Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#111

Post by willvarfar » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

valentinvieriu wrote: post #4

Author Here: Just wanted to share some technical details. The code can be found here https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 The main code and modification were put together by https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2 . I've started with the pretrained ffhq model, and I've trained it using come hand picked 1000 images of cubist Wikiart paintings. The frontend is Vuejs and it's using the amazing https://github.com/Ak…

Why cubist?

Is it that that's the style of art you like?

Or that you found to work best?

It would be really interesting to see the kind of images generated when its trained with other styles.

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#112

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #93

This is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum, and anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML. Honestly I would consider buying something like this, though I'd never waste my money on something so pretentious from a human. This, however, is an achievement, and there's beauty in that. Edit: in fact, if love to see two tests: a bl…

This is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum, and anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML.

I certainly couldn't distinguish an individual images from something I might see in a museum. At the same time, scrolling the images felt very different than scrolling through a series of images by a given artist or images from a given show.

This is what an image search for cubists and wikiart looks like. Also feels very different.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNRYdV4hOBO...

Which is just to say this sequence feels different. I couldn't tell if it's better or worse. It does feel bleak, opaque, oppressive, washed-out. All that is something some art aims for. But it could just be the randomness of the pictures, like they're well-spoken words in a language I don't know.

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#113

Post by satanspastaroll » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 7:56 AM UTC

alharith wrote: post #53

dwohnitmok wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you feel that an artwork having an anonymous author substantially detracts from your appreciation of it?

No, because the art allows me to get to know the person. If an anonymous voice tells me a short story I enjoy, I still get to appreciate the qualities of the person's storytelling (almost a completely lost art these days)

Would you appreaciate these images if you thought they were made by a person?

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#114

Post by satanspastaroll » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:02 AM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #87

valentinvieriu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is a little different here. You can also put no Man Sky in the same category of procedural generated universes

I realize that. My point was that in my opinion AI in this case does not add anything more "artistically" speaking.

I'd argue nobody can add anything not a combination of other things

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#115

Post by thegabriele » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

staplers wrote: post #107

allovernow wrote: post #93

This is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum, and anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML. Honestly I would consider buying something like this, though I'd never waste my money on something so pretentious from a human. This, however, is an achievement, and there's beauty in that. Edit: in fact, if love to see two tests: a bl…

Imagine a forum of artists talking about how a WYSIWYG builder rivals anything a dev can build.

Yep, this. Think we should stick to the tech behind the idea.

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#116

Post by TheGrassyKnoll » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

iakh wrote: post #39

kengor wrote: post #27

Not trying to denigrate the amazing technical skill needed to make this thing, but from the point of view of someone who makes art, this is a pastiche image maker. I have yet to see AI generate anything that's not a combination of existing images and techniques. Probably wading into murky philosophical waters here but I reckon art needs to be more than a nice 'arty' looking image to be considered any good. If you are…

Not trying to denigrate artists, but as somebody that admittedly doesn't appreciate art, I'm still not sure how artists aren't just pastiche image maker themselves. Based on your comment, I'm not entirely clear what the difference is

(pastiche: I had to look it up)

    pastiche

  n 1: a musical composition consisting of a series of songs or other musical pieces from various sources [syn: medley, potpourri, pastiche]

  2: a work of art that imitates the style of some previous work

http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=pas...

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#117

Post by friendlybus » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #60

iakh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to denigrate artists, but as somebody that admittedly doesn't appreciate art, I'm still not sure how artists aren't just pastiche image maker themselves. Based on your comment, I'm not entirely clear what the difference is

Well said. I actually do appreciate many forms of art, but I feel that many artist (that I know) are just a mixture of regurgitators and expert salesmen. They make something random, then come up with a backstory that makes it somewhat interesting. This AI can out perform them, without the need for the ingenuous hook story.

Interpreting the random is a fair form of art. Like a sports commentator or video game mechanic.

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#118

Post by TheGrassyKnoll » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:52 AM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #97

drongoking wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually do appreciate many forms of art, but I feel that many artist (that I know) are just a mixture of regurgitators and expert salesmen. They make something random, then come up with a backstory that makes it somewhat interesting. I wouldn't call your relationship with art "appreciation". Sounds more like undisguised disdain.

I appreciate art, not artists. You seem to either have misread what I said, or are actively trying to misattribute my words.

> "I appreciate art, not artists."

  Can you have one without the other ?

  Apparently, now, you can...

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#119

Post by jsaldes » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #110

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in an office decorated by a bot is the most demoralizing experience I could imagine. I would probably go into an existential rage and start breaking things until someone more physically powerful came and subdued me.

Is your problem that you know its bot-generated, or that you think there's some flaw in the pictures? What if you didn't know that the painting was the work of a bot? What if it was just some abstract painting that someone took enough fancy to to pay to have put on a canvas? Personally, I couldn't really tell them from the human-generated wikiart pictures that seeded the algorithm. Those human-generated pieces didn't…

I'd say it depends. For me art is as much about the artist behind a specific piece as it is about the actual piece. I agree with the person you responded to. I want human feelings in my art, no matter how abstract, for it to truly speak to me!

Re: Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art

#120

Post by tomerv » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #93

This is indistinguishable from something that would be hanging in an art museum, and anyone pretending otherwise only believes so because they know a priori that it is generated by ML. Honestly I would consider buying something like this, though I'd never waste my money on something so pretentious from a human. This, however, is an achievement, and there's beauty in that. Edit: in fact, if love to see two tests: a bl…

One of the tests you describe - a classifier trained to differentiate between machine and human generated art - is exactly what the ML GAN model is doing.

The generative adversarial network (GAN) has a generative part and a discriminative part which compete with each other. The generative model creates the images that you see in the gallery. The discriminative model tries to predicts whether an image is real or was generated. When it starts failing often, we know that the generative model is getting better (of course, the details are much more complicated).