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Teaching Machines to Draw

research.googleblog.com

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Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#51

Post by anigbrowl »

digi_owl wrote: post #36
Saturnaut wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope you're not ascribing that notion to me, as I am unsure why you chose to introduce it to the discussion.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#52

Post by anigbrowl »

visarga wrote: post #46
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.

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

In the same way that it's possible to project meaning onto a game of Scrabble.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#53

Post by anigbrowl »

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?

Art is not a quantitative matter of skill, it's a qualitative matter of selection. I've seen crude drawings by children that had more art value than hyperrealistic oil paintings by masters of technique.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#54

Post by anigbrowl »

olalonde wrote: post #34
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.

Only superficially. There's nothing technically special about any of my paintings, and in fact I'm vaguely curious to dump a bunch of them into this algorithm and see what happens if I just start cranking out endless mechanical variations on a theme. But that will get boring and predictable very quickly, notwithstanding that I may still find it pretty.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#55

Post by anigbrowl »

bborud wrote: post #30

Everyone I know who tried it drew a somewhat small repertoire of naughty sketches. Yet the service militantly refuses to recognize even the most basic of naughty sketches. :)

I heard about that I and I want an answer on it. Why is one subject deemed off-limits?

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#56

Post by anigbrowl »

make3 wrote: post #43
anigbrowl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but I'm used to people not understanding me until much later.

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#57

Post by jxcole »

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…

TLDR: The point is to correct a known flaw with image recognition algorithms.

I'm not a professional researcher, but here's what I gather from reading other articles:

One major problem with image recognition in machines is that while they are generally able to recognize real images correctly, they are 1) Easily fooled 2) Unable to have human-type image understanding. For example, you can recognize an animated character as a human, even though you may never have seen that particular style of drawing before.

One major problem that people realized is that deep neural networks have a tendency to recognize individual facets, for example, a nose. So if you want a neural network to believe something is a human, pepper it with as many noses as you can. It knows that humans have noses so the more noses the more human it must be. Of course, if we saw an image like this we wouldn't think that it was a human because we know a human has only one nose.

To me it seems the primary thrust of this research is to generate a NN that can recognize, like a human, that if an entity has 10 eyes, it's probably not a cat. This is alluded to with the house of horrors cat photographs at the beginning of the article. You can see that when passed an image of a cat with 3 eyes, this neural network correctly removed one of the eyes to make it more realistic.

Here is an article explaining this problem: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897.pdf

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#58

Post by anigbrowl »

scandox wrote: post #38
anigbrowl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've already given you my reasons. Why not think about them for a while?

Re: Teaching Machines to Draw

#59

Post by shouldbworking »

Oh my God. This is the first time I've seen anything related to AI research that's given me a visceral reaction of terror.

This is more than just making pretty pictures, the machine understands cats and pigs in a human way. It knows how many legs and eyes they're supposed to have, and where they go. And this isn't some human made algorithm, it learned that on its own.

The language of the paper even implies that the researchers don't quite know how the machine can do it. If this is a prequel to research on strong AI humanity is completely fucked.

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