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Teaching Machines to Draw

research.googleblog.com

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Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#31

Post by Saturnaut »

anigbrowl wrote: post #27

You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.

How is this different from a human? As humans grow, they receive input from their environment. The world around them is what feeds their imagination. Even advanced professional artists are still just using their memories and life experience to create works of art. The only difference here is that the machine has been provided a much smaller, more focused environment.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#32

Post by soylentcola »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #13

Welp those first images are terrifying. Gets much better as it goes on. :)

The quote made me laugh, although I don't know how serious they were being:

> "For example, these models sometimes produce amusing images of cats with three or more eyes, or dogs with multiple heads."

Yeah..."amusing".

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#34

Post by olalonde »

Ono-Sendai wrote: post #7

Plug of vaguely related work of mine: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44 One thing interesting about this kind of automatic/AI-generated art is that it forces us to examine preconceptions about human creativeness. What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?

It feels like a taboo opinion to hold but I do think it changes something. I remember being completely blown away by "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" (e.g. https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style). I've always thought of creativity as a process which can't (yet) be described in terms of mechanical steps.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#35

Post by anigbrowl »

wimagguc wrote: post #6

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders…

Frankly, I think there are many reasons not to do this.

1. It's not computer art. I believe in the possibility of artificial intelligence, and when we encounter it it will be so different from human intelligence that asking it to make imitations of human art will seem like an insult. We probably won't understand its art very well either at first.

2. I'm getting really tired of people racing to automate every damn thing. even if we establish an economic utopia and nobody has to work any more what are people supposed to do all day if every human activity can be performed 'better' by a machine?

3. It won't really be 'better' though, it will just be more popular because so many programmers are trapped in a quantitative mindset and thus treat every problem they encounter like a nail to be hammered in. Imitative digital technologies will always be correlated with popularity, limiting creative innovation because developers can't think of a reason to optimize for or nurture anything that is initially unpopular.

Creative prostheses that all require the same amount of effort to deploy (ie none) will be hailed as 'allowing everyone to be an artist' without requiring them to in best any meaningful time or effort in ideas that don't pay off or that fail. The result, which we are already seeing, is a plethora of new material created with little effort that is as superficial as it is ephemeral, whose volume and variety will obscure its stultifying conventionality.

This is no more art than Cheese Whiz is food. It's Art-flavored mechanical product that functions to do no more than alleviate the masses' thirst for self-actualization without any adjustment of power structures and is thus fundamentally limited to reproduction of the cultural conditions from which it originates.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#36

Post by digi_owl »

Saturnaut wrote: post #31
anigbrowl wrote: post #27

You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.

How is this different from a human? As humans grow, they receive input from their environment. The world around them is what feeds their imagination. Even advanced professional artists are still just using their memories and life experience to create works of art. The only difference here is that the machine has been provided a much smaller, more focused environment.

Yeah the whole notion about genius pulling ideas from thin air is frankly laughable. We are simply not aware of what they have read or observed in the past. Even old Archimedes was inspired by observing the rising water.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#37

Post by scandox »

anigbrowl wrote: post #27

You are teaching the computer to produce simple pictures of things that you find meaningful in response to prompts. You draw something from your imagination into the real world. You won't have built a machine that can draw until it produces a picture that it made on its own initiative without your prompt.

> own initiative

That covers a lot of ground. No-one prompts us directly to draw or tells us what we must draw. Still, something does prompt us. Something does determine what we draw. It's our reactions to those somethings that defines us.

The unanswered question is whether there is something in our nature that differentiates our "initiative" and our "reactions" in a qualitative way from what can be achieved with current computational concepts.

I think the answer to that is probably yes. But still this work is impressive and every step like this elucidates the argument more clearly, reducing it to its fundamentals - rather than to crude heuristics about what constitutes a particularly human ability.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#38

Post by scandox »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35
wimagguc wrote: post #6

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders…

Frankly, I think there are many reasons not to do this. 1. It's not computer art. I believe in the possibility of artificial intelligence, and when we encounter it it will be so different from human intelligence that asking it to make imitations of human art will seem like an insult. We probably won't understand its art very well either at first. 2. I'm getting really tired of people racing to automate every damn thi…

I think this is an anti-intellectual argument. Why would you argue against someone pursuing an idea? I don't see this as any threat to the distinction between art and mechanical reproduction.

Art has always been "ineffable" and will remain so, as long as humans have thoughts and feelings. Bad art, or lazy productions will be as ignored as ever.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#39

Post by maxerickson »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35
wimagguc wrote: post #6

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders…

Frankly, I think there are many reasons not to do this. 1. It's not computer art. I believe in the possibility of artificial intelligence, and when we encounter it it will be so different from human intelligence that asking it to make imitations of human art will seem like an insult. We probably won't understand its art very well either at first. 2. I'm getting really tired of people racing to automate every damn thi…

I hope the first AI lawnmower has a feature where when someone yells "Get off my lawn" it actually does it.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#40

Post by EGreg »

wimagguc wrote: post #6

I've read through all comments and referred docs, but no one seemed to offer much reason why we'd want machines to draw sketches. An incomplete list: * It's a different way to represent drawings. Alternative to pixels * Perhaps making it easier to render old-school animation at one point? It's a fun rabbit hole though, the many sub-perfect bicycle sketches reminded me to this project, when someone created 3D renders…

This is a scary milestone on the road to general intelligence. In this case understanding abstract concepts.

When machines learn something - they start being able to replicate it perfectly across as many machines as they want, parallelize it and execute it without mistakes more times than humans have ever done in history.

So that means - a nearly infinite glut of amazing art, jokes, music and movies. And not just that... but attacks on all our systems including reputation, trust, voting and so on.

Today our systems depend on the assumption that attackers are limited in their ability to proceed and expand quickly. How would things work if attackers were not? You already prefer to ask google more than your parents. What if software made better jokes, drawings and had sex better? And simulated emotions better?

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