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Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

bbc.com

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Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#41

Post by inimino »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #26
inimino wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically indistinguishable by what measure? One of many we could come up with, no doubt. If an expert were to look closely at this, perhaps they would also distinguish them, by something the statistics didn't quantify. An expert forger would be trying to make a painting that is literally indistinguishable from an actual Rembrandt, which is much harder. The GP's point was that something that can fool an algorithm…

By what measure? The measure of as many experts as you can find. Copying a specific painting is a very different thing. It's hard for entirely mechanical and chemical reasons. Trying to make a new painting that blends in is much more interesting.

I don't mean copying a specific painting, but creating something that looks to human experts like a previously undiscovered Rembrandt. This would be a lot more impressive than creating something that fools a particular statistical algorithm.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#42

Post by narrator »

roywiggins wrote: post #3

If it were a -human- painting a fake Rembrandt, no matter how perfect an imitation, it would be called "a very very good imitation of Rembrandt" and nobody would claim that they'd in any sense brought Rembrandt back to life. Calling a very good forged Rembrandt a "new Rembrandt" would be pretty silly. Calling one generated by a computer a "new Rembrandt" seems just as silly. Just because it was composed by an algorit…

I am sensing this odd meme developing, which seems to be rampant in the singularity crowd, that a computer imitating a person accurately enough to deceive another human is equivalent to the person being imitated. So much so that it is even considered to have a similar value to that person. As in, "oh good, we have the computer now and we don't need to care that Rembrant (or whomever is being mimicked) is dead anymore".

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#43

Post by Dylan16807 »

inimino wrote: post #41
Dylan16807 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what measure? The measure of as many experts as you can find. Copying a specific painting is a very different thing. It's hard for entirely mechanical and chemical reasons. Trying to make a new painting that blends in is much more interesting.

I don't mean copying a specific painting, but creating something that looks to human experts like a previously undiscovered Rembrandt. This would be a lot more impressive than creating something that fools a particular statistical algorithm.

What has suggested to you that the goal of this program is not creating something that looks to human experts like a previously undiscovered Rembrandt? (With emphasis on 'looks'; they're not trying to trick forensics)

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#45

Post by nxzero »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #30
gus_massa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241 In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes…

Ugh. I see the point in general, but the eye closing is a really broken analogy, and there is a difference between a bias and a preconception.

Yes, the difference between bias and preconception is exactly what, or are you being bias?

Seriously, lookup the meaning of the terms and see if what they mean are what you believe them to mean.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#46

Post by hacker42 »

ma2rten wrote: post #16

I feel like it's misleading of them to say that a computer painted the picture. That makes it sound like all works of Rembrandt have been fed into a Machine Learning algorithm and finally the computer spit out this piece. After having watched the YouTube video, I fell like actually the picture was more or less photoshopped together from existing Rembrandt paintings. The role of the algorithms was "only" to generate t…

I'm also getting the feeling that they are being dishonest about the techniques they've used.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#47

Post by 50CNT »

narrator wrote: post #42
roywiggins wrote: post #3

If it were a -human- painting a fake Rembrandt, no matter how perfect an imitation, it would be called "a very very good imitation of Rembrandt" and nobody would claim that they'd in any sense brought Rembrandt back to life. Calling a very good forged Rembrandt a "new Rembrandt" would be pretty silly. Calling one generated by a computer a "new Rembrandt" seems just as silly. Just because it was composed by an algorit…

I am sensing this odd meme developing, which seems to be rampant in the singularity crowd, that a computer imitating a person accurately enough to deceive another human is equivalent to the person being imitated. So much so that it is even considered to have a similar value to that person. As in, "oh good, we have the computer now and we don't need to care that Rembrant (or whomever is being mimicked) is dead anymore…

It seems more that we now have a snapshot of Rembrant as he was when he died. Assuming that the man were immortal somehow, his style would continue to progress, each painting building upon the last. If this algorithm were to do that, it'd just be deviating from what we now consider a Rembrant. I don't think we'd appreciate when an algorithm spitting out pictures akin to Picassos Rose Period suddenly decided that Cubism was more his thing.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#48

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

howlingfantods wrote: post #22
ma2rten wrote: post #16

I feel like it's misleading of them to say that a computer painted the picture. That makes it sound like all works of Rembrandt have been fed into a Machine Learning algorithm and finally the computer spit out this piece. After having watched the YouTube video, I fell like actually the picture was more or less photoshopped together from existing Rembrandt paintings. The role of the algorithms was "only" to generate t…

I used to paint old masters portraits as a hobby (including Rembrandt). I think it's a bit disingenuous to describe this as 'painting'. On top of ma2rten's criticism that it basically photoshopped previous examples to create a most representative work, I'd add that 3D printing with texture is not painting. Rembrandt, in particular, was known for painting with countless layers of semi transparent glazes to give his pa…

The 3D printed element is the least interesting part of the process because it's literally superficial. There's no reason you couldn't set up a robotic brush painter next to a robotic pigment factory to recreate all of the above.

However - what's interesting to me is that the only way to make this work was by defining the features that were going to be included, analysing and averaging them separately, and gluing them together to create a whole.

This wasn't a "Throw everything into an RNN and see if something useful falls out" project. It deliberately separated specific target features.

That works well for an artist with very consistent and narrow clothing, lighting, and background choices, and limited model poses.

It might not work so well for artists who included a much wider range of imagery - which is probably most of them.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#49

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #43
inimino wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean copying a specific painting, but creating something that looks to human experts like a previously undiscovered Rembrandt. This would be a lot more impressive than creating something that fools a particular statistical algorithm.

What has suggested to you that the goal of this program is not creating something that looks to human experts like a previously undiscovered Rembrandt? (With emphasis on 'looks'; they're not trying to trick forensics)

They don't seem to have asked a lot of human experts for input. I think if they had done, the finished article would look different.

In fact it's nearly impossible to nail down provenance of any painting without an historical paper trail.

Auction houses regularly pay academics to make statements about provenance, but the statements are always questionable if there's no definitive record of sales and ownership.

Re: Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt

#50

Post by anonymousDan »

z3t4 wrote: post #44

It would be cool if we could upload a photo and then have it oil painted by a computer in Rembrandt style.

Yes, and I imagine it would be a short step to having e.g. your portrait painted in the style of an artist of your choice for a fraction of the cost. I wonder could there be any intellectual property issues arising from this down the line?
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