Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

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

#51

Post by gglitch »

fghrthtb wrote: post #40
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…

Well, not entirely. Imagine a perfect replica of Rembrandt's brain connected to an artificial body, a painting produced by this machine would be a Rembrandt. Now imagine reducing the correlation between the artificial brain and Rembrandt's brain until you reach the level of correlation to that of the machine described in the article. There will be a precise point where the paintings produced by the device will stop b…

Not sure why you're getting downvotes. Sure, the argument comes off as sort of sophomoric in the face of the indisputable fact that there was an actual Rembrandt and this painting was produced neither by him nor by a low-fidelity replica of his brain; but I think it's interesting to think about. If we wanted to get real sophomoric, we'd apply the Ship of Theseus/Heraclitus/Lucretius line of thought to whether even a Rembrandt is a Rembrandt: is what I made yesterday made equally by the me of today? Cross-pollinating the brain-replication discussion with the multiverse discussion is pretty wild to think about: what is a copy of a dynamic thing?

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

#53

Post by Retric »

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 will admit this has the same freaky uncanny valley eyes as a Rembrandt painting. So, if they can leave the program alone and produce and endless stream of these things it is different than a single physical imitation.

However, I suspect this was highly supervised, and curated aka they picked the best example. So, it's much closer to a painter using a new brush type than an independent thing.

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

#56

Post by sp332 »

50CNT wrote: post #47
narrator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cubi…

The computer didn't learn how to paint or even compose or even choose subjects like Rembrandt did. With the help of a team of experts, it assembled premade parts of Rembrandt's earlier paintings into a fancy collage under tight constraints. The heightmap algorithm was probably more interesting than the one that made the picture.

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

#57

Post by sp332 »

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.

It's not the case that randomly-generated weights will not have biases. The point is that if you generate weights randomly the computer will still have biases, you just don't know what they will be.

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

#58

Post by sp332 »

mirimir wrote: post #6
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…

Yes, it's more accurate to say that they have an AI forger. Maybe some money in that ;)

They just have to teach it to sign the paintings ;)

If anyone hasn't see F for Fake, I highly recommend it.

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

#59

Post by sp332 »

Animats wrote: post #24

It's an impressive achievement. But compare the computer generated image[1] with a real Rembrandt of a similar subject at high resolution.[2] Compare the detail in the neck ruff. Look at the iris of the eyes. (Why do Rembrandt's people have no eyelashes?) [1] http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/950/cpsprodpb/4B28/production... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Johannes...

I think your first link is not high-res enough. I don't know why but the website breaks the image into tiles: www.nextrembrandt.com/static/img/painting/painting_XX.jpg where interesting values for XX are 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 33. (Full range is 01-40 inclusive.)
Post reply on HN