[HN Gopher] AARON: AI Art Generator from 1973
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AARON: AI Art Generator from 1973
Author : smusamashah
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-04-05 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.katevassgalerie.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.katevassgalerie.com)
| peppery wrote:
| For those in (or soon traveling to) Southern California, the LA
| County Museum of Art is now featuring a lovely computer art
| exhibit that includes physical outputs from Harold Cohen, among
| other works from algorithmic luminaries of art:
| https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/coded-art-enters-comput...
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Can someone explain how this works? Read the article and have no
| clue.
| rhplus wrote:
| "AARON cannot learn new styles or imagery on its own; each new
| capability must be hand-coded by Cohen."
|
| So... not AI?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Artificial Intelligence != Machine Learning
|
| More precisely, ML [?] AI
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Isn't AI just a fancy word for a ton of if statements?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _So..._
|
| Simulating intelligence - is AI
|
| That new capabilities must be hardcoded just means the AI is
| not "general".
| jrmg wrote:
| When I was studying AI at university 20 years ago, there was a
| running joke in the AI department that things were AI until
| they worked reliably, then they became Computer Science and the
| AI folks never got the credit.
|
| Like the best jokes there was a grain of truth to it: novel
| search algorithms, expert systems, heuristic systems, fuzzy
| logic etc. were all 'AI' to begin with. The field really only
| means trying to get computers to behave intelligently. But
| people want AI to be somehow mysterious. The current large
| neural networks are inscrutable enough that the joke may be a
| reached its limit now (I'm not sure of that though...)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _inscrutable enough_
|
| The "problem of transparency" is also relevant to checking
| that the solutions proposed by the AI system actually are
| "intelligent".
| tjr wrote:
| Decades ago, it was common that "AI" specifically referred to
| rule-based, symbolic systems. If you were working on "neural
| networks" then you would explicitly say so.
| smusamashah wrote:
| This used to be downloadable on windows as a
| screensaver/standalone version. Here is the gallery of images it
| made https://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/static.html The
| windows version can be found on Archive[1][2] and it works fine
| on Windows 10. Generated images are stored in temp dir in text
| format. Made a tool to view and save them in JavaScript[3].
|
| Images generated by this are very coherent and artistic. You have
| to try this yourself to witness it. Obviously the windows version
| is not the full thing but it does create people, plants, walls
| with paintings on them and does this very well.
|
| 1: https://archive.org/details/AARON-2-0-01420
|
| 2: https://archive.org/details/kurzweilcyberart_aaron
|
| 3: https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/Kurzweil-CyberArt-AARON-
| Image...
| totetsu wrote:
| Wow since that page was made we've come full circle on " your
| web browser is not Java-enabled"
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _His creation of this program grew out of what he has described
| as his need 'to understand what art is'_
|
| Is not this in a way also the approach of Marvin Minsky?
| abbassi wrote:
| [dead]
| amyres wrote:
| There's a good book from 1990 with lots of detail, history, and
| examples of AARON and Harold Cohen's work: Aaron's Code by Pamela
| McCorduck. Recommended reading for anyone into generative art, or
| more generally the intersection of computation and art.
|
| Out of print, but available second-hand on Amazon:
| https://www.amazon.com/Aarons-Code-Meta-Art-Artificial-Intel...
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| I first learned of AARON 20 years ago, when prints were being
| handed out at a Lisp conference in New York. (Harold Cohen
| switched from C to Lisp so that he could add colour to its
| artwork.)
|
| There's a lot more information about AARON on its web page:
| http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/publications/index.html
| andion wrote:
| What an interesting conference! Thanks for sharing
| [deleted]
| ris wrote:
| Only tangentially related, but I think it would be fascinating to
| see an image-generating model trained only on imagery from before
| a certain date.
|
| Or, for that matter, a LLM only trained on content before a
| certain date, presumably exhibiting attitudes of the time.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'd say that's very manageable; there's open source tools and
| datasets to train a tool just like that. I do wonder if
| generators like dall-e would generate different results then,
| that is, if you ask it to do a work in a certain style without
| any other style in its databases.
| TomWhitwell wrote:
| I'm intrigued by how he achieved the hand-drawn sketchy line
| style look in his early 80s work when so much computer art was
| geometric lines or Mandelbrot sets
| retrac wrote:
| Some of them seem to have been drawn with a plotter.
| amichal wrote:
| I saw several plotter-based AARON demos in the 90s. It was
| interesting and the sketchy line style was nice but not
| itself impressive. There were many add-ons to CAD software
| for instance to render drawings in various "hand drawn" looks
| for reviewing drafts with clients or delivering them as part
| of the visualizations. I even remember a pen plotter that my
| dad had that had thick highlighters in some slots for doing
| color elevation renders
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