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Comment by michrassena | Hacker News Reader

When I see the style transfers, I'm reminded of the early days of Photoshop, and whatever else was a commonplace photo editing application of the mid-90s (like Fractal Painter). It was fun to play with the idea of oil painting, or watercolor, or to simulate paper textures. How is style transfer an improvement? Undoubtedly, it's more sophisticated and requires more computational resources.

Can it be used for artistic purposes, or is it only skin deep like those old filters? It looks to me as if this is pure imitation, your images of a night with friends at the street cafe, or stacking bails of hay can look like a Van Gogh when you upload it to Instagram.

Am I missing something?

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Sure, for example https://imgur.com/a/HUN9G. Just by playing around with drawing different textures, I was able to get the above with the wave model. I just see it as another digital tool like you do, but with creative use I could see some pretty cool applications in modern art.

After seeing this, and thinking through what I wrote yesterday, I have a bit of a different take. I don't like the style transfers of famous art-piece, to user-provided image. A skin-deep transfer of the look of Van Gogh, or Katsushika Hokusai, or Renoir, or whatever doesn't make art (in my opinion).

I realize these tools are just a proofs-of-concept, which is something I forgot yesterday. What I'd like to be able to do is style transfer between arbitrary images, whether it's my own work or that of others. That would open up the creative possibilities.

Fast Neural Style transfer is a variation of a "regular" Neural Style algorithm.

With regular Neural Style, you can do style transfer between any two arbitrary images. The disadvantage is it takes longer so doing it in the browser might be unfeasible for now. See https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style

Anyway, even with Fast Neural Style, you can use any arbitrary image as a Style, but you'll have to train it first (4-6 hours on a GPU).

Wow, that is actually super cool!

As you can see from the output, the model can simplify the shape, alter the geometry, put a texture on an object (projecting a texture like UV mapping) without being explicitly programmed to do so. It is inherently different from Photoshop filters that apply a fixed transformation on the pixels. The fundamental difference is that the model is able to abstract away from the pixel representation of the image and it can decorelate content and style. Also, it is not necessarily more computationally intensive in the generation / forward phase.

It still looks like Poor Photoshop Art Imitation++ though.

Outside of the developer community, no one cares how this works. They only care about whether or not they connect with the result.

And a good historical hint is that no one uses those old Photoshop filters now, because they're uniformly cheesy and terrible.

Artistically, this is similar.

The Deep Dream output was an interesting novelty, for a while, but to most people this style transfer process is going to be Just Another Photo Filter Effect.

Technically, it's not abstracting shape and texture in an intelligent way. It's applying a mechanical effect in a mechanical way with absolutely no insight into texture or spatial geometry.

Even in abstract art, shapes mean something. They're not just a set of coordinates. This process doesn't understand that meaning - and generally, developers who think "art" means "I made an image with my computer" don't understand it either.

Sometimes this process gets lucky and something passable falls out, but mostly the results are mediocre.

I mostly agree that the results are not always good. As someone who read the original style transfer paper, and implemented it, I disagree that it is applying a mechanical effect. Maybe I'm biased but the algorithm use a pre-trained CNN on object recognition. The CNN develops a representation of the image that is more and more abstract along the layers of the network. You can visualize the information in each layer by reconstructing the image only from the feature maps. And when you do this you will see that the network, learns the objects and textures of the image compared to its pixel values (pixels -> edges -> regions -> objects, etc).

Dunno about you, but when I first saw some of the results, I was amazed. Here are a few more examples:

https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style

https://github.com/lengstrom/fast-style-transfer

Admittedly, though, I haven't seen the Photoshop filters you speak of. Could you link to some of them that show these same effects?

I think there's something of a human selection effect with the more impressive outputs they've opted to show; much as you can throw a far dumber algorithm at far less selective samples of Shakespeare and end up with the non-incoherent examples seeming wonderfully poetic

Take the example of the woman's face and Munch's The Scream. Ask an art student to pain a woman in the style of The Scream and you'll probably get her with a simplified, harrowed expression, surrounded by swirly waves and skies. Run this through the algorithm and you'll get a photograph of a woman's face with brushwork superimposed over it including a choppy, vibrant orange forehead instead of a choppy, vibrant orange sky. It's not particularly visually interesting and is obviously the work of a dumb algorithm[1]

On the other hand, I combined the woman's face with Picabia's Udnie and the results were very pleasing, especially the way the contrast of black and white and sharpened edges happened to emphasise the model's cheekbone structure and eyes, and it looks like something a human might draw and sell as an original semi-abstracted portrait (albeit something an art teacher setting the "draw her in the style of Picabia" assignment would probably still frown at and say they'd missed the point of the exercise in producing representative art and not really grasped Picabia's massing or shading either)

[1]And I'm sure it's not the first time I've critiqued computer generated art based on combining Munch's the Scream because it treats the top of the image as vivid orange sky regardless of what it actually is...

What do you mean? It is what it is. You can use it for artistic purposes if you can think of some creative way of using it, but if you're just uploading images and spitting out altered versions I don't suppose many people would consider that to be particularly artistic

Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation. What it creates is not novel. It's just doing what the programmer told it to do. Blah blah blah.

In my opinion, it is one step -- and an impressive step -- in the direction of computers being able to actually be creative. The areas where humans can do something that computers can't is shrinking. You can dismiss it if you want, but at what point will you acknowledge that what the computer is doing isn't simply imitation? I guess you can keep moving the goalposts, but to me, this is pretty impressive.

I think the definition of "creativity" is very vague when we try to explain that in terms of computer or AI. Generative artwork/systems, which are highly random tends to appear "creative" and not just any "imitation".

> Of course, computers can't be creative, so it is just imitation.

I take it that you've never worked in IT support :)

This assumes creativity is anything more than copying from multiple sources.

If it's not more, how come there is anything to copy from?

Copying from nature with tiny little variations I guess?

Little compared to what? They're infinitely big compared to no variations. Ignoring that part because it's unclear is like throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater to me.

What is your definition of "creative"?

Having the ability to make something original, I suppose. But then you can question what is original.

I tend to think everything is somewhat derivative. But some things more than others. The things that are the least derivative, are the most creative.

And what this program does is more creative than most things computer programs do, and probably more creative than lots of things that, if a human did it, you'd call "creative."

I don't know if the un-repurposed output is artistic, but surely creating these algorithms is.

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