Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art
art42.net
art42.net
The frontend is Vuejs and it's using the amazing https://github.com/Akryum/vue-virtual-scroller for the very fast infinite scroll option. The app runs on Cloudflare Workers, using https://github.com/l5x/vue-ssr-cloudflare-workers-template
Hope you guys enjoy the experience and would love to get some constructive feedback
Especially if they can be generated at 300dpi+
What if you didn't know that the painting was the work of a bot?
What if it was just some abstract painting that someone took enough fancy to to pay to have put on a canvas?
Personally, I couldn't really tell them from the human-generated wikiart pictures that seeded the algorithm. Those human-generated pieces didn't speak to me either.
I'd love to see the algorithm work on some other art style seeds.
Perhaps the Vogels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_and_Dorothy_Vogel knew the artist? The way they amassed their collection is truly inspiring.
Picaso's wife infamously knew he was having an affair with his muse from glancing at a painting. But did every other Picaso fan who saw that same painting? Did truly know anything about the artist behind the picture?
So the chances of everyone else who appreciates an artist actually truly knowing anything about the actual artist? Complete rubbish, say I!
Take Turner, for example: turns out, the location of a lot of his pictures have been wrongly attributed! How everyone can claim to 'know' the artist and yet not realise that the picture is of Portsmouth or a lake in Scotland instead of Venice or somewhere else seems like they didn't really know the artist after all?
So there's a picture on the wall by Satoshi Nakamoto. You feel that genuine, because it's signed? Then when you get told that its painted by a bot, you feel cheated? Because you felt you knew something about the artist by looking at the art?
To me these pictures are very nice looking from afar, but once you try to look in the details it makes you feel stupid that you don't get it, until you realize that it is senseless, there is no coherence, no point, no soul and it's normal that there is nothing to get from the picture as it's not in the algorithm.
The technique is perfect. But the art side reflection and emotion must still come from the eye of the beholder. It is deeply moving art in the sense it inspire strong negative emotions, the feeling that there are some stronger forces coming to crush you.
One such reflection that these collection should inspire is : "Is this the direction we want to take ?". Infinitely many garbage art stealing attention away from human artists.
Don't get me wrong, I like generated art but it's necessary to situate it in its context. That what makes it interesting. I even believe you can have machine explore thing and discover interesting thing on their own without it being formulaic, but we are not there yet.
I don't fully agree with you on the purpose of art. Art can create different meanings for every watcher and they could be quite far away from what was the intended purpose ( the message ) of the artist. I would say that main function of art is to ask questions, and also to give you a way to experience life in a way you would otherwise not be able to. In this context I think AI generated art can bring something new, a new layer of reality, a new set of questions, that might not been surfaced because we use brains to create art and brains to interpret it. It could be a new type of input that would push humanity further.
These pictures are interesting though. To me the thing that popped out, without having read background on the project, was how this robot artist is copying modernists like Picasso and possibly Pollock and DeKooning. And doing it along a few themes, with high degree of repetition; or tweaking some small things in each variation. The limitations are glaring and I’m wondering will it evolve and how.
My train of thought exactly. Even second-rate/beginner/hobbyist paintings, like those on Binned Art for example, are absolutely crushing these in every dimension.
Who decides what gets shared? Are you posting everything, or do you curate the results of the algorithm?
Is it that that's the style of art you like?
Or that you found to work best?
It would be really interesting to see the kind of images generated when its trained with other styles.
I have to admit I'm rather in the first camp. I have spent time in art galleries, but not a huge amount; I have opinions about art, but 90% of what I hear said about paintings seems to me to be nonsense.
I know a lot about music; and so far I've always been able to distinguish 100% of computer-generated musical snippets from genuine classical snippets. And specifically, the key difference is exactly what is claimed by the second group -- that computer-generated melodies are just piles of similar musical ideas mashed together, without any apparent intent or direction.
One of the claims of skeptics of art is that there really is nothing there, and that all the "art critics" are just doing a wetware version of GPT-2. If someone trained in art can really distinguish a cubist painting with artistic intent from one generated with this neural net, then it's 1) proof that there really is something there, and 2) it's maybe worth learning about.
Is it a random number or another image or something else?
Let's say you wanted to re-render the exact same image given the same state of your pre-trained model, what information would you use here?
Which is to ask if Audiences are never wrong?
Without Mondrian, would it find beauty in clean abstract lines and sharp angles? Can it, by itself, come up with the concept of neoplasticism and implement that, in any way, to create a new beautiful artwork?
Would the AI, not for Klimt, have an appreciation for how casually erotic the female form can be?
Does it, yet, have this appreciation?
I don't know, and I'm sure it doesn't either.
Even more pertinently, it doesn't care.
I wouldn't call your relationship with art "appreciation". Sounds more like undisguised disdain.
Can you have one without the other ?
Apparently, now, you can...Watch this video of an art dealer looking at the "efforts" of the Top Gear trio - He's looking for premeditation, emotion, and inspiration, it's arguably a bit pretentious, but you can see his change in the thought process when James May starts to explain how his big metal face is a deconstruction of a car into a display of his emotions while driving it.
A piece of art is different to different people, but you are consuming the artist's opinions both directly (if you are aware of the artist's previous work, i.e. Francis Bacons paintings are pretty interesting if you know a bit about his life) and indirectly (The Video game Pathologic is very polarising but is so utterly alien to the archetypal video game - especially when it first came out - that it really resonates with some of those who play it). Imitation and technique only go so far - Erik Satie wasn't particularly well regarded as a composer (or even a musician, he often referred to himself as a Phonometrician) when he produced his most famous works but he is known to this day for his command of minimalism, repitition and a surprisingly Jazz-like use of "horizontal" harmony from simple scales (Potentially constructed by stacking triads but I don't know)
pastiche
n 1: a musical composition consisting of a series of songs or other musical pieces from various sources [syn: medley, potpourri, pastiche]
2: a work of art that imitates the style of some previous work
Comparing this to generated music -- every time there's a "quiz" challenging to distinguish computer-generated snippets of music from real classical music, I've gotten 100%. The key difference is that the computer-generated music I've heard so far is just one musical idea after the other; it doesn't seem to have intent or motion. (Much like GPT-2 style text: a single sentence looks reasonable; once you get to several paragraphs, it completely stops "hanging together".)
Because it does not have any. It’s a tool. Can we say a cool brush creates paintings, a complex instrument creates music? By itself Im afraid it’s far from it. A human hand must be involved somewhere (im literal about the hand part, but a brain nonetheless)
It’s just that with machines and deep learning we can try more variations in a much shorter period of time.
No more waiting to see whether that bunch of disaffected art students sitting around drinking absinthe and smoking strong cigarettes come up with anything good, get a bunch of computers to do it in a fraction of the time - and with far less angst.
However art is anything that moves you and the paintings on this website are most definitely moving to me. I find them terrifying and a lot of that has to do with the fact that a machine made them.
There isn't anything really grotesque there. (Grotesque is a blend of horror and empathy. Horror is a scary guy in a mask holding a bloody axe or things jumping out at you. Grotesque is a person maimed.)
This site has, in my opinion, art that is nauseatingly scary. It is scary in part because its soulless and part because it's a mirror of how a machine sees humanity.
Regardless of how it was made, it moved me therefore from my perspective: It is art.
And, because AI implies heart and/or conscience, ML is a much better term because it is more accurate and describing.
I found myself thinking about similar things when I trained a neural net to make art: who’s the artist? Me, or the machine?
Originality is how artists signal to their peers and scene their value. It's relatively modern concept. Art existed before originality was considered a value and it probably exists after the originality stops being an issue.
Relevant quote from Feynman about art: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184384-i-have-a-friend-who-...
I like art too and make some myself (musical). But I happen to think art is just what each viewer thinks of it. I don't know enough about visual art to know whether this is a "pastiche image maker", though I suspect AI won't make that for long, if it is.
Honestly I would consider buying something like this, though I'd never waste my money on something so pretentious from a human. This, however, is an achievement, and there's beauty in that.
Edit: in fact, if love to see two tests: a blind test with a series of humans, and a classifier trained to differentiate between machine and human generated art. I have no doubt that the humans would not score much better than chance - I bet only an artificial discriminator would be able to tell, and then only because of subtle differences in pixel distributions that humans won't perceive. Throw in a couple different GANs trained on different distributions and even a machine will have trouble telling the difference!
Haha, the exact opposite of my scroll through. I thought to myself: "These look like a clone stamp sampled and then vomited up all the lovely modernist paintings I've seen at art museums."
I certainly couldn't distinguish an individual images from something I might see in a museum. At the same time, scrolling the images felt very different than scrolling through a series of images by a given artist or images from a given show.
This is what an image search for cubists and wikiart looks like. Also feels very different.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNRYdV4hOBO...
Which is just to say this sequence feels different. I couldn't tell if it's better or worse. It does feel bleak, opaque, oppressive, washed-out. All that is something some art aims for. But it could just be the randomness of the pictures, like they're well-spoken words in a language I don't know.
https://www.google.com/search?q=composition+abstract+paintin...
I think this is quite expected, since ANN constructs its own view on stuffs, which is basically deconstruction of images into local components, like local color relation and sub-patterns. Global composition and shapes will be destroyed in favor of local composition, which is pretty much what many modern abstract paintings were after.
While ANN can mass-produced stuffs like this, that doesn't mean it's gonna replace artists. It's gonna be the opposite: if artists learn through AIs, each of which trained on different sets of data (which can overlap), we will be able to see works in a different level. It's like go players study AlphaGo for new principles that humankind have missed.
The thing is that I think that art involves using texture to "say" something. The artist puts combines represent of the physical world with reference to previous artists and images with composition. Some artists stress one or the other of these things - so that, yeah, a pure composition painting can definitely be "good enough to be in a museum". But a stream of painting like this definitely doesn't feel a museum or art as a whole.
The generative adversarial network (GAN) has a generative part and a discriminative part which compete with each other. The generative model creates the images that you see in the gallery. The discriminative model tries to predicts whether an image is real or was generated. When it starts failing often, we know that the generative model is getting better (of course, the details are much more complicated).
> ... anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML.
To me, a large part of an artworks beauty comes from its ability to make me feel something. These works make me feel nothing at all. So I cannot call them beautiful.
The only reason these are indistinguishable from "pretentious" paintings is because those were used for a training set. Use a "non-pretentious" set and you will get corresponding generated art. Particular images generated are almost not the point, in my opinion.
Many human paintings make me feel nothing at all.
I assume that the AI generated art would be harder but what is the point really? I would only see the point if the model was trained with something else and ‘it came up with modern art looking images’.
What's funny is that I then tabbed back to HN, where I was deep down the comments tree, and momentarily I forgot that real humans make these comments. I thought "I shall never reach the end of the HN comments. It's all AI - generating a pastiche of plausible opinions and sentences-that-appear-sentient." Same despair. Quite a relief, then, to get to the end of the page.
I am standing next to the artist. Seeing what she saw, imagining what it must be like to arrive from the other direction, without all the layers of preconception and intention that she baked in. And hopefully, from her direction and from mine, the good housekeeping seal, there is something "good" about this meeting of two perspectives.
Your project throws that good-housekeeping seal out the window. Which is not to say that a given image is bad. Rather, that the social contract between one viewer and one artist, is missing. My viewer's eye keeps assuming it exists, and my brain reminds me -- no, this is all fake, there is no humanity behind the curtain. There is nobody to connect to. Maybe it's still art, but not the kind I... emotionally expect from a thing that looks, at first glance, beautifully painted?
So, the infinite aspect definitely "helps" the experience. The exhaustion helps one feel viscerally how big is the problem space.
I don't get the appeal as trying to appreciate this as actual art (or music in the case of ai-generated tunes).
Art for me is about the connection I can make with the person who made it. I can't make a connection with an algorithm. I view it and I am like "OK this is interesting" but that's about it. There's no desire to try and understand it because it was programmatically generated.
Does anyone else feel this way?
some of them feel pretty real to me, but then again, I don't know a thing 'bout this...
were someone to make a catalogue of them, with random names and possibly authors, would you not enjoy it then, too, if you believe them to be made by humans?
Tech is more of a, “why is a painting of a triangle worth so much!?” crowd (see: other comments).
You can’t take away the human and get what you have here.
a) the ignorance or apathy of the person answering the question; and/or
b) deception if you are telling them it's created by a human, when it's not.
There's less inherent value of this kind of "art" for most people if they know it's created by an algorithm in milliseconds, rather than by a human artist who spent hours working on it. Maybe there is an audience who would pay good money for it, who knows. But I think most human beings would devalue it if you were honest about its source.
I can't appreciate how much pain something takes if it can be achieved for less. Much like opting to use a bucket for water transport instead of pipes, it's just silly.
That's a valid point of view I think from the point of the art consumer, if you are into computer generated art. But misses part of the point of art completely; the point from the artists' perspective, at least for humans, which is about self-expression.
If the artist has such a great story, I wish they (or someone else) would just write a book about them, and do without the art as an intermediary.
A piece is more than just itself, there is a history to each one and that story adds to the piece. Some (honestly most) pieces and stories just are not very interesting, maybe even to the artist, and that is fine. And some are interesting to just some people at some times.
Art 'speaks' to each person differently, or sometimes not at all. Art is what you make of it. If you make nothing of some forms of art, that is on you. If you make nothing of all forms of art, you may want to consider why so many other humans feel so strongly the other way.
Though pretentious, ArtAssignment on YT is a great into to the wider world of art. I really think you should give it a try:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdGqz6dgvIzbBxo7XJHnO...
"Art is anything you can get away with."
There was a recent Show HN project about generate quotes having some great results having sense : https://machineswisdom.com
I have been studying art non-professionally for the past 5 odd years now and I would be hard pressed to tell you if any one of the pictures your software generated was created by a human artist or not.
Nice work!
https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000086582.j...
It reminds me of those time slice type photos, where the bottom is when the little 'tree' on the right is young and each layer is a new year or three along the way, in which the environment gets a bit older and gnarlier over time.
Absolutely wonderful work.
http://gregorywieber.com/art/a-walk-through-latent-space-mak...
but it's still very cool, even if the site may or may not be slightly deteriorating (top banner's broke for me, wouldn't be surprised if some other stuff was too)...
"Site broke on me" - interesting I did not notice anything. Maybe because we might've used different browsers
Value is just what people will pay for it. Which is apparently, in some cases, more than 430k: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-c...
The notion of vulgarizing art is what people said about jazz when it pulled people away from the "fine art" of classical (the "swamp of jazz"). How wrong they were. I don't think people will see beautiful art, albeit generated by an AI, as "vulgar" in the future.
I do not appreciate modern art anyway, but I love this since it will for sure upset some artists that think they're talented.
http://blueboxsw.com/labs/shogun/play.cfm?S_Key_Play=281C436...
Still, I guess "art" is all subjective anyway & this is still great stuff.
https://vcloud42.com/file/art42-cdn/cubism/seed_0000213622.j...
- An interface where people select a subset of artists they like. - Build a model on the fly with art just from those artists - Get HQ high res downloads of generated art
Freemium model, with 1 HQ download free and the then $1 per download.
Or maybe it's synthetic art or simulated art.
Either way I feel it has value.
On one hand is art really art without the bullshit story of the maker that defines the art? Sometimes we really want the creator to shut up making bullshit stories and just enjoy what has been made.
On the other hand, is a AI algo really a form of being creative? Nature is an algo that creates things.
Do things have to be art to appreciate their beauty? Is art about beauty? Is art about statements?
etc. etc.
Probably all answers are personal really.