[HN Gopher] The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art
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       The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art
        
       Author : jxmorris12
       Score  : 124 points
       Date   : 2022-04-22 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jxmo.notion.site)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jxmo.notion.site)
        
       | jxmorris12 wrote:
       | Hi, I'm the author of this post. I hope you all enjoy it! I
       | researched and wrote this back in January, and although the main
       | ideas are still relevant, the landscape of AI art generation has
       | changed quite a bit in just three months. Here are some important
       | new developments:
       | 
       | - DALL-E 2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
       | 
       | - Midjourney: https://twitter.com/midjourney
       | 
       | - Laion 5B dataset: https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-
       | large-scale-mult...
       | 
       | - Compvis latent diffusion: https://github.com/CompVis/latent-
       | diffusion
       | 
       | Since the field is moving so quickly, this newsletter is a good
       | way to try to stay on top of things: https://multimodal.art/news
       | 
       | Also I went on Yannic Kilcher's podcast to talk about this!
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdkenV-ZdJU&ab_channel=Yanni...
        
         | devindotcom wrote:
         | Glad you did this. I started working on something myself in
         | January as I was dabbling in it but the whole scene was
         | evolving so fast I was like, by the time I write it the piece
         | will seem like a time capsule. The survey/history style is good
         | and educational, maybe this will spur me to put out the effort
         | and do my own..
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | > _this newsletter is a good way_
         | 
         | Thank you! ...RSS?
         | 
         | Edit: same "...RSS?" is valid for your blog, at
         | https://jxmo.io/ ...
         | 
         | PS: the article: very precious summary!
        
           | jxmorris12 wrote:
           | I think this link works: https://jxmo.io/feed.xml
        
             | mdp2021 wrote:
             | Thank you!
             | 
             | In case one day you'll want to increase its use, I suggest
             | to put it at least in the homepage source (where we go
             | check if we find there a literal 'rss', or 'feed', or maybe
             | 'xml').
        
       | JJMcJ wrote:
       | Interesting article.
       | 
       | But the web page itself: the PageDown key doesn't work for
       | scrolling, though the arrow keys do.
        
       | afpx wrote:
       | There's certainly a market for AI generated art. But, of all of
       | the AI art that I've looked at, it all lacked "soul". It feels
       | like writing I've read that was generated by GPT-3 - it has a
       | very pleasant way of saying a lot of nothing.
        
       | marban wrote:
       | "Art is what you can get away with" -- A.W.
        
       | woldenron wrote:
       | It's not AI.
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | It is called in this specific sense of the term 'intelligent'
         | the entity which writes the implementation of a function from
         | some input to some intended output; the engineer which creates
         | a writer of functions from some input to some intended output
         | is said to have created an "intelligence".
         | 
         | If somebody wears a thicker coat during a "cold war", the
         | problem is not considered terminological.
        
       | spencerflem wrote:
       | It's crazy how far & fast AI art has come.
       | 
       | I still love the deep dream style tho :) Feels the most like the
       | AI is coming up with it's own art by itself for other AIs which I
       | find just the right amount of unsettling
       | 
       | Can't wait to try out the colab links later today! Thanks so much
       | for the great article :)
        
       | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
       | It's cool to see the impact colab has had here too. It seems like
       | a huge enabler in the art community of people who would otherwise
       | have tons of overhead to play around (getting and setting up the
       | machine and libraries). It's awesome that google just gives away
       | this scarce resource (gpu cycles) for free.
        
       | vullaprovarasw2 wrote:
        
       | nix23 wrote:
       | I really don't think it's art, cloud's in the sky are more
       | "creative"
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | It looks like art. It acts like art. It stimulates the senses
         | and evokes emotion like art.
         | 
         | Whatever "creative" means, either the AI has it, or it isn't
         | really relevant.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | mdp2021 wrote:
           | You missed the important point: an artistic object is a
           | concretion of a structure of meanings. It takes a proper
           | intelligence to build that - you need conceptual depth,
           | reflection etc.: you have by definition wait for a GAN.
           | 
           | To elicit emotions (per se not quite a demanding endeavor) is
           | not sufficient to be qualified as "art".
        
             | nix23 wrote:
             | That is exceptionally well articulated, fully on your side.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | AI is doing fine art now. Wait until it learns to write good
       | programs and we're doomed.
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | > _AI is doing fine art now_
         | 
         | (Not really. "Illustration", "graphics", somehow, yes; "fine",
         | maybe; "art", no1.)
         | 
         | > _Wait until it learns to write good programs_
         | 
         | ...and we will be empowered of a power almost unimaginable.
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | 1Well, I just had to be more explicit for a post nearby, so
         | I'll copy that: <<[...] an artistic object is a concretion of a
         | structure of meanings. It takes a proper intelligence to build
         | that - you need conceptual depth, reflection etc.: you have by
         | definition wait for a GAN>>
        
       | moultano wrote:
       | You all might enjoy some of the things I've made with it.
       | 
       | Tour of the Sacred Library -- A short story illustrated with
       | VQGAN+CLIP https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/tour-of-the-
       | sacred...
       | 
       | Doorways -- A series of images exploring "semantic symmetry"
       | using CLIP's embeddings to do visual analogy completion.
       | https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/08/23/doorways/
       | 
       | Depth of Field -- Exploring the scale of the Hubble Ultra Deep
       | Field image using CLIP guided diffusion to create visual
       | analogies. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2022/03/24/depth-of-
       | field/
        
         | enriquto wrote:
         | Why don't you share the exact code for these experiments so
         | that anybody can reproduce them? (and tweak them!)
        
           | corysama wrote:
           | Pretty sure Moultano's Tour was made with a hosted version of
           | the original VQGAN+CLIP method https://colab.research.google.
           | com/drive/15UwYDsnNeldJFHJ9Ndg... Though that method and
           | implementation is quite old.
           | 
           | If you want an up-to-date list of open implementations, it's
           | here https://pharmapsychotic.com/tools.html Whatever is the
           | newest Disco Diffusion has been the best around for the past
           | few iterations.
        
           | moultano wrote:
           | For the first and third, I can't, it isn't my code.
           | 
           | For the second, I have to get approval from my employer to
           | release it, but I stalled out half way through the paperwork
           | and haven't had the energy to keep pushing it forward.
        
       | krapp wrote:
       | Twitter users should consider following
       | https://twitter.com/rpgmakerai and https://twitter.com/ai_curio
       | for examples of AI art in their feeds
        
         | scottmf wrote:
         | I have access to midjourney and have posted some creations
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/scottinallcaps
         | 
         | e.g.,
         | https://twitter.com/scottinallcaps/status/151597724462738227...
        
         | yboris wrote:
         | I'm not creating it, but I can't stop retweeting all the cool
         | stuff I find: https://twitter.com/whyboris
        
         | chrisa wrote:
         | I'll add another - https://twitter.com/PasanenJenni does some
         | fantastic work by combining AI generation with more traditional
         | digital art; great stuff.
        
         | jxmorris12 wrote:
         | I have some links in the post! Here are some more good
         | accounts: https://twitter.com/advadnoun
         | https://twitter.com/RiversHaveWings
         | https://twitter.com/danielrussruss
        
       | forsythe_ wrote:
       | A couple years ago I decided to fork StyleGAN, optimistic to kick
       | the tires and just see if it would run on my desktop. I got bored
       | after an hour or two and scrapped the setup, having felt it was
       | too complex for someone with a casual interest.
       | 
       | Fast-forward to finding the link to NightCafe a half hour ago,
       | where I just had to type a ridiculous phrase for it to spit out
       | something that attempted to match my description after just a few
       | minutes:
       | https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/sPsmFbpijhePoRDwqF...
       | 
       | Still, I don't see using this for anything more than gags with
       | friends right now. But it's a solid leap forward.
        
       | seanwilson wrote:
       | > ...the main development is the rise of *multimodal learning*.
       | 
       | > Multimodal learning, in this case, is learning to match up text
       | and images. Our new models are really good at learning to write
       | captions for images, and (more importantly for artistic purposes)
       | to generate images that correspond to a given caption.
       | 
       | Can anyone explain this more? I think I recall Facebook was
       | automatically generating captions for images automatically a good
       | while ago, but this is something different?
        
         | scottmf wrote:
         | https://openai.com/blog/clip/
        
       | spython wrote:
       | I've recently had fun using VQGAN + CLIP, combined with slowly
       | zooming in, for an art project on ecology:
       | https://rybakov.com/project/metamorphosis/
        
       | holoduke wrote:
       | A year ago or so there was a video posted about an AI generated
       | video. It was extremely scary. Almost like a emotionless
       | psychopat with absolutely zero feelings towards humans. Anyone
       | remembers where to find it?
        
       | big_blind wrote:
       | I've been playing around with the Dall-E 2 website all day. It's
       | simply amazing: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
        
         | KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
         | Who do I beg to get earlier access?
        
       | julieturner99 wrote:
       | The linked post suggests that AI art started in 2015 (what it
       | labels as "early forms of AI art"). AI art goes back decades--it
       | didn't start with Google. Perhaps the author might want to look a
       | bit further back than seven years.
        
         | gwern wrote:
         | Why should he bother with such 'Schmidhubering'? Contemporary
         | AI art owes little to before 2014.
        
       | elevaet wrote:
       | I wish there were analogous tools for sound design
        
         | corysama wrote:
         | AudioCLIP has not received as much attention
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13043
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SLQVh9ABDM
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | The CLIP stuff has its downside. Much of what I see looks like a
       | collage of real images. Not so much art as graphic design.
        
       | supramouse wrote:
       | searching the same phrases on google images returns more
       | interesting "pre-generated" results
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-22 23:01 UTC)