[HN Gopher] Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene ___________________________________________________________________ Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene Author : panic Score : 258 points Date : 2021-07-01 04:56 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (ml.berkeley.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (ml.berkeley.edu) | mattkevan wrote: | Been playing around with this for the last few days - it's | fascinating. | | 'Peppa Pig by H R Giger' produced startling nightmare fuel, while | 'Victorian Robot family portrait' was utterly charming. | corysama wrote: | I'll show you mine if you show me yours ;) | | https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o3sefy/victorian_... | mattkevan wrote: | Very similar! I got the idea from your reply to my Steampunk | space station. | | Small world, etc. | omarhaneef wrote: | There are many theories of what "real" art is: that which is | beautiful, that which powerful institutions put in a museum, that | which satisfies a particular psychological itch, that which | captures the values of our times, and so on. There are entire | courses built up on this. | | For my purposes, I am happy to say art is whatever people decide | to call art. So this is art. | | But it isn't "valuable" art, and this is not a deep philosophical | point about intention in the making of art, or the ability to | pick up human emotions or something. | | This is a shallow point about economic supply and demand: if we | can produce a lot of this in bulk -- and from this demo it seems | we can -- then in general it will be devalued. | | I think there is still a role for critics to play though, and | that part might be exciting to us old school humans still | deploying "natural intelligence." The interpretation for art is | still constrained by our ability to imbue the visuals with | meaning. In fact, we may be able to use that ability to make | particular outputs more valuable than others. | sandworm101 wrote: | Art exists in context, in its place within history. This junk | lacks any context. It's creator lacks understanding, rendering | only images without meaning. If people find them pleasant then | that's good for them. I find many trees pleasant to look at. | That doesn't make them art. | dfxm12 wrote: | If anything, it might be valuable in that a printer can have | access to "unique" designs to print and sell. Some of this | stuff (especially cityscapes & landscapes) reminds of posters | you buy, pre framed, off the shelf at home stores. The | difference here is that these images are somewhat unique, and | royalty free (assuming it is...). Once sales of a design start | slipping, roll a new image and get a new one to sell. | | Also imagine, if a printer can print different images on | demand, being able to sell a random image generated with the | prompt being your wedding day, etc. It's like printing out and | hanging your DNA sequence. A bit of you was the seed for its | creation. It's the sentimental bit that could be valuable. | prower wrote: | Is there an online interface where i can try this myself? | speedgoose wrote: | The blog post has some python notebooks links that you can use. | ArcturianDeath wrote: | The soulless retarded arcturian aliens are using dreams to | psychologically model and mind control Humans. They call it | "mental screening" where a race treats your brain like a movie | theatre and can screen whatever mental image they want. Their | purpose in choosing to initially experiment with me is to | eventually inflict their control over you. In effect, the brain | doesnt rest, I feel like I havent slept for 4 years. They can | also erase dream memory, which means its heavy programming and | fucking sketchy. They can control sleep duration. Seeing how | sleep and dream deprivation works over time, they are gathering | data on how best to use your revealed personal information to | craft dream imagery through active telepathic decoding which | causes sleep deprivation, a build up of beta amyloid plaque, | neuronal misfires causing spasm, symptoms of brain damage, eye | pain, headaches, high pitched buzzing, and cutting off healthy | subconscious processing. // The childlike-ego Arcturians are | using psychic manipulation or chemtrails to make us ingest heavy | metals to facilitate mind control of the people. // They are | playing up the concept of pre-cognitive dreams, which is simply | using imagery of the designed dream state and then using psychic | control when awake to direct attention. // Their imposing to do | this means only one thing: Control. Abusive, ruthless, and | desperate control. // They are manipulating brains like a | battery, turning information around, seeing how the response | reacts to the stimulus, playing into those concepts. Dream | manipulation is an imprisonment technique used to condition and | starve the mind. Both dream manipulation and constant telepathy | has negative neurophysiological effects, it results in headaches, | confusion, memory loss, vision impairment, rest deprivation. // | They can enact this from some distance too, its possible that | there is an active technological accelerant, a headband that can | amplify their telepathy. Aluminum foil covering or dietary intake | can amplify the telepathic reception, resulting in subconscious | dream programming being erased. // The solutions so far Ive found | that can mitigate this would be a heavy covering of the brain | stem, top, and temples with Velostat or Linqstat, and grounding | and shielding the soles of the feet. Keep a Pyrite stone on the | left side of your body. // "With repeated or continued exposure, | the increased excitability leads to a state of exhaustion of the | cells of the cerebral cortex." // Curse those dumbfucks pig- | hearts. | | Sleep deprivation accelerates Alzheimer's brain damage | https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-deprivation-alzhe... | | https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/brain-researchers-... | | To sleep, perchance to heal: Newly discovered gene governs need | for slumber when sick | https://www.medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-perchance-newly-g... | | https://www.naturalblaze.com/2021/02/healthy-sleep-habits-cu... | splistud wrote: | There goes my 3 day weekend | j4yav wrote: | I am not sure how to say this best, it probably sounds negative | but I don't mean it that way. It is really interesting because | using these tools abstracts away the talent/skills part of | creating art - you say your idea, and get the computer to keep | showing you completed pieces until you find what you meant, or at | least something you found interesting. It reminds me a bit of the | role of the DJ to do the searching and curating, but not actually | create the music. | | In fact you could imagine a musical version of this where the | operator is describing feelings or styles and the AI is | generating music to match where the operator wants to go. | writeslowly wrote: | To me it feels like AI-assisted divination. It's like staring | into clouds of smoke or a crystal ball until you find something | that looks significant, but using a computer algorithm instead. | | Divination has been around throughout human history, so it | makes sense that it would emerge again through the use of | machine learning algorithms. | api wrote: | https://gizmodo.com/an-occult-history-of-the-television- | set-... | | The spiritualist movement and similar late 19th / early 20th | century occultism can easily be re-interpreted as oblique | science fiction... or vice versa. | | The whole industrial revolution is at least culturally and | historically inseparable from the occult revival in the sense | that all that "natural philosophy" stuff was the primordial | soup of ideas from which modern science emerged. | Methodological scientific empiricism is the gold that was | left in the crucible, and it yields magic that actually | works. | | ... now back to writing obscure runes in an alien language to | instruct the daemons in the ether ... | omgwtfbbq wrote: | I wonder if its not more similar to electronic music producers. | They no longer have to learn how to play instruments and can | focus on composing so maybe artists that learn these tools can | compose art in a similar way. | suby wrote: | You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of | the craftsmanship that comes with creating art. I do think the | resulting work is still interesting, valuable, and art from a | practical point of view, though. There is perhaps a threshold | where this is not true, perhaps related to how much | curation/pruning/how indiscriminate the human is in determining | the final outcome. | | That is to say, if there is some text to image generation | program, and the human generates 1 image based on the first | phrase they thought of, that image they generated is probably | not going to be very interesting, at least based on the image | generation stuff I've played around with so far. It often takes | time and several attempts / variations on the phrasing to get | something which is interesting and novel. | | People have been finding tricks like appending the words | "Unreal Engine" onto the phrase in order to produce certain | types of results. Some people actually go into the code to | tweak things to get desired results. | | I do wonder how true this will be going forward. It feels like | this media synthesis stuff is progressing at the speed of | light, and perhaps it'll only take 1 iteration / attempt to | craft the interesting and novel stuff that we're looking for. | | So at least at the moment it's maybe not so different from | anything else. I think of it as exploring the possibilities in | a given space. I work on video game development, and it's the | same story there. If you're creating a game prototype, you | might have an initial idea which sparks development, but once | the initial seed is implemented the game often takes on and is | guided by a life of it's own, shaped by the possibilities in | that given space which you are narrowing down into a subset | which seem to work and gel together. That's how I view it | anyway. | kingsuper20 wrote: | >You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of | the craftsmanship that comes with creating art. | | Perhaps art, going forward, is simply described as the | process, not the result. | | I don't doubt that a computer could (or will) produce a | perfectly convincing Charlie Parker solo or Richard M. Powers | painting. There really was less there than met the eye (or | ear) and most of human output consists of cliches in any | case. | | My take is to become increasingly archaic and self-sufficient | in interests. Greek red figure pottery looks like a good | place to end up after the walls are filled with amateur art, | but a kiln looks pricey. | germinalphrase wrote: | 'Beautiful thing' will indeed be massively available (as it | is right now), but 'beautiful thing touched by a human' | will always remain scarce. Only the latter will be truly | considered an art object. | kingsuper20 wrote: | In that case, the value of a thing is not it's physical | reality but it's provenance. | | I guess it's no different than the high value given to a | lot of 20th C. art, it's just another form of marketing. | | Maybe this bodes well for antique prices. | songeater wrote: | >> In fact you could imagine a musical version of this where | the operator is describing feelings or styles and the AI is | generating music to match where the operator wants to go. | | OpenAI already did this with Jukebox! I'm just surprised more | people have not used it as an "instrument" vs as a novelty. | | shameless plug: https://soundcloud.com/songshtr/sets/2106-ep | smthngwitty wrote: | One downside with Jukebox: it takes ~9 hours to generate ~90 | seconds of audio (even on a NVIDIA V100 GPU) since it's an | auto-regressive model making experimentation and 'co- | creation' much harder | songeater wrote: | >> it takes ~9 hours to generate ~90 seconds of audio (even | on a NVIDIA V100 GPU) | | btw this is true if you upsample all 3 levels. I have found | in practise that you are fine upsampling 2 levels and then | using a DAW to "clean up"/"remaster" [0]... again will work | for certain sounds better than others. | | The last upsampling step is by far the most expensive. so | cutting that down cuts total time by 75% | | [0] simple hacks such as using a low-pass filter | songeater wrote: | agreed. full waveform "music" (unlike say MIDI) is just | many more variables than a "picture" or even "video". Also | you have to "stitch together" a lot of these samples to get | anything that resembles a "new" song. More akin to | mining... but still its kind of crazy what can be done with | it. | echelon wrote: | I'm not familiar with Jukebox, so maybe I'm wrong. It | seems like you'd want a fast architecture to use a model | to generate sheet music / MIDI, then layer another model | on top to create instrumentals? | songeater wrote: | >> Why doesn't the architecture use a model to generate | sheet music / MIDI, then layer another model on top to | create instrumentals? | | there are various models that do this [0]... just doesn't | have the same power to generate waveform music that | jukebox does. | | Jukebox effectively is a 2 step model a) a 3 layer VQ-VAE | compresses the music (so think of this as the MIDI | equivalent) and b) a transfomer then learns/generates | sequences. | | The compression is the expensive part of the model. | | [0] https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-generate-music- | using-a... | hutzlibu wrote: | " It reminds me a bit of the role of the DJ to do the searching | and curating, but not actually create the music" | | It very much depends on the type of DJ. But a good DJ | performing live, is indeed generating music, as he feels the | vibes of the crowd and mixes in the exact tracks fitting to | that moment. | | Not predefined track after track, but they blend in and over on | each other. | | If you do this with parts of a song from here and then there, | with a small snippet from something else - it is indeed | generating new music in my book. | | And I think alien dreams and ai generated art alike ... can | move into that direction. Generating art, by knowing the | various tools and combining them. | j4yav wrote: | I am a DJ myself, but I would still give credit to the | authors of the tracks rather than claiming it for myself | (even when it's a unique interesting combination or flow). | hutzlibu wrote: | Sure. You build up on existing art. | | Like is done here with the generated art, it probably does | not make much sense for one person to claim he "created" | and owns this image. Would be hard to judge, how much | credit goes to the programmers, the basic AI researchers, | all the people who created the input on the AI to learn ... | MayeulC wrote: | This is very interesting, I would love to play around with this. | | However, it looks like the quality of the result really depends | on the prompt, or in other words, on the quality of the training | dataset captions. | | Would there be a way to "fine-tune" the network on a smaller, | better-captioned dataset to have better control over the output? | | Can I make my own dataset and use it with few-shots learning to | expand the capabilities of existing networks? Making it better at | generating say, spaceships or fantasy animals? | adyer07 wrote: | It looks like you can - the repo for VQ-GAN has instructions | for this: | | https://github.com/CompVis/taming-transformers#training-on-c... | speedgoose wrote: | I asked for pornographic images in the prompt, and it does | generate very weird images that are more disturbing than | arousing. | taylorius wrote: | Very interesting. There is a principle with a lot of modern, | abstract art, which is that the work is not complete until the | viewer sees it - that is to say, the observer brings a portion of | the meaning to the work. This AI art seems to go one step | further, there isn't really an artist anymore, in the traditional | sense. The creator of the work is more like an observer - | choosing which output they like best. The "artist" becomes a | consumer! | redactyl wrote: | The artist was already the consumer. Whatever the medium, the | artist has to ultimately select particular things as "works of | [their] art". If I paint my bathroom and then go on to paint a | masterful painting, probably only one of those things is going | to end up in a gallery, and that relies on there being a | consumer. | ammar_x wrote: | Thank you for this article, it introduced me to amazing works. | I've been very interested in the field of GANs, style transfer, | etc. | | The best thing is the notebooks which I can play with to generate | images. I now have ~10 Colab tabs open waiting for testing :) | yreg wrote: | >It was discovered by @jbustter in EleutherAI's Discord just a | few weeks ago that if you add "rendered in unreal engine" to your | prompt, the outputs look much more realistic | | This is amazing | ankalagon wrote: | My dream is that in some years we could make a film by passing | the script as input. | datameta wrote: | A movie made using a script generated by an ML model trained on | a sci-fi movie script dataset: https://youtu.be/LY7x2Ihqjmc | akavel wrote: | Whoah, it just came to my mind it could be an interesting | mechanism to explore for procedural generation (of levels and | other stuff) in games! Does anyone know of any experimental games | already trying to do that? | corysama wrote: | Related: ArtBreeder has some features specifically for | generating starter concept art for games | https://www.artbreeder.com/i?k=f8ea23c50937080453a657514304 | hypertele-Xii wrote: | The technology doesn't scale yet to consumer hardware. It's | limited to web-accessed mainframes (like AI Dungeon) and | researchers with racks of latest graphics accelerators. | malka wrote: | You can run big sleep easily on consumer hardware. same with | vqgan if you limit output resolution. | scandox wrote: | I liked how the TS Eliot one which the author calls "sublime" was | actually impressively sophomoric. It really was like a painting | an able, shallow person would come up with to reflect their idea | of TS Eliot's poetry. | | That in a sense is uncanny and notable. | GlennS wrote: | I went and stared at the pictures for a bit after reading this. | | Not much experience of art really, but I think you're probably | right. They're all interesting pictures - but "let's assemble | some related elements in a new combination". | | I did really like "a face like an M.C. Escher drawing" though. | | Maybe this is the final form of postmodernism? "There's no | meaning here, but will you ever figure that out?" | mrspeaker wrote: | Maybe they are using the meaning of sublime of converting from | solid to vapor state | scandox wrote: | Chemical-Visual art criticism ... Could be a whole new field. | lurquer wrote: | Someone should make a game out of it. | | Create images based on a string of five random words. | | The players then guess what words made it. The player with the | most right wins. | bsenftner wrote: | Except this is not "Art" with a capital "A", it is pretty | imagery, with an interesting backstory. The technology is | fantastic, but do not get carried away - this is in no way "Art" | in the same way human constructions in a museum is Art. | | Art is a human expression of an aspect of life, a human | reflecting this aspect of life in a manner betraying a | comprehension only possible with the emotions and understanding | of a human facing our complex society, their limited frame of | reference, and describing their situation through the mediums we | call "Art". | | Art is not pretty pictures. Art is a complex, multi-dimensional | communication medium between highly complex, self aware, | comprehending entities. AI and AI generated "art" has none of | these qualities. These are pretty pictures with an interesting | technological backstory. They may be sold as art to unaware | consumers, but they are less "art" than a bikini girl poster. | heavenlyblue wrote: | It seems more like mimicry to me than actual "creativity"; | although I am pretty certain there will be a whole trend of | artists doing this for the next ten years and we will get | someone really big out of it. It could be someone like Andy | Warhol who would democratise the "fine" art and not just pop | art? For example, imagine a combination of 3D printers with | brushes and deep learning inspired paintings? These will not be | as unique as the original inspirations for these paintings; | however they would be a cheap alternative to what you can only | get as a very cheap looking art print. | bsenftner wrote: | I am in no way saying they will not be popular with | consumers, these curated AI constructions; nor am I saying | the people behind them will not hire PR agencies to promote | them and their work as serious Art. It is curation that | carries any human expression within them, and not the | generative AI art's idiot savant pooping output. | robbedpeter wrote: | The most fascinating thing about these programs is the | undeniably imaginative, dreamlike nature of the output. Spend | time actually using them and you will be continually | surprised and engaged. Any human nuance you can interpret | visually can be generated. | | There is a high level of similarity with the mechanism human | brains use to visualize things. This makes sense, because the | neural networks are being trained to approximate that very | function. | | The output of these programs is not mimicry any more than the | output of a human artist is. It's just more limited in the | computational power available to the algorithm. The space of | these generative expressions is vast, and significantly | overlaps the space of art humans are able to produce. | | Moore's law and algorithmic improvements will inevitably | expand the capability of software to produce art to such an | extent that all "human" capacities will be exceeded, for any | and all metrics and nuances you can imagine. | robarr wrote: | Ernst gombrich (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Gombrich | ) talked about a "motif in the artists' inner world" in | relation to art creation. There is not an inner world to be | represented in the case of the Ai creations. | vmception wrote: | There is no distinction of art with a capital A versus with a | little a. | | I agree that there will be challenges to broad respect of this | creation process and result, but I can see communities | gathering around specific personalities no matter what they | create. | | Similarly, the public will likely be moved by stories, perhaps | even some artists will create new poetry specifically for to | generating an image where the poetry itself moves the audience | too. | | But the distinctions you have created are not a relevant way of | articulating this path. | bsenftner wrote: | It's a different sophisticated and mysterious brush for a | human artist to use - but the AI is not generating any art. | The human curating the AI's output through their lens of | human experience is the Art. | MikeHolman wrote: | That's like saying it's not the painter generating any Art, | the gallery curating the art through their lens of critical | artistic appreciation is the Art. | Applejinx wrote: | They're all strangely intention-less on every imaginable level. | That can be unsettling. | | I've listened to, and made, a lot of music like that. When I want | to relax or think, I like music that engages me in some way but | has a sort of drift, an ambient (in the Eno sense) quality even | if it's slamming Berlin techno. It's different from the prog-rock | I grew up with, which was difficult and loaded with | intentionality. | | I ended up experimenting with music that was more generative, | doing pretty sophisticated things with a degree of structure but | without intentionality: always a random factor, a journey to an | unknown goal (typical end result: wandering around for a while) | | AI art is like that. We see it wandering around for a while. It's | getting better at picking up the trappings of identity, but | persistently lacks intentionality. | | Maybe the trick is to supply the intentionality instead of the | identity? Instead of 'creepy moat', a visual identity, make it do | a painting of "you are not going to survive and that's good" or | "thank you but I am not worthy". | | If you have to feed it words, get a poet, don't describe the | picture. | api wrote: | There's no difference between this and synthesizer music which | sounded shockingly alien when it first came out. My uncle tells | me about people going to Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream concerts | and it was virtually a religious experience to hear music so | utterly otherworldly. Techno music had similar effects when it | first hit the scene with pioneers like Kraftwerk or the Detroit | and Chicago Techno artists. | | It also came with the criticism/fear that "machines are | replacing people as musicians" which was bullshit. We just got | a new set of musical instruments based on electronics that | musicians could play and that led to an explosion of new | musical genres. | | Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines | replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a new | way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. | | This is just another new set of artistic tools. It will spawn | new art forms with their own rules and sense of technique, | aesthetics, and style. | | It's art if the artist is art-ing. | anders_p wrote: | >Photography was initially derided as "not art" or "machines | replacing human artists" too. It was neither. It was just a | new way to make pictures that spawned new art forms. | | This is one thing about progress and art, that I have found | really interesting. | | Like, how the invention of photography completely changed | painting. | | Ultra-realism became uninteresting over night, as soon as it | was possible to create perfect depictions via cameras. | | Painting, as an art form, didn't "die". Painters weren't | replaced by machines. | | Instead, artist's interpretation became more important, than | their technical ability to reproduce reality. | | We've since seen impressionism, expressionism, and more | abstract movements like cubism. | | The invention of photography ended up being a gift to art. | | And now we see artists embracing digital artworks as their | medium of expression. | | So, I guess the fear of AI and machine learning being the end | of art as we know it, might very well be unfounded. | | It looks to me, more as the possible birthplace of new modes | of expression. A reason for artists to rethink their art. | agency wrote: | I think at the moment there is an important difference that | the OP is talking about, namely the ability of the artist to | channel their intention into the work. I think even early | synthesizers offered a degree of control which even if the | results were other-worldly were still channeling the artist's | intention. At the risk of wading into the murky waters of | defining "what is art," I don't really feel like feeding an | ML model a short sequence of words is "art-ing." | | However I think you're right that in the long run these types | of technology will become another tool in the artist's | toolbox and are not in danger of replacing artists. But I | also think the OP's criticism is valid. I suppose you could | argue this is a bit like early criticism of photography as | "not art" and that feeding the model is like picking what to | photograph and how to frame it and such, but I still feel | like there is a key difference in terms of the ability to | have an intention and to have some ability to foresee how | that intention will be realized in the work. Feeding a model | inputs and guess-and-checking the results until you get | something cool does feel "less artistic" to me. | api wrote: | Intention would be done linguistically then. What happens | if you write poetry into this thing? Prose? Song lyrics? | Stream of consciousness? | | Here's an idea: freestyle rap MC with the output of the | text fed into this projected on a screen. | | Wait until the ghost hunters get hold of this shit. That'll | be fun. | agency wrote: | I think it would be one thing if these tools worked such | that with experience you gained a kind of intuitive | understanding of how your inputs map to the outputs and a | finesse in crafting that poetry for the machine. But | based on my (limited) understanding on ML models I have a | hard time imagining that is the case. These models are | complete black boxes, where a small perturbation of the | input can create large, unpredictable variations in | output. That makes me think that there is a strong "guess | and check" aspect to these creations. And I think tools | with that characteristic are limited and frustrating to | create with, because you cannot channel your intention | effectively through that unpredictable mapping of input | to output. But I have no doubt these tools will continue | to evolve in the direction of being able to be wielded | more intentionally. | archsurface wrote: | "intention-less" - agreed. Lacking in connection with anything | human. It feels like a glorified /dev/urandom. I feel empty | looking at these. I once wrote a program that iterated over | every combination of colours of pixels to create every possible | image for the specified size - similarly empty. | krapp wrote: | You feel empty because you know they were generated by an AI. | If you didn't know that beforehand, you would probably | ascribe intent to them as you would anything created by a | human, you would _feel_ something, but only because an | algorithm was pushing buttons in your monkey brain. | | That implies "connection" and "intention" aren't properties | of the art or the artist but something entirely manufactured | by the viewer. | jl6 wrote: | Netcraft confirms death of the author. | ACow_Adonis wrote: | no, that's not entirely the case. | | there is, of course, the technical aspect: the blurred | edges, the repeated elements, the relative placement of | things and unrelated objects, a kind of statistical | uniformity/ non uniformity. this is technical aspect which | shows they were generated by machine and a particular | implementation of neutral networks/ai. | | but then there's also the intentlessness that is | symptomatic of a lot of modern art, and symptomatic of why | a lot of people don't like modern art. | | these combine both aspects, and both aspects can be talked | about and discussed separately. | | To be sure, maybe one day we'll be able to consistently | generate something artistic and convincingly filled with | what our minds confuse for intent, but these aren't there | and ai isn't currently at that level, and there is a | particular property of these that make them feel empty, | just like a lot of modern art also feels empty and | intentless. | golemotron wrote: | This so true. | gwern wrote: | "Intention" is what the final fraction of a bit gap in | predictive performance feels like from the inside of your head. | | It has all the low-order correlations learned well, but there | are long-range correlations still lacking. (Think of a | detective novel where the clues are hidden thousands of words | apart, in very slight tweaks to wording like an object being | 'red' rather than 'blue'.) As models descend towards the | optimal prediction, 'intention' suddenly snaps into place. You | can feel the difference in music between something like a char- | RNN and a GPT-2 model: it now sounds like it's "going | somewhere". (When I generate Irish music with char-RNN, it | definitely feels 'intention-less', but when I generate with | GPT-2-1.5b, for some pieces, suddenly it feels like there's an | actual coherent musical piece which builds, develops a melody | and theme, and closes 'as if' it were deliberately composed. | Similarly for comparing GPT-2 stories to GPT-3. GPT-2 stories | or poems typically meander; GPT-3 ones often meander too but | sometimes they come to an ending that feels as if planned and | intended.) | | Once this final gap is closed, it will just _feel real_. Like | if you look at No Alias GAN (~StyleGAN4) faces, there 's no | 'lack of intention' to the faces. They just look real. | corysama wrote: | I have been playing with this quite a lot over the past few weeks | and posting my results on Reddit. | https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/submitted/?sort=new | | There is a small community on Reddit doing the same. They are | spread across a few subs, so I put together an aggregate | https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/top/?sort=top... | | You can play with it for free using Google Colab notebooks given | only a Google account. But, the most popular notebook is in | Spanish | https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1go6YwMFe5MX6XM9tv-c... | and so are it's instructions | https://tuscriaturas.miraheze.org/wiki/Ayuda:Generar_im%C3%A... | You can ask the AI in Google Translate to help you ask the AI in | the notebook to make some art. | | Addressing some concerns brought up here: | | Yes. It feels more like exploring than painting. Often it feels | like watching a small child draw and trying to steer what is | drawn. Like when I tried to ask for storm clouds made out of lava | https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o033x1/playing_wi... | the AI was like "No, Dad! Lava stays on the Ground!" | | But, I still believe that "It is _Art_ ". (As much as I and | everyone else hate that whole debate.) I think of "Can a computer | make Art?" the same as "Can a brush make a painting?" Unless you | are finger painting, you don't make the image. The brush does. | But, without you, the brush out be inert. Or, at least | undirected. | | With the GAN, random noise inputs get random noise outputs. | Finding interesting results is a lot of work. Much like finding | an interesting sculpture within a block of stone. "Interesting | (to humans)" being the key word that brings the humanity into the | process. | aronowb14 wrote: | wow amazing work!!! Upvoted basically every single one haha. | | The "End of Everything" is beautiful. I don't know why but it | filled me with melancholia. | | How long do you normally spend making these? | corysama wrote: | Well, that's the sign of good art :) | | It takes 2-3 minutes for an experiment to warm up. If you are | paying attention, you usually can tell it's not going well at | that point and cancel it. If it looks like it might go well, | it can take around 10 minutes to settle. I've seen a few | cases where some people got great results by letting it run | for hours. But, with long runs I've also seen more cases | where the evolution "gets bored" with where it is settling | and makes a suddenly makes a large jump that rarely looks | better than what it abandoned. | jgotti92 wrote: | Very cool, in 100 years these works will be equivalent to Picasso | etc. | | As as side project I actually started online AI art gallery | called Art Supreme. If you like please check it out: | https://www.art-supreme.com or instagram | https://www.instagram.com/ai_art_supreme/ | vmception wrote: | doubt it, it really depends on how the public is moved by this | form of creation | | not necessarily the level of discipline involved, but the lack | of discipline necessary and low barrier of entry will ensure | that the public is not interested in discerning value to these | works | | there will only be some personalities that the public gathers | around | Workaccount2 wrote: | The scandal will be finding out that some big time artist was | actually just copying works from a custom trained AI. | Broken_Hippo wrote: | The scandal will not be that they copied, but because they | lied about it, though. | | Folks already copy things made with photo editing software | and filters. It generally isn't a big deal. | jgotti92 wrote: | Exactly, there will be only some personalities or brands that | the public gathers around. | | Its quite a niche, but actually I believe that I am one of | the leaders in this space (for 1.5 years already) | stemlord wrote: | Does anyone know of any AI generated visual art that's about the | output (form and composition) that isn't complete garbage? It's | so far away from competing with the generations of aesthetic | development we see in the status quo of contemporary fine art... | stuff that's advanced enough that we need college degrees to | begin to intellectualize their effectiveness. Artworks that | better deal with power and agency and the process and | implementation of AI are another story, IMO, but those usually | manifest as films, performances, or other forms of documentation | not an AI generated thing itself. | aronowb14 wrote: | Art is quite subjective. So hard to say what is "garbage" and | what isn't. I assume this comment will get downvoted due to | that. That being said I do agree with you :). After staring an | GAN art for a year I find it is extremely "empty" and | essentially all looks the same, with very similar visual | artifacts that make them look bad. I view style transfer and | GAN art generally as "trippy artistic filters". I don't think | it's more than that at the current state of the art. Even in | images linked above me: they are cool, but do just seem to be | trippy distortions of existing things. If you like that that's | fine, but I don't think it's more than that. | | Looking at ML as a type of artistic filter though is | interesting: and does open up some interesting use cases. I | created a project in college using style transfer filters to | make a short film. I think it achieved an effect that would | have been unachievable without the ML. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE | corysama wrote: | What are paintings if they are not trippy distortions of | existing things? ;) | | I've been having a lot of fun using GANs as what I think is a | better form of style transfer. The default approach uses | noise as the initializer. But, by specifying an initial | image, you can get a result that is very similar to style | transfer, but more scene-coherent. | | https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o83bd0/portraits_. | .. | | https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o7eosf/this_is_fi. | .. | stemlord wrote: | I appreciate you adding a more technical description to aid | my inital sentiment, and thanks for sharing your vid, was | funny and you actually managed to harness style transfer | filters to achieve a particular feeling, which I haven't seen | so much | corysama wrote: | Are you asking for stuff that's not complete garbage? Status | quo? Or, advanced enough that we need college degrees to begin | to intellectualize their effectiveness? | | Within the tiny community I've been hanging out with, I like to | think some of these are not complete garbage. | | https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/oairlt/cancer/ | https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o8og8g/schizophr... | https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/obvwnh/trained_t... | https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/nvt77u/the_fall_... | https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/o57eyx/a_paintin... | https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/comments/o5i3av/bio_clockw... | https://preview.redd.it/q8kwssia9j771.jpg?width=864&format=p... | ziroshima wrote: | I've noticed that AI-generated images give me a weird, 'skin | crawling' sensation. Somewhat similar to nails on a chalkboard. | Does anyone else experience this? | handrous wrote: | Malfunctioning pattern-matching is a hallmark of mental | illness, so it makes sense than any but a nearly-perfect "AI" | system would often produce work that's creepy or off-putting, | for that reason. | rendall wrote: | I know what you mean. There is a disturbing uncanny valley, | filled with centipedes and Elder Ones | satori99 wrote: | I just spent an hour or so playing with the notebooks at the | end of the article, and it's pretty much all nightmare fuel | | https://imgur.com/a/kUDgbsH | lurquer wrote: | That second one... was 'Cthulhu' a keyword? | xtiansimon wrote: | What's creepy about AI images I believe can be traced to the | inputs. Give an AI images of people and it doesn't have the | same sensitivity to its own existence to preempt what we meat | puppets find shocking and gross. | voldacar wrote: | Yeah I know what you mean. I think "Lovecraftian nausea" is the | best way of describing it | coldcode wrote: | As an artist who uses generation as part of my art (the rest is | me) I find these images extremely cool, though I prefer non | objective abstractions. Given the technology is still immature, I | wonder if improving the technology will lead to less "art" -- | what we see currently are really imperfections in the process | rather than deliberate choices. Maybe in a few years the end | result will be more realistic and less fantastic. Will that be | better? | bckr wrote: | I can imagine there will be software to iterate on an image... | "A man. Yes, a very tall man. Not that tall. Standing in a | field of wheat. The wheat is abstract. The man is rendered in | Unreal Engine." | | > Will that be better? | | Most importantly, it will be better when it stops putting | swirly nightmare creatures in everything. Those give me the | heebeejeebees. | smusamashah wrote: | If we are calling it art. The people giving it prompts can't | certainly be attributed as artists. The machine is the artist you | own. Make it a request and it will create a painting for you. | gimmeThaBeet wrote: | Hmm, I certainly see where you are coming from, certainly a | large part of art is that, an artist really did some feat in | creating it. I am sympathetic to the notion that aspects of | modern art certainly seem value vision more than outright | skill. | | Would you say that the person who made the machine/software at | least has claim to the title of artist? | | I think about Sol LeWitt, where his main works are instructions | about installing the piece. You have works that are in | buildings and such, but then, you have works in museums, where | the way you 'acquire' a piece seems to work is a representative | from LeWitt's studio (this seems like a requirement? not an | authority, any description of the endeavor mentions how | exacting it is) helps the museum staff install (i.e. draw, | paint) the 'actual' piece. | smusamashah wrote: | > Would you say that the person who made the machine/software | at least has claim to the title of artist? | | Here a machine has memorized/trained on millions of art | works. Then you ask it make something out of what it knows | (understands?). | | This in its own right is like an artist who see other | people's artwork and creates his own out of some idea. | | If you are a good painter and I ask you to paint something | for me because I can't. I will only be claiming that idea not | the artwork you created. | | It's like GPT-3 which can write article based on some initial | idea/prompt. Can I claim the whole thing it generated for me | based on the initial prompt? I recently read that "unicorn | who speak English" text that it generated and its amazing. | It's a generated text but it's amazing. It won't be fair to | claim ownership because it was trained on millions of texts | written by other humans. | | But again that's also how writers train. They read lots of | text written by other people. If you write something for me, | you are the writer. | | This is how I think about art/text generated by machines that | learned that specific domain. | | EDIT: writing code to draw a line and then drawing a line is | different from training on millions of lines drawn by other | people to explain what a line is and then asking to draw | something that looks like a line. So to answer your original | question, we still can't say the person who wrote that | software is the artist. He can be if he feeds it his own | artwork only but that's not the case here. | scyclow wrote: | I think it's a little silly to ask "but is it _really_ art?" To | me, it feels like it's no less art than photography. | Photographers don't create the world they're photographing, but | they engage in an incredibly high level of curation to show the | viewer something unique. | | At the end of the day, anyone who looks at this and enjoys it | doesn't really care if it's _really_ art. But they'll get bored | with it eventually as they start to notice little similarities. | That is, until they find a set of pieces generated by someone | else's prompts which, for some reason, feel fundamentally | different. At that point I think the "it's not art" argument | starts breaking down. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | I've made generative art and it involves studying the | algorithms, guessing what inputs might produce good output, and | generating hundreds of tests and samples, almost all of which | are discarded without value. It takes time and skill to predict | what'll work, and touch up the result to something presentable. | | It's funny the linked article mentions "planet ruled by little | castles" specifically because I've also made those [1] using | generative methods, though in this case style transfer rather | than language visualization. | | [1] https://hypertele.fi/32c6f4c835b5e790 | scyclow wrote: | Interesting! I've also been doing a bunch of generative art | recently. That description almost reminds me of this | artblocks project https://artblocks.io/project/31 | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | The music video for Buzzcut by Brockhampton appears to use | entirely ai generated scenery. | | https://youtu.be/fsQhOCkczHQ | janee wrote: | that's pretty rad...both the song and vid :) Didn't think I'd | find some new music to listen on the drive back home from HN, | thanks haha | nonbirithm wrote: | So I'm wondering if image-based NN generation will ever run | across the same copyright issues as the source code generation of | Copilot that's becoming a hot issue at the moment. | | It's already known that Copilot was trained on GPL licensed code, | and code can easily be searched to check for copying. | | What about a neural net that generates collages that resemble | some obscure photographer's work that's under copyright? What | about determining the copyright status of a model without knowing | its source material? What will be the standard for determining | copyright violations when, unlike code, it is not possible to | coerce the model to output a near-1:1 duplicate of the original? | | And what about training a neural net on images that are illegal | to possess in certain jurisdictions? | mistrial9 wrote: | new and impressive kinds of food without nutrition; like a fancy | dance ball that never ends - no beginning and no end; like a | series of sunrise and sunset from around the world, while you | never leave a chair in a closed room. Machine, master? | dougmwne wrote: | Wow, I didn't know about this and it is definitely connected to | the prompt experimentation I've been doing with GPT-3. Incredible | images and lots of exciting paths forward to generate new styles | of outputs. I wonder how seriously this is being taken in the art | world. It seems like it could be an incredible installation in an | art museum. | pmontra wrote: | One problem with images is that where a text generator's output | could be nonsensical or ungrammatical, the output of an image | generator can be nightmarish. See the Face Like an Escher Drawing | in the article. I'm not sure I want to spend a hour looking at | the outputs of the generator to select the good images and drop | the bad ones. | Lammy wrote: | I was pretty impressed when I asked one to generate "Talking | Heads album cover" https://i.imgur.com/P5jCBsw.png ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-02 23:01 UTC)