[HN Gopher] Show HN: AI-Generated Illustrations of Plants
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Show HN: AI-Generated Illustrations of Plants
Author : Yenrabbit
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-08-24 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.easyzoom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.easyzoom.com)
| sajeeb14 wrote:
| re: secret sauce, I tend to be in the 'sharing is caring' camp.
| The code for this was based on the popular notebook by
| @RiversHaveWings (VQGAN+CLIP) although I've edited it back and
| forth a few times. I usually run for a few hundred iterations (eg
| 250). EDIT: here's a Google Colab that replicates my plant
| generation:
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...
| mkl wrote:
| This is just a copy-paste of the creator's comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286869
| ryandvm wrote:
| I'm curious what the state of AI generated music is. I heard a
| quote once that "music is math for people that don't like
| numbers" which struck me as particularly insightful. All the
| things that people appreciate about the instrumental aspect of
| music are mathematical in nature (rhythm, chords, progressions,
| etc.), at least at a superficial level.
|
| Apart from vocals and lyrics (yet), it seems that AI ought to be
| particularly well suited for creating artificial music that
| actually sounds decent. Sure it's not going to be pushing any
| boundaries, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't able to churn out
| some catchy melodies.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Really? My initial reaction is to disagree, though I do think I
| understand your point.
|
| While the medium is music is purely physical, and physical
| things can be abstracted to mathematics, what do you think
| about the _generation_ /composition of music. Most music isn't
| really composed of instruments playing single notes; it's
| composed of things like phrases phrases and expressions. The
| math is just an obtuse way of representing the phrases,
| emotions, and expressions.
|
| What do you think of this perspective?
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Some sounds OK, most sounds like a series of plausible notes
| that nevertheless don't actually go anywhere. Most generative
| models tend to do OK at predicting the immediate next note,
| say, but they can't keep a macro-level structure unless you
| force that as a constraint. For me what has worked best is
| generating music and then re-interpreting that with some manual
| post-processing to get it into a less jarring form. A fairly
| recent project that is close to the state of the art:
| https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ One of my own experiments:
| https://datasciencecastnet.home.blog/2021/05/13/whistlegen-g...
| illegalmemory wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, this is cool! But in most of such projects I
| have seen is lack of continuity in generated content. From a bird
| eye view things look natural but as soon as you observe the
| content, a little closer, things start to fall apart.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Agreed. When I'm using this as part of a larger workflow I'll
| sometimes use the GAN to generate a starting point and then
| manually edit things to remove weird inconsistencies. The
| output is also quite low-res so it needs tweaking. Of course
| both problems can be avoided by making the individual images so
| small that the weirdness is hidden - as I did for this project
| :)
| lyaa wrote:
| I love these so much! How did you direct the GAN to generate
| them?
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| I made a prompt generator that creates descriptions like 'A
| biological illustration of an alien plant near sand,
| watercolor'. A model called CLIP gives a way to compare an
| image with a text prompt and then I can optimise the image to
| match the prompt
| datameta wrote:
| You've been able to get some interesting output! I've been
| playing with the following notebook: https://colab.research.g
| oogle.com/drive/1oA1fZP7N1uPBxwbGIvO... but my results are
| not quite so well put together as yours. What are some tweaks
| you've made to the model? I'd like to better understand what
| is going on under the hood.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| The big difference is the model used to generate the
| images. VQGAN (which I use) tends to look a lot nicer to my
| eye than some of the other approaches.
| popotamonga wrote:
| Game art illustrators will be the first to get replaced with AI.
| At least on non premium titles.
| totetsu wrote:
| Am I a curmudgeon for wanting to call most of these ai art
| projects ai illustration projects?
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| No, I think that's fair in this case. Most of my stuff involves
| a lot more post-processing, tweaking, editing etc to convey
| something specific, in which case I claim 'art' more liberally
| :)
| totetsu wrote:
| https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ nice stuff
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| So many talented artists! I have a couple of collections
| there - https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/johnowhitaker/creations
| has most of my experiments and
| https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/flow_jw/creations has some
| higher-effort pieces adding motion to GAN stuff.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Fantastic stuff! I love the painted over pieces (assuming
| they are painted over). The pronounced details and
| refined features almost add another level of "dreaming"
| on top of the AI nightmare. Gloriously creepy and fun.
| ramigb wrote:
| TIL AI thinks plants and reproductive organs look a like
| [deleted]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Wait till you hear about orchids.
| baxtr wrote:
| Awesome. Could you also do fruits?
|
| PS: thanks for not calling it ,,this plant does not exist"
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| I tried generating some fruit - you can see some outputs in the
| notebook I just shared (https://colab.research.google.com/drive
| /1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...). Not quite as pleasing as the plants
| but I'm sure with a bit of fiddling with the prompt we could
| get a few good ones.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered setting up a website
| at thisplantdoesnotexist.com haha luckily I changed my mind. I
| could try some fruits - let me set a smaller run going and see
| that it comes up with.
| smusamashah wrote:
| They look like drawings in Codex Seraphinianus. See these images
| https://images.google.com/search?q=codex+seraphinianus+plant...
| baltimore wrote:
| A lot of them seem to be growing out of books :-)
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| My fault for including 'nature journal' in some prompts!
| aetherspawn wrote:
| These would make a cool postage stamp set.
| skinkestek wrote:
| To me this is probably the most interesting / delightful.
|
| The one with persons is useful, this one is something I'd like to
| order as a print or maybe even as a wallpaper for my company
| headquarters (haha, it is currently <<10m2) sometime in the
| future :-)
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| I'm happy to share the original JPEG if you want to print this
| out :) I have it in A2 on my wall although at that scale the
| individual pictures are a little small.
| ectopod wrote:
| Please do, that would be brilliant.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EJofIqhvHhh2O
| a1GFokBIBIJlBg... A1 size recommended, although A2 works
| (they're about stamp-sized)
| ectopod wrote:
| Thank you, that's lovely. Many of them are reminiscent of
| the covers of 50s scifi novels.
|
| Converted to a direct download link: https://drive.google
| .com/uc?export=download&id=1EJofIqhvHhh2...
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Thanks :)
| fumblebee wrote:
| This is cool! Thanks for sharing. I've played around with some
| random Colab notebooks that have surfaced on HN but the results
| have been underwhelming compared with some of the polished AI Art
| I've seen in the wild. Some questions that popped into my head:
|
| What's your setup (Cloud/Colab/Custom hardware)? Did you borrow
| the code in its entirety or is there a secret source? How long
| did it take you to fiddle around with the hyper-parameters until
| you were happy with the results? How many iterations did you
| settle on before stopping? Thanks!
| ak391 wrote:
| there is also a easy to use web demo here on huggingface with
| some presets https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/VQGAN_CLIP
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| This is what I send to non-technical folks who want to dabble
| - thank you for making that available :)
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| It can be hit-and-miss. With a bit of trial and error you start
| to see which prompts work well to generate pleasing images.
| Some people have done excellent work exploring ways to change
| the look, like https://imgur.com/a/SnSIQRu
|
| As for hardware, a lot of my experimenting is done on Google
| colab. For this plant generation stuff I rented a GPU via
| vast.ai for ~$0.20 an hour and set it running overnight.
| fumblebee wrote:
| That link is incredibly extensive, great resource!
|
| I find the "tattoo" effect to be extremely disturbing.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| The '8k 3D' examples there are crazy red/blue analyphs. Total
| brainwarp.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| re: secret sauce, I tend to be in the 'sharing is caring' camp.
| The code for this was based on the popular notebook by
| @RiversHaveWings (VQGAN+CLIP) although I've edited it back and
| forth a few times. I usually run for a few hundred iterations
| (eg 250). EDIT: here's a Google Colab that replicates my plant
| generation:
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1b1UfblpdhPJ7f1WRjfC...
| fumblebee wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to reply to my Qs; all useful
| insights and is much appreciated.
|
| Mostly I'm excited about the direction and innovation
| velocity that AI art is going, but partly I'm anxious about
| what the eventual implications will be for human artists.
| malka wrote:
| Packaging is meh, but you can use my repo if you want to
| generate your images using the CLI, a discord bot, or an IRC
| bot with your own hardware: https://github.com/luc-
| leonard/clip_generators. It includes vqgan+clip and guided-
| diffusion models
| jcims wrote:
| I'd like to humbly suggest that you give her CLIP guided
| diffusion model a try. It's blowing my mind.
|
| https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12a_Wrfi2_gwwAuN3VvM.
| ..
|
| Some recent output (prompts are summarized)
|
| max max alien craft in the desert -
| https://imgur.com/a/1R5UZQb
|
| worshippers gather at mad max alien craft in the desert -
| https://imgur.com/a/acdbLVu
|
| vintage 70s alien spacecraft in the meadow -
| https://imgur.com/a/kwAVWG9
|
| (note these are all upscaled with waifu2x)
|
| My guess is that you've solved this already but I run it in a
| loop by replacing do_loop() at the bottom of the last frame
| with the following: import random
| prompt='crystalline alien spacecraft on a flower'
| modifiers=['',' macro photography', ' with hyperrealistic
| 35mm depth of field'] original_prompt = prompt
| while True: for modifier in modifiers:
| prompt = original_prompt + modifier seed =
| random.randrange(1000) tqdm.write(f'Prompt
| {prompt}, Seed {seed}') do_run()
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Had a play the other day - I love it! But it's quite slow,
| so for most of my experiments (which involve video and
| motion) I haven't yet found a way to incorporate it into my
| workflows without slowing things down considerably. Thanks
| for sharing though, the work she's doing is so great!
| [deleted]
| RiversHaveWings wrote:
| I have a 512x512 version now too! https://colab.research.go
| ogle.com/drive/1QBsaDAZv8np29FPbvjf...
| jcims wrote:
| Dang it! I _knew_ this existed but I couldn 't find it
| for some reason. Thank you!!! This has been a wonderful
| journey...my poor kids have been getting spammed with my
| latest incantations for the past week lol.
|
| I keep trying to think of ways to make this more
| consumable for the less technically inclined, but GPUs
| are just not cheap. I was on a V100 for probably 36 hours
| through Colab via my $9 monthly subscription, that'd run
| $100 on AWS for the same amount of time on a p3. So then
| I'd need to figure out a tip jar or something to keep the
| gas tank full.
| rapido-gato wrote:
| dumb question, but what is that loop achieving?
| jcims wrote:
| Not dumb at all. This code is at the bottom of the
| notebook cell that actually generates the image. By
| default it's a one-shot deal, this allows me to
| continuously generate images with some perturbations in
| the input to build in some variety (seed value, some
| prompt 'modifiers' that tend to have a style transfer
| effect).
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I love how the plants seem to flow into the landscape in many of
| these!
| graderjs wrote:
| Looks very alien! Great!
| psfourplusone wrote:
| Cool, reminds me of Codex Seraphinianus
| valyagolev wrote:
| check out also Algorithmic Botany, that tries to use algorithmic
| creation for research http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/
| eqbridges wrote:
| Reminds me of the work called "Herbarium" by Spanish artist Joan
| Fontcuberta:
| https://www.juanmagonzalez.com/fontcuberta/herbarium.html
| namero999 wrote:
| And to me, it reminds of the Codex Seraphinianus
| fsiefken wrote:
| and to me the voynich manuscript, perhaps this AI plant
| generation could provide an additional clue to the meaning of
| the fantasy plants in the manuscript!
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| This was one of the things that got me hooked on the idea of
| an encyclopedia for an imagined world! Such a fascinating and
| fun work.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Now we know the origins of the Voynich Manuscript.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| Hi HN, I've been playing around with AI art (who hasn't) and
| wanted to share the results of last nights run: 300 auto-
| generated plants in a big collage that you can zoom into and
| explore. My end-goal with this is to work on some sort of
| speculative biology project. GANs like the one I used here are
| great for generating nice-looking images in bulk, which could
| then be curated and refined into some sort of consistent work.
| Happy to answer any questions on how this was generated or on AI
| art in general :)
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(page generated 2021-08-24 23:01 UTC)