
This AI is bad at drawing but will try anyways - corysama
http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways
======
jyriand
Every time I look at AI produced pictures, I feel discomfort and uneasy. These
pictures are like a scene from a perfect nightmare.

~~~
ttul
I feel discomfort reading “I feel discomfort and uneasy” because discomfort is
a noun and uneasy is an adjective.

~~~
jstanley
You can both "feel discomfort" and "feel uneasy", so I think it works.

~~~
green_on_black
No. You see:

    
    
        void feel(x: Noun)
        void feel(x: Adj)
    

"discomfort and uneasy" is actually an instamce of the superclass of Noun and
Adj, but there is no overload for that so it doesn't compile.

~~~
diegoperini
With better heuristics and fuzzy logic, our IDEs should detect and handle such
usage without hassle.

~~~
Filligree
I suspect that sort of autocorrections would be AI-complete.

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matthberg
It would be great to have an art gallery, digital or physical, devoted to ai
produced media. They could run exhibits highlighting different strategies, or
have awards for creative or accurate results.

~~~
EGreg
Unlike real art, computers can produce a trillion unique works an hour. This
will apply to all forms of art in the future, including stories, music and
movies. So where is the scarcity?

~~~
hrnnnnnn
Scarcity matters if you regard art as a commodity to be bought and sold.
Otherwise I don't see why it's important.

~~~
bklaasen
I recommend John Berger's "Ways of Seeing", available on YouTube.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing)

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notfed
Generate them yourselves:

[http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/](http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/)

~~~
eigenloss
It looks like this webpage has been overwhelmed at this point.

~~~
hhjinks
Absolutely nothing happens when I type something in. Perhaps their GPU
allowance ran out.

~~~
ealhad
The server is not properly configured.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS)

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blt
(two comments in this thread:)

> _What always fascinated me is how those images look almost exactly like the
> hallucinations you get on some psychedelics... The AI must be pretty close
> if they can already match the output of a confused human brain._

> _Traditionally, with computer generated stuff, you could clearly see the
> math in the algorithms (the sine waves and fractals and whatnot). With AI
> generated stuff it looks... natural... It 's a computer no longer letting
> you see how he thinks._

The paper "Deep Image Prior" by Dmitry Ulyanov et al. gives compelling
evidence that the _structure_ of convolutional neural networks already encodes
strong knowledge about the appearance of natural images, independent of any
specific _parameters_ (learned weights). Independence from parameters means
it's independent from what task the network was trained to accomplish, and of
the training algorithm.

This helps explain (IMO) why a neural network with "wrong" weights (meaning,
the training process did not fully meet the goal of the project) still
produces images that like plausible activations of the human visual cortex,
rather than harsh mathematical patterns. The convolutional network structure
is biased towards natural-looking images.

paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10925](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10925)
third-party blog post: [http://mlexplained.com/2018/01/18/paper-dissected-
deep-image...](http://mlexplained.com/2018/01/18/paper-dissected-deep-image-
prior-explained/)

~~~
bobmarley1
The connections between Neural Networks and the human brain are superficial at
best and it's unwise to abuse the analogy beyond it's limit. The author's make
no such claims and I don't think you have the standing to either.

~~~
blt
yeah I did not intend to claim anything strong about that. edited my comment
accordingly.

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alwayseasy
Interestingly, Christie's will sell an AI generated painting in the coming
weeks. They come from a French startup who seems to create "better" (at least
more pleasing) results [https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-
between-t...](https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-
artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx)

~~~
pavlov
There's an obvious blotchy feature grid in all of the images generated by the
French team. They don't look like paintings in technique at all, but only what
they are: automatic collages of randomly blended pieces of photographs from
old art.

The CAN images in that same Christie's article are much better, quite
beautiful. But the author of CAN is full of shit in this interview answer:

 _> ‘An interesting question is: why is so much of the CAN’s art abstract? I
think it is because the algorithm has grasped that art progresses in a certain
trajectory. If it wants to make something novel, then it cannot go back and
produce figurative works as existed before the 20th century. It has to move
forward. The network has learned that it finds more solutions when it tends
toward abstraction: that is where there is the space for novelty.’_

The algorithm has grasped that art must move forward, so it paints abstract?!
Or could it be that feeding random numbers into a black box neural network
algorithm is never going to give you a human likeness... No, it must be that
the AI just doesn't _want_ to be Rembrandt.

With bullshit meters at this level, the next AI winter must be just around the
corner.

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jwilk
Link to AttnGAN without the tracking junk:

[https://github.com/taoxugit/AttnGAN](https://github.com/taoxugit/AttnGAN)

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chisleu
I typed in "modern art" and it looks about right.

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ChrisGranger
I tried using the same phrase several different times and got different
results, so it appears the system is not deterministic.

~~~
minimaxir
That’s how GANs work: trying to make sense of random noise (with maybe a hint)

~~~
pingiun
You can deterministicly make sense of random noise

~~~
arketyp
The point is that the GAN is trained to model the "probability distribution"
of the descriptions it's trained on precisely so that the concepts are
generalized and can be synthesized/extrapolated. Once trained, you may fix the
random seed so that the same description would generate the same image.

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Peaker
And this is why they need human brains in The Matrix

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joewee
This reminds me of the scene from the Matrix when they question whether the AI
knows how to replicate the taste of human food “maybe they couldn’t figure out
what chicken taste like, which is why chicken taste like everything.”

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY)

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montenegrohugo
This was not a good idea to read at work. I tried to control the giggle but
still coworkers noticed and I had to show them.

It's hard not to anthropomorphize the neural net and have a little bit of
pity/laughter at its struggle to paint even remotely accurate pictures

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sandov
They'd make good album covers.

~~~
vividmind
That was exactly my first thought!

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BrandoElFollito
The level of our AI capabilities today means for me that

\- we must not give it any decision making abilities because they will fail
terribly on some mundane task

\- SkyNet is not for yommorox, or the day after

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EB66
Fear and Loathing in AI.

~~~
drawkbox
_We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs
began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit
lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar
all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping
and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an
hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus!
What are these goddamn animals?”_

 _Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring
beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you
yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and
covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your
turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the
shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor
bastard will see them soon enough._

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freeflight
Kind of sad it only recognizes English.

Which makes me wonder how useful it would be to use different languages for
teaching ML about the world?

Maybe an understanding across different languages might help it differentiate
between objects with more accuracy? Tho, I'm probably making this sound far
more simple than it actually would be.

~~~
bobmarley1
All the Major AI conferences are published in English, are you concerned about
that as well? English has long been established as the lingua franca of
Science, it's not discrimination it's just reality.

~~~
freeflight
I didn't say anything about "discrimination"? I was merely pondering the
possibility that cross-language reference might increase the learning
potential of ML.

If it can compare between different language models, then likelihood
interpreting the right way could be increased. Google seems to be doing
something like this with for Google translate, using Bible translations [0].

[0] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-
goo...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-google-
translate-spitting-out-sinister-religious-prophecies)

------
dluan
its not as fun when when you can kind of backwardsly induce how limited the
training data set is, e.g. when I tried

> a dog on a bun on dog on a bun on a dog on a bun on a dog on a bun on

or maybe I've completely misunderstood it and in a way it's passed my art
turing test?

------
aogl
Perception of real life may not be what you think it is.

Visual information processing is the visual reasoning skill that enables us to
process and interpret meaning from visual information that we gain through our
eyesight; perhaps this is not the same for all of us and is well illustrated
with this AI example?

------
johnsonap
I'd make prints of some of these for my wall

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derekp7
Is this the graphical version of Markov chains?

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analyzethis
Reminds me of what my kids are drawing.

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adultSwim
"try"

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fake-name
Why the fuck does this link to the amp version of the site?

Change [http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-
at-d...](http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-
but-will-try-anyways/amp) to [http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-
ai-is-bad-at-d...](http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-
drawing-but-will-try-anyways) and it actually loads and looks proper.

~~~
corysama
When I posted my experience on mobile was the opposite. AMP page loaded fine.
Non-AMP, no images or text at all with multiple refreshes. Don't know why.
Non-AMP looks fine now.

~~~
larkeith
AMP is nonfunctional with Javascript disabled, non-AMP works fine for me.
Perhaps regular page got slightly hugged?

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jaytaylor
I liked it up until the "subscribe for more" plug at the end.

    
    
        I .. ended up with way more than would
        fit in this one blog post ..
        Enter your email and I’ll send you them
        (and if you want, you can get bonus
        material each time I post).
    

Why so stingy about it, author? Force me to subscribe for more funny AI pics?
Rather than simply posting the content in a followup article. Right. Then you
wouldn't be able to collect all those e-mail addresses and subscribers.

Probably doesn't qualify as a full-on dark pattern, but I am annoyed enough to
say that I dislike this approach.

Is this Web 2.0, 3.0, or higher? I'd like to go back to the 1.0.. anyone got a
D/L link so I can reinstall the good version?

~~~
yeukhon
Some people are shady af. Author should come here and explain.

~~~
chucksmash
This isn't a dark pattern, it isn't shady af, and the author should not be
called to the rug to answer for it.

It's just someone trying to build an email distribution list for their (side?)
gig. Feel free to enjoy the content without opting in.

~~~
yeukhon
Oh please. It’s a clickbait at best from my angry engineer tone. It’s shady
because the person lure people in to read it and then at the end just day
“btw, if you want to see them? Send me your email!”

How is that not shady marketing? This is bad press. Bad article. This is
killing reader morale. We should not encourage people like this to build their
gigs. I felt I wasted my time reading this in the first place.

~~~
monadgonad
> How is that not shady marketing?

Because you’ve already seen the good content! This blog highlights the most
amusing/weird examples of stuff generated by AI. This particular post has 17 -
I counted - examples. They’re not presented as a listicle or one-by-one
slides, there’s not an advert between each one. This is exactly the sort of
content we should be encouraging.

~~~
yeukhon
No. I disagree. Just because it has 17 examples doesn’t mean it’s not a
markrting strategy.

~~~
monadgonad
I didn't say it's not a marketing strategy, but it's really not shady. Again,
you've already seen the best content. The rest is an optional, barely-
mentioned extra.

