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Comment by mfi | Hacker News Reader

I just finished my latest project, building an AI art installation at home, generating 100 % unique artworks on the fly. Just push the button below the screen and another one will be displayed. When the button has been pushed, the old artwork is deleted and can't be retrieved again.

Setup:

* An Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX was used for all logic, machine learning inference, art kiosk GUI etc.

* A StyleGAN was used to generate the artworks, trained on ~5k images of abstract art.

* A passive infrared sensor (SR602) was integrated with the Jetson to reduce screen burn-in. When no movement has been detected around the installation within a pre-defined threshold, the screen shuts off until movement is detected.

* A custom control box was built, encapsulating most of the electronics.

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Interesting! I built a generative art frame based on "{Shan, Shui}" by Lingdong Huang

https://dheera.net/projects/einkframe/

but also planning to use it for neural-net based generative art. I wasn't planning on putting a NX in it though, I was thinking of just keeping the Pi Zero in there and have it do all computations in "the cloud" or on a Nano/Xavier box sitting elsewhere on the same network.

I'm currently working on a 3-panel version of the above:

https://imgur.com/a/3IfKpb3

I didn't make my own frame though, I designed the dimensions and had it custom-built by a frame company, which was surprisingly affordable.

That is amazing!! I actually looked into buying an E-ink screen for this project, but decided not to due to the cost and the lack of compatibility.

Was the E-ink screen simple to work with?

As long as you get the HAT, yes. I had to desolder the header and solder on a 90-degree header to get my low-profile layout, that was a pain. They weren't able to ship me a HAT without pins soldered :(

The documentation is sparse but they do have one C++ demo example and that's pretty much good enough as a reference to do whatever you want.

One thing I will caution is to NEVER unplug or plug the display while the board is powered on, I fried one display by doing that, but Waveshare was nice enough to replace it for free one I got a hold of some employee's WeChat.

This is more interesting to me as I'd never suspect it was generated art.

Yeah that was what I was going for, guests who come would not even know that there are electronics in the frame, and suddenly the art would change every now and then.

Requires drilling a fat hole in the wall to send the USB cable down behind the drywall but meh, needing to patch drywall when moving out isn't the end of the world, usually if you chat up the maintainence folk you can get some extra paint of exactly the right color and spackle/paint it yourself.

What would be amusing is gaze detection such that the art would change only when someone wasn't looking for a while, and then maybe only "advance the scroll" an inch or two.

>> Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX

Curious -- since you're only doing the inference/generation on the frame, and since you're not doing it all the time, did you need a Jetson or would an RPI have sufficed? Did you test inference speeds across different edge compute options?

Yeah I think the way I'd do it (personally) is have an RPi constantly generate new images in the background and cache them until storage is maxed out, then when you hit the button it just fetches the next image from cache.

That would allow the frame to be somewhat lower power and also decrease ventilation requirements -- no fan needed.

Is it me or is this more of a woodworking guide than an AI art guide? I only see a small blurb to put AI art code here. Presumably the button/replenish image dir. is a seed component to the AI. I suppose that further removing the art generation from the installation diminishes the magic of art. The engineer in me would further trim this down by pre-generating art on a PC and slap it on an SD card plugged into basic picture digital frame. Or dispense with storage and connect it to Wifi to poll AIArtAsAService.com.

The difference between this project and a digital photo frame is as you’ve described - The AI generation. I think the destruction makes it special too, if every unique image disappears forever at the click of a button.

Ok, so this is cool as fuck.

I don't think much of the actually produced art, but the fact that you laid out your whole process makes this drool-worthy. Now it is just a challenge as to- can I do better?

Great job.

Nobody could include more individual photos in the how to.

This one has how many gazillion photos?

Oooh, next step is to create an AI picture frame that generates images based on the photo documentation of its own creation.

Glad you like it!

Of course you can! Give it a try and share it afterwards ;)

This is really cool! I'd love to seed the GAN with my own artwork and generate new pieces in my style

Thanks! Depending on how many artworks you've created, it might be difficult to train a GAN network on them (due to overfitting). What you might try is to train one network with a lot of random artworks, then use a Style-transfer network to convert the generated pieces into your style.

couldn't you use something like style transfer to take your own artwork's style and apply it to the generated art?

Yeah exactly, that's what I meant!

do you have the code for training ? i wasnt able to find it in your repo. That would be so cool!

I left it out as I wanted people to use their own generative art. Here's the implementation I used: https://github.com/taki0112/StyleGAN-Tensorflow

Hey thanks! so just put your pictures and run the python script ? and we can take the model and drop-in replace in yoru code ?

Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, I used that repo to train the NN. Then I modified and reduced the code to only include the generative part, and that is what I added to the Kiosk-code.

Do you actually want to disseminate your work and have many other people try it? Or is that not actually a goal.

Right now it really feels like this isn't a priority. Which is fine.

But if it is a priority that other people replicate your work, I'm not sure you're making this as easy for people as possible.

My intension is not for people to replicate my work (the trained GAN-network), but rather supply a tutorial over how to build the installation. Then people can add their own generative art/code. It could be ML-generated, or traditional "code-art".

this comment seeded an interesting idea! Many artists and photographers want to get into the NFT space but they don't necessarily have experience in digital art creation.

If you could leverage AI to generate digital art based on real artist/photographer inputs, perhaps you could create a nice little marketplace business.. or maybe just a simple AI generator plugin for an existing marketplace..

Most artists (with some exceptions) want to have nothing to do with AI generative art. They will simply continue to produce art the way they do with older technologies such as paints and brushes, musical instruments, film equipment, writing tools, and so on. Art making involves a process, a state of mind and there's always a human behind it who digests everything around them and spit something out. All these imitative AI art are beautiful in their own way but really have no substance; once the wow factor weans out they won't have much of a leg to stand on in my opinion. Art making is a self discovering journey at the same time.

Having said that, I'm curious and somewhat excited to see how these will evolve. As I said, I find them beautiful. As a painter myself there is nothing out there that will make me not paint. Sure, I sometimes use tools but there's always the me in there who is in control or driven by my human instinct.

As someone who has been a part of the demo scene in the 90s I find this offensive.

Generative art can be a wildly creative process on par with anything a painter works through. It's just a different medium.

The way you express yourself through art is not threatened by people choosing other ways using different tools. Painting did not become obsolete because someone invented art photography.

I do agree with the sentiment about NFT 'artists' though. Copy pasting a colab notebook, replacing a string and selling the result as NFT is just idiotic.

I wonder who the bigger fool is. The one who sells or the one who buys.

Demoscene Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Wired article about the demo scene from 1995 https://www.wired.com/1995/07/democoders/

A lot of what we call "art" now means just "pleasant picture". I could see AI "art" competing on price with stock pictures and cheap illustrations for throwaway/placeholder usecases, or when uniqueness is preferred.

It's already happening with social media profile pictures for instances. Next up could be the filler artworks in hotel rooms.

That's good insight. I am not an artist but I've also run this idea by a friend who is. He loves the idea and is curious what a technological interpretation of his work might look like. He's also interested in how we might use those interpretations to create a new segment of collections for this brand.

Everything is a remix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd-dqUuvLk4

Made by humans and that is key. They digest what came before and spit out something else, a remix as you call it but which does veer in different directions over time

i don't know any real artists who actually want to get into the NFT space, only con-artists.

Thats what I am thinking about, what kind of images to train on

Or seed it with XKCD.

Really beautifully done. Thank you for sharing it with us!

Quick question: can you use the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX to train a model? Or can it only be used for inference?

Awesome! I'd recommend running your cables behind the drywall, the look is very clean!

Yeah, that would've been optimal, but it's also a lot more work, so I decided to use cable channels in the end.

What country uses those round black outlets?

Red countries on this map: https://world-power-plugs.com/plugs-outlets-types

I'm from Sweden :)

Cool installation! What was the process of obtaining the 5k abstract art images?

I scraped them from various art websites.

Why not use the artworks themselves as a screensaver?

Cool project. How much does this setup cost you?

Hmm, I think The Frame 32" was about $500 and the Nvidia Xavier NX costed as much (including import taxes etc). The other stuff (cable channels, screws, MDF etc) was probably around $50. So a total of around ~$1050.

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