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Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

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Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#21

Post by tlack »

nsxwolf wrote: post #14

What I never understand about these things is ... what actually does the drawing? The AI decides what the beetle looks like, at what level of abstraction? When/how does it go from beetle idea to pixels? Does this network "know" what the beetle's "leg" is, or does it just "know" "this pixel here should be this color"?

From what I understand there are two networks in a GAN like this one.

One (the discriminator) is trained with a bunch of images showing what beetles can look like. It detects a real or fake image of a beetle.

The other (the generator) is just generating images with a convolutional neural network. The generator optimizes itself based on how close it is to passing the discriminators test - that is its "loss function".

So over time, the generator gets better and better at making things that look like beetles. The process takes a very long time and is aided by many GPUs (as mentioned in the article)

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#22

Post by belforn »

_fullpint wrote: post #16
nsxwolf wrote: post #14

What I never understand about these things is ... what actually does the drawing? The AI decides what the beetle looks like, at what level of abstraction? When/how does it go from beetle idea to pixels? Does this network "know" what the beetle's "leg" is, or does it just "know" "this pixel here should be this color"?

Much closer to the latter. I haven’t read this yet, but it sounds like an encoder model.

Correct.

The machine here doesn’t even know that those are beetles (because nobody told it), it is “just” arranging pixels in a similar manner as the pixels from the source images. It does understand that each generated image must have “legs”, “eyes”, “shells”... and other features that it detected are common in the original images.

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#23

Post by nbardy »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #13
ArtWomb wrote: post #10

This is a beautiful write-up. And I don't wish to detract from the author's work. Nature's result side-by-side with that of the Machine. Makes one feel as though we've taken a step backwards from Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Consider the "morphogenetic puzzle" of a bi-valved seashell that shuts with perfect water-tight seal. There is a constraint to this design: survival! https://twitter.com/A…

Reminds me of video game art: every game has two sets of art, the “real” art which is part of the mechanics of the game world, and the “pretty bits” which dangle off the game objects and try to trick you into believing there’s more to the game world than there is. A lot of gameplay involves testing for this boundary... Trying to figure out whether you can actually do things that are implied by the art. Are there any…

Deep Rock galactic. If it's not all game objects its damn close.

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#24

Post by hayksaakian »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #13
ArtWomb wrote: post #10

This is a beautiful write-up. And I don't wish to detract from the author's work. Nature's result side-by-side with that of the Machine. Makes one feel as though we've taken a step backwards from Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Consider the "morphogenetic puzzle" of a bi-valved seashell that shuts with perfect water-tight seal. There is a constraint to this design: survival! https://twitter.com/A…

Reminds me of video game art: every game has two sets of art, the “real” art which is part of the mechanics of the game world, and the “pretty bits” which dangle off the game objects and try to trick you into believing there’s more to the game world than there is. A lot of gameplay involves testing for this boundary... Trying to figure out whether you can actually do things that are implied by the art. Are there any…

Minecraft?

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#25

Post by chaosmachine »

belforn wrote: post #8
mensetmanusman wrote: post #6

I had the thought of how obfuscating this technology could be to hide information. Imagine this going off and publishing an unlimited number of images with generated descriptions that are indistinguishable from what a human would do. There would be no way to verify what the correct information is if you are someone just casually searching the Internet. (This could also almost apply for any type of information...)

-> https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com All of the dynamic content on each listing is generated via a series of different machine-learned AI models.

"The laundry are converted into a mini central heating for every guest."

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#26

Post by dllthomas »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #13
ArtWomb wrote: post #10

This is a beautiful write-up. And I don't wish to detract from the author's work. Nature's result side-by-side with that of the Machine. Makes one feel as though we've taken a step backwards from Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Consider the "morphogenetic puzzle" of a bi-valved seashell that shuts with perfect water-tight seal. There is a constraint to this design: survival! https://twitter.com/A…

Reminds me of video game art: every game has two sets of art, the “real” art which is part of the mechanics of the game world, and the “pretty bits” which dangle off the game objects and try to trick you into believing there’s more to the game world than there is. A lot of gameplay involves testing for this boundary... Trying to figure out whether you can actually do things that are implied by the art. Are there any…

> Are there any modern games where 100% of the art exists inside the game world?

Baba Is You

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#28

Post by copenja »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #13
ArtWomb wrote: post #10

This is a beautiful write-up. And I don't wish to detract from the author's work. Nature's result side-by-side with that of the Machine. Makes one feel as though we've taken a step backwards from Alan Turing's "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Consider the "morphogenetic puzzle" of a bi-valved seashell that shuts with perfect water-tight seal. There is a constraint to this design: survival! https://twitter.com/A…

Reminds me of video game art: every game has two sets of art, the “real” art which is part of the mechanics of the game world, and the “pretty bits” which dangle off the game objects and try to trick you into believing there’s more to the game world than there is. A lot of gameplay involves testing for this boundary... Trying to figure out whether you can actually do things that are implied by the art. Are there any…

In Lone Echo, a VR game, you can grab any and all surfaces with your hands.

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#29

Post by eskimobloood »

Would be interesting to see the result trained on images from this book[1] about mutation on insects in the chernobyl area.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Heteroptera-Beautiful-Other-Images-Mu... [2]https://atomicphotographers.com/cornelia-hesse-honegger/

Re: Show HN: A beetle generator made by machine-learning zoological illustrations

#30

Post by lopmotr »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #6

I had the thought of how obfuscating this technology could be to hide information. Imagine this going off and publishing an unlimited number of images with generated descriptions that are indistinguishable from what a human would do. There would be no way to verify what the correct information is if you are someone just casually searching the Internet. (This could also almost apply for any type of information...)

If that was going to be a problem, people would already be generating fake numerical data like material properties, physical constants, statistics, or whatever that's also subtly wrong. You don't need machine learning to do that.

This fear of fake information from ML misleading everyone is ridiculous and kind of arrogant. It assumes that the world is full of "other people" who are too stupid to make decisions for themselves and usually concludes that "us smart people" have to somehow control what they see to protect them from themselves. We've had fake information since forever and we've developed systems to deal with it. Citing sources, trustworthy organizations, multiple sources agreeing with each other, people pointing out mistakes, Google favoring popular sites, confirming it yourself, etc. Some fake information still gets through and it is a problem but it already happens and the world keeps turning. For casual internet searchers who don't care how reliable their information is, let them believe whatever nonsense satisfies them. They aren't trying to be right, they're just entertaining themselves.

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