing it correctly.

Hm. So a machine trained exclusively by men/women would make different drawings?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that it would be in the same vein as teaching a child to draw; you don't start by teaching them how to draw like Van Gogh. I'd assume that Google is going to up the complexity once their neural network reaches a certain milestone. Imagine 20 years from now and you have a humanistic robot drawing with your child at the kitchen table à la iRobot.

It's interesting to think about, regardless. Stuff like this gets me excited (and motivated!) to delve into machine learning and AI.

Ironically, in irobot he draws more like a dot matrix printer than a human: https://youtu.be/Bs60aWyLrnI

GANs are capable of generating full color images from semantic space and it exists already, it's not a thing from 20 years ahead.

> … a humanistic robot …

That's what I was referring to happening in 20 years. :)

Those full color images are way worse than the sketches in TFA which look like a person could have drawn them.

It is not about sketches at all. It is a nice AI problem that is becoming approachable now with algorithms and computing. It is a step towards machines being able to learn more and more complex concepts and producing correspondingly complex behaviors.

The second paragraph mentions a couple of reasons:

> ...we created a model that potentially has many applications, from assisting the creative process of an artist, to helping teach students how to draw.

For vector output, there's also a subtle but important distinction between machine-drawn images (based on rasterized data) converted to vectors, and generating machine-drawn vector images. The latter could be more useful in (as you mention) animation, as well as producing vector images with clearly isolated elements - e.g., a vector image wherein occluded elements are represented with full masked shapes (preserving editable layers) rather than a single "flattened" vectorized layer.

Think less about drawing pictures of cats and more about the path mimickry. The machine is "putting a pen down" and drawing vector strokes (these are not bitmaps). Perhaps velocity will come next. And then understanding of pen tilt, pressure, nib angle of attack, response to various paper textures, brush/nib selection, etc.

This is a scary milestone on the road to general intelligence. In this case understanding abstract concepts.

When machines learn something - they start being able to replicate it perfectly across as many machines as they want, parallelize it and execute it without mistakes more times than humans have ever done in history.

So that means - a nearly infinite glut of amazing art, jokes, music and movies. And not just that... but attacks on all our systems including reputation, trust, voting and so on.

Today our systems depend on the assumption that attackers are limited in their ability to proceed and expand quickly. How would things work if attackers were not? You already prefer to ask google more than your parents. What if software made better jokes, drawings and had sex better? And simulated emotions better?

I am just as terrified as you but we're getting downvoted by idealists. This is a significant step towards the obsolescence of humanity

Sometimes doing things that doesn't serve a direct purpose is a great way to learn something that serves a pretty valuable purpose.

GPS was invented by a few guys "just playing around" with the signals put out by sputnik.

It could also help to create another representation of an image or an object in the image. Think of "Please find something that looks like this: human sketches some lines"

I assume you look out far enough you might replace cartoon animators with AI. Maybe throwing them automation bones along the way.

Might also be helpful for captchas?

Those were some awesome bicycles.

How about using the same approaches for coming up with solutions to 3d printing objects?

Frankly, I think there are many reasons not to do this.

1. It's not computer art. I believe in the possibility of artificial intelligence, and when we encounter it it will be so different from human intelligence that asking it to make imitations of human art will seem like an insult. We probably won't understand its art very well either at first.

2. I'm getting really tired of people racing to automate every damn thing. even if we establish an economic utopia and nobody has to work any more what are people supposed to do all day if every human activity can be performed 'better' by a machine?

3. It won't really be 'better' though, it will just be more popular because so many programmers are trapped in a quantitative mindset and thus treat every problem they encounter like a nail to be hammered in. Imitative digital technologies will always be correlated with popularity, limiting creative innovation because developers can't think of a reason to optimize for or nurture anything that is initially unpopular.

Creative prostheses that all require the same amount of effort to deploy (ie none) will be hailed as 'allowing everyone to be an artist' without requiring them to in best any meaningful time or effort in ideas that don't pay off or that fail. The result, which we are already seeing, is a plethora of new material created with little effort that is as superficial as it is ephemeral, whose volume and variety will obscure its stultifying conventionality.

This is no more art than Cheese Whiz is food. It's Art-flavored mechanical product that functions to do no more than alleviate the masses' thirst for self-actualization without any adjustment of power structures and is thus fundamentally limited to reproduction of the cultural conditions from which it originates.

I think this is an anti-intellectual argument. Why would you argue against someone pursuing an idea? I don't see this as any threat to the distinction between art and mechanical reproduction.

Art has always been "ineffable" and will remain so, as long as humans have thoughts and feelings. Bad art, or lazy productions will be as ignored as ever.

I've already given you my reasons. Why not think about them for a while?

I hope the first AI lawnmower has a feature where when someone yells "Get off my lawn" it actually does it.

Are you kidding. No one is saying this should replace art. It's just an experiment in generative algorithms. It can though have interesting applications in assisted design, which I bet you would say is not art either anyways.

No, but I'm used to people not understanding me until much later.

Examples ?

I think i get what he is saying. I see code as a kind of human expression. it would be like a machine compiling itself. the machine did not make the thing, it did what a human told it to do. so a human saying draw me a cat would not be making art, only the original code and the beautiful ideas inside would be the art. art and programming share a kind of knowledge called techne. as opposed to epistme like history and such. hence why traditional artists and programmers are both so concerned with craftsmanship.

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