[HN Gopher] Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene
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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
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