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Teaching Machines to Draw

research.googleblog.com

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#41

Hi, I'm the author of this work. Happy to take any questions.

Thanks for the article! It's really well written, and shows so many different applications and insights from this work. What I really like about models that fit a low-dimensional representation is that you can really "see" what the neural network learned by tweaking it or doing interpolations, arithmetic operations, etc. Awesome!

A bit of a shame that most commenters on HN are focusing on more metaphysic discussions and the eternal "This is not AI. You are just [insert something that people considered AI 6 months ago here]."

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#42
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…

[deleted]

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#43
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…

Are you kidding. No one is saying this should replace art. It's just an experiment in generative algorithms. It can though have interesting applications in assisted design, which I bet you would say is not art either anyways.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#44
The article fails to explain where the human inputs came from

The input sketches look a lot like the doodles that people sketched in quick draw (o)

If true that they reused this data I commend their resourcefulness and their clever way of turning data entry into an unaware fun game

(o) https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#45
post #8
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…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that it would be in the same vein as teaching a child to draw; you don't start by teaching them how to draw like Van Gogh. I'd assume that Google is going to up the complexity once their neural network reaches a certain milestone. Imagine 20 years from now and you have a humanistic robot drawing with your child at the kitchen table à la iRobot. It's interesting to think about,…

GANs are capable of generating full color images from semantic space and it exists already, it's not a thing from 20 years ahead.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#46

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.

It is possible to sample from the latent space and generate original drawings.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#47

We already have plenty of machines that draw, they're called printers. That aside, I don't see the novelty in a machine drawing, other than a nice display of programing.

Classification is the central paradigm in machine learning. It maps complex input signals into a limited number of classes. But now we have algorithms that do the opposite process as well - we can generate from latent representations images, video, text and drawings.

Having both ways to encode and decode is useful for interfacing with models and visualizing their internal states. It also leads to unsupervised learning of representations. Instead of generating simple labels, now we can generate very complex data.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#48
post #45
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that it would be in the same vein as teaching a child to draw; you don't start by teaching them how to draw like Van Gogh. I'd assume that Google is going to up the complexity once their neural network reaches a certain milestone. Imagine 20 years from now and you have a humanistic robot drawing with your child at the kitchen table à la iRobot. It's interesting to think about,…

GANs are capable of generating full color images from semantic space and it exists already, it's not a thing from 20 years ahead.

> … a humanistic robot …

That's what I was referring to happening in 20 years. :)

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#49

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.

Motivation. A machine that has its own motivation will produce work we won't like and will be attacked for it (I'd like to mention that I stand with sentient machines against stupid humans when that day comes, BTW).

You think art is just some stimulus-response thing because American psychology has been mired in behaviorism for decades and lacks a coherent theory of mind. But art is much more than the whimsical reproduction of presented stimuli to varying levels of accuracy, it is about making selections that foreclose other possibilities and which embody a certain perversity.

I paint, among other things, and one thing I especially enjoy about painting is that it's solitary rather than performative so I don't have to interact with other people while I slap colored goop onto sheets of fabric. While I'm painting, I think intensely about the part I'm working on now, (duh) and also why I'm making that painting, and what decisions about the painting are coming up that will be impossible to undo.

Why did you paint this and why did you paint it this way are questions that cannot be answered by automation. Nor does the answer lie in technique. There's no shortage of technically astonishing work that is semantically empty; I die a little every time I see a Facebook video of some impressive new graphic technique that is then used to reproduce some lowest-common-denominator pop icon for maximum recognizability. There's no feeling there and the resultant work is about as thrilling as a robocall or a display mannequin. The level of craftsmanship is very high indeed, but the level of artistry is close to zero. In short, it's eye candy that never activates anything much past your visual cortex, or at most tugs on some existing semantic relationship.

When I talk about feeling, I mean the desire of the artist that the work embodies. That isn't something that comes along after a certain level of technical accomplishment has been reached. It is what motivates the act of creation in the first place.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#50

Hi, I'm the author of this work. Happy to take any questions.

It seems that you use children development stages as inspiration for AI development. Can you explicit your approach?

You can also see my question as a rebuttal to the "it is useless" argument.

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