This Artwork Does Not Exist
thisartworkdoesnotexist.com
thisartworkdoesnotexist.com
Of course not all art has to be pleasing to the viewer, but confronting/challenging art is made deliberately that way by the artist, and the process of experiencing the art involves understanding the feeling and learning something from it.
It's a different feeling altogether to be discomforted by art, but for no purpose.
There's something alienating in the emotional response evoked by an AI designed to simulate human creativity, which ironically transcends itself in the relationship between a "real" and "artificial" intelligence, creating a legitimate work of art in the contemplation of manufactured emotion. You begin to question whether your response is any less the product of a blind, stochastic machine than the stimulus.
Also some of them look like spooky faces.
The algorithm could use some additional imbalance-creating modules.
Thanks for sharing this.
The textures and subtle tones, the method of craft, the interplay between mixed media, the energy (or lack of), the emotion (or lack of) etc and so on.
All of that gets lost in a 512x512px image.
Technically this is great, but I guess I am not able to appreciate the art itself... but then I get zero feeling from "real" art as well. Shrug
If you appreciate the technicality of it that's still appreciation. I'm like that with photorealism, awed at the skill of it, but otherwise unconvinced by it as a form of painting.
Some people say they are emotionally moved or mesmerised by the beauty etc. Sure I can appreciate it is a skill etc etc, but I don't understand the emotional reaction people say they have - I just see a "thing" like I see advertising boards on the street as a "thing". I wonder sometimes if people just say this stuff because they think they are supposed to.
Art also includes literature, music, movies, theater... Not sure if you also meant those.
No, other people are actually capable of appreciating art as an abstraction and of having an emotional reaction to the concepts that art conveys.
Styled after Mark Rothko, or server overloaded?
> Imagined by a GAN (generative adversarial network) StyleGAN2 (Dec 2019) - Karras et al. and Nvidia Trained by Michael Friesen on images of Modern Art
This is almost beyond the uncanny valley for me.
At an abstract level, this stuff is still derived from works done by humans.
I can't process this (at the meta level), ha ha.
Basically, the universal question, but where does art begin, and where does it end. This is in essence, taking something already abstract (I'm assuming) created at the hands of expressionists, and turning it back into something—random—
AGGGGGHHHH I can't process it!!!! ha ha
What did the painter want to do here? I don't know, I can't detect a painter to begin with.
I would take many of them and scale them up to a resolution that would work for LARGE prints, with a tool that does its own upscaling/stylish embellishing (like Dynamic Auto Painter), then work them up further in digital.
I think it's a fantastic tool for brainstorming ideas.
Anyone know the license terms for images generated by this web site?
I guess at one point, all this makes it real art, where the artwork isn't the object, but the craftsmanship is. Might be interesting to put the repo on display at a gallery.
This is what artists like Marcel Duchamp did when selling “readymades” with the conceptual art movement.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
[1]: https://thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/the-duchamp-dictionary-...
This generator of all of them seems to raise the more existential questions. What does it mean to exist? Surely art is art regardless of whether it's on a physical canvas. Just the act of generating it and serving pixels changes the state from "doesn't exist" to "does exist"...
The problem is more that you hit diminishing returns fast from training at higher resolutions. There's not too much difference between training at 1024px or training at 512px and using an off-the-shelf superresolution NN upscaler, but the latter is like 4x faster. So why bother? You don't always even have input data which is 1024px+.
http://gregorywieber.com/art/a-walk-through-latent-space-mak...
Your actual idea is much cooler.
To expand on your idea, it would be cool if every time you blinked or looked away, it wasn't a completely new picture, but the same one that is subtly changed, such that it slowly morphs over time, but only as you aren't looking. I suppose you could pre-generate quite a few steps in advance and then mete them out gradually.
For these and more, see https://thisxdoesnotexist.com
(Of the ones I've seen)
Compare to the real things: https://www.factmag.com/2016/04/20/best-post-rock-albums/
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...
Is it possible to create artwork that doesn't exist?
36x48in (92x122cm) for ~$10. It would not be too terribly difficult to just do this at a flea-market this very weekend.
The first "image created by an AI" kind of painting has already sold for a lot of money. It'll be much tougher for the next 100,000.
Or am I..
(Nice work!)
StyleGAN2 takes 512 dimensional vector as an input. Would be neat to attach some physical input device, like a matrix of dials... And encode your own painting with it :)
Surely you can hit F12? Can't test on mobile.
curl -v https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/
GET / HTTP/2
content-type: image/jpeg
...
Warning: Binary output can mess up your terminal. Use "--output -" to tellI tested this using Safari and Google Chrome and when inspecting the image element, both browsers produced different <img/> tags which I assume is because of the browser itself.
The input of these networks are all copyrighted. The closest analogy in terms of copyright is probably "collage".
In any case, the idea that you can just take some artist's life work, train a CNN on it, and then do what you please with the results doesn't seem "right".
There's plenty of case law that non-humans are not creators and cannot get a copyright. How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example? It was famous! (And funny.)
You're ignoring the fact that the inputs are copyrighted and that therefore the "non-human" is not the (sole) creator and the "work" is derived. The CNN isn't creating anything new except for random numbers.
Taken to the extreme, your position would be that any transformation performed by a computer program and involving random numbers would effectively remove copyright. That can't possibly be true, so there would have to be some "threshold of originality". Again, no case law on this, as far as I'm aware.
In effect, I believe you are spreading legal misinformation based on a flawed understanding of copyright law, which may put others in harms way.
> How could you have not heard of the Naruto case, for example?
Not really a good comparison. The "inputs" here are the monkey and the jungle, neither of which are themselves protected by copyright.
A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted. I doubt the "a monkey did it" kind of defense would stand here.
> A better comparison would be a monkey creating a "director's cut" of Disney's Jungle Book, interspersed with footage from National Geographic, both of which are copyrighted.
That wouldn't be a good comparison at all, because a human could very easily identify exactly which frames are literally copied from which copyrighted work. That's not 'transformative' at all. In contrast, if you look at the faces, most of them don't have even a remotely similar exemplar in the dataset (you can do nearest-neighbor lookups using features or pixels, and GAN papers often do to demonstrate that they are not just 'memorizing' - I discuss this in my FAQ section).
You're dodging. The inputs to the neural network are clearly the training images, they don't just disappear. The outputs are derived works, at least.
> They don't produce a copy of an existing work, any more than a human trained on looking at faces is producing a copy and 'stealing other people's lifework' (without even paying them a cent! how dare they), unless it's so similar to serve as a substitute (among other considerations).
I'm not talking about the faces, I'm talking about CNNs in general. Surely these faces all look like generic anime faces, because that's what you trained on. On the other hand, if you trained on the works of Van Gogh with his very distinctive style, that would easily be discernible.
Also, the very fact that it is not a human doing this task is very relevant for copyright, as you point out yourself.
Note that I'm not saying this is illegal or that this violates copyright, I'm saying that there is no case law on this, so you can't just claim that there is no issue here. It's undecided. It comes down to the intention behind copyright. Furthermore, even if you can dodge copyright law, you may not be able to dodge trademark law.
> In contrast, if you look at the faces, most of them don't have even a remotely similar exemplar in the dataset (you can do nearest-neighbor lookups using features or pixels, and GAN papers often do to demonstrate that they are not just 'memorizing' - I discuss this in my FAQ section).
Again, your argument fails the general case. Overfitting and memorizing is a problem when working with CNNs. Some CNNs may just literally copy - and visibly so. At which point are you not just literally copying? What's the "legal threshold" here? It would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis, just like a "fair use" defense.
Couldn't this allow the person hosting the model to claim copyright?
I am also thinking about hyper-parameter configuration and selection of training data as creative human input in this process.
Someone needs to make thisartworkdescriptiondoesnotexist.com
This is silly
But I'm pretty sure that with some meaningless verbiage generated from a corpus of art criticism (thisartcommentarydoesnotexist?) as a caption, it wouldn't look out of place in some modern art galleries and some collector would lap it up.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_ar...
I coded a verbal recombobulator that generates such statements to mock such statements. Please point your friends to it if they're ever stuck.
Sure, if you were dishonest about its origin, and that says a lot about the pretentiousness of the modern "fine art" industry.
If you told them it took 0.00001 cents worth of electricity/compute power to create both the artwork and the description from an algorithm and some random numbers, I doubt most collectors would be prepared to lap it up at any price.
At the bottom left corner it stated "sunrise" and in the top right hand corner upside down was stated "sunset" and it sold for $20,000..
Just as plausible given the motives of art buyers.
All collectors are individuals - you'd have to ask them whether/how much they are prepared to pay if they know the art is synthesized. All I'm saying is that pretending it's generated directly by a human instead of a human-driven algorithm is unethical. Whether they can tell the difference or not on their own is beside the point.
Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement.
Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art.
But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art.
This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies.
But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value?
This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography.
So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency.
But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked.
"Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor.
For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it.
For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.")
Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something.
Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different.
So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag".
You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge"
You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change."
Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?"
Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay.
But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.
Art may be about generating an intellectual response, moral response, political response, or simply an esthetic response.
What I'm asking of you is to be less cynical about what actual art and artists and be genuine in the search for meaning.
If you don't find it - no harm.
Also, the meaning in the author's own head is irrelevant. Death of the author. You can find your own. Maybe their guidance and perspective helps there, maybe not.
There's a typo here, and I honestly am not sure what you're trying to say. I will say this: I am not a modern art hater. Far from it, I love modern art, and I go well out of my way to enjoy it. My complaint is entirely with the ham handed descriptions of pieces that require no descriptions at all.
You're right, I definitely accidentally a word there, may be several.
Ironically, I DO hate most modern art, and the treatise I wrote out is a description of my own journey, and what I frequently have to consciously remind myself to allow myself to experience and feel things that I don't have an immediate connection to.
Most of the discussions around modern art is around who sells for the most amount of money. It's a numbers game, gaming galleries which exist for no other reason than to peddle crap possibly for tax reasons, and con artists posing as real artists...
I don't think that follows at all. My favourite cafe has almost perfected my morning Americano, but that's exactly why I enjoy going there. The TV series that provoked the strongest emotional response in me wasn't doing something nonrepresentational, it was doing exactly the list of tropes that you'd expect to provoke that emotion, just executed in a really polished way.
And even - especially - if we talk about pictures, there have been plenty of representational works that left me awestruck by their beauty. Look at, say, Sparth's spaceships (which couldn't possibly be replaced by photographs, even though they're "photorealistic" in some sense). Heck, look at Luis Royo, or the dragons on my college friend's deviantart. Even if you just want to talk about photorealistic oil paintings, take a look at the aeroplanes and board meetings in the China Art Museum and tell me those don't make you feel something. The things that people found beautiful and inspiring and provocative for centuries can still be all those things, and the idea that everything that can be done with representational, conventionally beautiful artwork has been is as absurd as the idea that everything worth doing in fine dining or orchestral music or classical ballet has been done.
Humans are good at pulling meaning out of noise, even when there's no actual meaning there - consider rain dances, or the face of Jesus on a shower curtain. Of course ambiguity has always been a part of art - the famous Mona Lisa smile, or a lot of poetry rests on things that can be taken in different ways by the reader. I'm sure it's possible to look at a random pattern of brush strokes and have a meaningful emotional response - heck, I'm pretty sure I've done it myself. But surely there should be some equivalent of a double-blind test; art that performs no better than a placebo should not be considered as art, just like in any other field. And I'm convinced a lot of modern art would fail that test - e.g. Damien Hirst tells a story of how he tried to deliberately do one of his spin paintings badly, but ended up with one that was indistinguishable from the others. All of the art forms I talked about in the previous paragraph have a better hit rate at provoking interesting emotions and insights than modern art (and I don't think it's just a matter of accessibility - classical ballet takes a fair bit of effort to be able to appreciate it fully). So it seems crazy that the art world is so exclusively, overwhelmingly focused on non-representational, looks-like-random-noise works.
If modern art really was just a scam, what would you expect to be different? What would it take to convince you that there's no there there?
International Art English is, from a virtue ethics standpoint, a pure waste of time and pure crap.
One can still dig the work itself, though. Forget the words around it. Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.