
1SecondPainting: Generate abstract paintings in one click - wimpypistol
https://1secondpainting.com/
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captn3m0
I got this one, which doesn't look abstract: [https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/8.png](https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/8.png)

~~~
codegladiator
Compare with this [https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/5999....](https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/5999.png)

:)

~~~
flixic
I got this: [https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/3046....](https://1secondpainting.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/07/3046.png)

Even simpler. Blank canvas.

~~~
mzzter
I mean, it is similar to some actual pieces of abstract paintings where the
texture makes the piece.

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mensetmanusman
Cool!

Please use this technology to make a 4K video of an infinite zoom through the
art.

i.e. generate an image frame, zoom in 1% near the center of the image, re-
anneal the art to fill in missing resolution, repeat.

It would be analogous to the infinite exploration of the Mandelbrot fractal
set.

It might help us intuit the black box of the algorithm as well if it reaches
some periodic local minima and keeps reproducing the same art sequence.

~~~
ellis0n
If zoom is possible, depends by method of generation

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d--b
There is definitely a recognizable style of NN-generated art. It looks
"piecewise-consistent". After a few years of seeing these I find them really
boring and unpleasant to look at.

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jakear
Many would say the same of the artists the NN’s mimic. Perhaps they’re doing
better than you give them credit ;)

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lokl
I think AI is currently able to generate images I find pleasant to look at,
but they have no impact on me beyond that momentary enjoyment. It is still
decoration and not yet art, according to my personal definitions.

When I can tell an AI to make an image about the Spanish Civil War and it
produces Guernica, then I will be impressed in the way human artists impress
me. And then we will have a powerful new tool to communicate. I would like my
own personal Guernica each day to help me learn about something happening in
the world.

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jameslk
This doesn't sound like it would be unrealistic. I think this can be partially
solved by two systems: one that paints and one that finds the best painting to
match a current event (in the form of a topic). The latter system could be
trained on a set of paintings and corresponding topics or meanings, and then
uses this training to match newly generated paintings to topics/meanings.

~~~
dropofwill
There are definitely people working on this sort of thing. I recently read
this conf paper on generating modified flags based on a topics (e.g. Cyprus +
peace):

[https://cdv.dei.uc.pt/ever-changing-flags/](https://cdv.dei.uc.pt/ever-
changing-flags/)

Maybe not as technically exciting, as a super generic NN, but I think projects
scoped like this are useful to think about.

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raziel2p
Judging by the URL of the images themselves these seem to be pre-generated,
which makes me think there might have been some human selection process to
filter out the badly generated ones.

Still some really cool looking art in there, though. I'd be perfectly happy
hanging some of these up in my apartment.

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synnick
The language on the landing page suggests that every time you click Try Now a
new image is generated.

> Click the button below for an AI-generated abstract painting. Built for
> artists, developers, and hobbyists.

Really though there is a gallery of around 10,000 pngs on a Wordpress site.

Fake it 'til you make it!

~~~
growt
The fine-print at the bottom explains it: "On a Tesla T4, it takes on average
0.173 seconds per novel generation." I don't think you can expect someone to
pay for T4 instance 24/7 for some hobby project.

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glenstein
>I don't think you can expect someone to pay for T4 instance 24/7 for some
hobby project.

That's a needlessly uncharitable interpretation of what is happening here. The
site is giving the misleading impression that these images are generated on
the spot, and then walking it back in the fine print.

It's a valid criticism, and lecturing people about the economics is not a
charitable engagement with that criticism.

~~~
pdabbadabba
That seems backwards. I think GP's point that the critics on HN are themselves
being uncharitable towards the site (or maybe just missed the explanation) by
acting like it's a nefarious bait and switch, rather than considering the
possibility that the author of the site is just trying to save on computing
costs.

He or she's not lecturing anyone about economics. In fact, if we want to talk
about charity, I think _that_ accusation is about the least charitable thing
I've seen so far on this thread!

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sofal
The title literally says "generate abstract paintings in one click" and it is
not doing that. I clicked on it expecting it to generate abstract paintings in
one click, and now my disappointment is uncharitable?

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pdabbadabba
First of all, my post was quite clearly interpreting a prior comment, not
making a claim of my own about whether anyone should be disappointed.

But since we're here: the gnashing of teeth on this thread about having been
"mislead" _does_ seem to me to be a bit out of proportion. This person really
_does_ seem to have developed a cool toy that uses AI to generate convincing
abstract art, but many here aren't saying about it because they object to some
of the wording on the landing page!

It's their own fault, of course, for writing the page the way that they did.
But still...

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glenstein
I think people are just making a normal, perfectly correct and reasonable
observation that the description was misleading, because it really was.

But the hallmark of many internet comment threads is to try and get additional
mileage out the conversation by subjecting said reasonable observations to the
ritual exercise of switcheroos, contrarianism, idiosyncratic distinctions and
unusual interpretations. Which leads to the original wisdom being repeated,
which makes it seem like it's being blown out of proportion.

But I think the simpler explanation is just that it's a correct observation
and that it's not that complicated.

~~~
pdabbadabba
Fair enough. FWIW, when I originally weighed in, this conversation about the
description being misleading was way up at the top of, and seemingly
dominating, the entire thread. But I'm glad to see a bit more discussion about
the actual work up top now.

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valentinvieriu
Congratulations on the project! This looks very similar to my project:
[https://art42.net](https://art42.net) I've used the higher resolution model
1024, and I also chosen to generate the picture in advance. It's expensive to
generate them realtime.

~~~
wimpypistol
Thank you. I love the clear, intelligent user interface of your site - it's
given me a lot of inspiration for future projects. Keep in touch!

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ChrisGranger
[https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/](https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/)

~~~
jahnu
[https://cecinestpasunepeinture.com/](https://cecinestpasunepeinture.com/)

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fareesh
This isn't live/dynamically generated, but if it was, what would be a good way
of architecting it in a basic implementation? Say you keep the WordPress site,
do you then just send a request to some endpoint that is served by python
which keeps the model in memory for quick responses?

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lostmsu
When I was doing AI lyrics, I just ensured that the same seed generates the
same text. So server just pregenerated several thousand texts into a queue,
which you drain from instantly upon a click to get random.

The generated texts are then cached, and if not visited for a while - expire.
But thanks to the ability to regenerate the same text from seed are still
accessible from URL.

[https://github.com/losttech/BillionSongs](https://github.com/losttech/BillionSongs)

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Keverw
Very cool! Wonder how the copyright works on this sorta stuff. Since you fed
your AI with actual images of other people art... but a art student would
study other people’s art too. So not sure if AI would be seen as a copy or a
derivative work. Seems like if you were designing a game and needed random art
to fill frames on a wall could be cool to use these. But I feel like the legal
part of doing that might be a little murky and unclear and probably even
varies by country since still a very new technology.

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wimpypistol
Definitely something I considered while feeding it a tremendous number of
famous paintings (Rothko, Pollock, etc). Considering the nature of random seed
generation/traversing through latent space, I don't see a strong legal case to
be made for infringement. The law has done crazier things, though, so I'll
keep an eye on it.

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fxtentacle
This appears to reuse NVIDIA's StyleGAN network, just like artbreeder.io which
was previously on HN. If I remember correctly, NVIDIA's terms don't allow non-
research use.

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coldcode
As a digital abstract artist who also does generative art, I find making the
tiny images sort of funny. How about making a 30x30 inch painting? If it takes
1 second to make a tiny 250 pixel image how long would it take your system to
make a 9000x9000 image?

~~~
wimpypistol
Certainly a good point. Unfortunately, the output size is constrained by the
training data (which in this case was ~800x800px). I think it would be kind of
a pain to find 14,000 9000x9000 images, though, so I don't know if this will
ever be able to fulfill this requirement. ;)

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itronitron
I'm curious to know from the people commenting on this thread that they would
buy one of these generated paintings whether they would still be interested if
the paintings were artworks made by people. I'm guessing that there are two
distinct markets here.

~~~
op03
2 is a very small number. Peoples personalities and needs vary wildly and are
ever changing. And there will be some artist sitting somewhere catering to
some unimaginable combo. Thats how we end up with a gazillion Youtube videos.

On the otherhand look at Netflix (or Tiktok though I am less familiar with it)
where there is more sophisticated feedback loop deciding what content get
produced. They are generating Art, so much Art that personally speaking, I can
barely remember who the creator was or what the creators story is. And I have
no problem paying.

Yet obviously there are a whole bunch of people very very different from me,
part of huge fan clubs and movements built around connection with the creators
and their narratives, much like sports fans, political junkies and religions
people.

So who knows, we might get a cult or two or seven hundred following different
Algos soon.

The number of those cults (and markets) possible is dependent on the
personalities and needs distribution of the population. Zuckerberg probably
can generate the data. But it changes like the weather everyday. With love,
with war, with age, with depression etc etc etc. Where Art is concerned its
definitely more than 2 though.

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estsauver
I really like this as well, and would love a higher resolution generator. I'd
definitely put a few that were generated on a wall.

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bowmessage
Just pipe the output to an upscaling ai like
[https://letsenhance.io/](https://letsenhance.io/) /s :)

~~~
maze-le
Why is this downvoted? Chained and piped AIs will probably be the next step
towards building ever more powerful AI systems. There is even a framework to
chain Machine Learning outputs and use other systems to improve:
[https://singularitynet.io/](https://singularitynet.io/)

~~~
Hard_Space
Commercial site requiring immediate sign-up.

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ryankrage77
Very similar to [https://art42.net/](https://art42.net/), which has a larger
selection of images (10,000+, whereas 1secodpainting has only 9989 pre-
generated images).

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stevehiehn
Where is the 'order now' button? I'm not even kidding, I would put some of
these prints on my wall!

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ivalm
They are all very low res. Not sure there is a networks out there producing a
few hundred megapixels needed for a good large print.

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oseph
Neat. I made my own abstract painting generator a while back, and is
admittedly much more low-tech and produces mostly similar results. It doesn’t
pull from a set of pre-existing images either ;)

[https://holinaty.com/generative/sketches/?name=029_AutoPaint...](https://holinaty.com/generative/sketches/?name=029_AutoPaintings)

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jimbob45
If I hung any of these in my house and signed them with random names, no one
would be able to tell that they weren’t organically made.

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itronitron
That really depends on how you create them. If it's a print then no one would
care and it would likely fade out after a few decades. If it's painted on
canvas then you've just made yourself a painting so might as well sign your
own name :)

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SergeAx
It made me think about couple years old trend of style transfer using GAN:
"make your selfie look like Van Gogh". Generating abstract painting may be
reduced to transfering average style of several abstract painters onto random
seed image. But then it should be a trivial task, even possible to do client-
side, no GPU.

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alexmingoia
I think it would look much better without the colored border, or any border.

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MarkLowenstein
Gorgeous! Would absolutely pay for most of these. Best thing though: this is
the first software I've ever seen that advertises "in one click" yet really
requires only ONE CLICK.

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destory-everyth
Can you put an thumbs up / down counter for each image and use the human
preferences collected to refine the model further ?

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ellis0n
Cool things! I did a similar project and generate tons of art.

Here is art samples
[https://www.instagram.com/likeplus.plus/](https://www.instagram.com/likeplus.plus/)

Full HD samples [https://imgur.com/a/XMnMi](https://imgur.com/a/XMnMi)

Generated in real time low res or seconds for HD on iPad

~~~
wimpypistol
These are gorgeous! Great work.

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voisin
Very cool. It would be great to be able to output to various resolutions for
printing/framing.

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newswasboring
I would like to know how people are judging these painting. I have no
knowledge or understanding of abstract paintings. To me the only criteria
seems to be does it look "organic", but organic to me is just "not completely
random".

~~~
nabla9
As Marshall McLuhan said: "Art is anything you can get away with." (and Andy
Warhol later quoted him).

Art is cultural phenomenon and modern art is even more so. You have to study
painting and modern art to be able to judge it in context.

In the quality of modern painting is almost completely path dependent and not
absolute in any way. Some of those cheap decorative paintings you see on hotel
wall would have been masterpiece for artist who sees the style first time in
1920's. Today art critic would not look twice at them because they are just
lazily copying style.

Modern art scene is just like any scene. Just because it's usually done by
adults and rich people are attracted to it does not mean it's any more or less
valuable, or more or less sophisticated than some other scene.

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wolco
The novelty factor (1920 style looks cheap now because it is copied) is the
gamication engine of this scene.

You have to be told this is good by an accepted thought leader who was
accepted by previously thought leaders. Meanwhile everyone stands around and
pretends to say something but are really trying to copy others.

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daiyanze
This is amazing! Does it mean that our modern artist can utilize these AI
paints to create more abstracted and imaginative pictures?

I'll be glad to see that happen when those paints are ready to be sold on
Sotheby's or Christies. :D

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tentakull
I'll never not hate purely procedurally generated art and art projects.

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e_tm_
It isn't abstract art if it is generated from a deep net.

The emotion and intentional abstraction of imagery no longer exists.

However, a deep net can absolutely generate more literal artworks, such as
portraits, scenery, etc..

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jgotti92
There is also quite interesting website [http://www.art-
supreme.com](http://www.art-supreme.com) which claims to be the world's first
AI gallery.

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bilater
Similar to 9GANS: [https://9gans.com/](https://9gans.com/)

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keyle
At first I thought this would be very gimmicky but I'm impressed.

Any way we can could actually get a print version?

~~~
wimpypistol
Thanks for the input. I'm working on adding print functionality as we speak -
let you know when it's up.

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boskonyc
Very few of these look like paintings

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runeb
Add a pain brush plotter to this and it could get pretty interesting

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ilsel
artbreeder.com is the true king of it's bunch at the moment.

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jbverschoor
So should every author of the trainingset be attributed?

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zquestz
Any place to get high res versions of these?

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kingkawn
Makes a good point while missing the point

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sabujp
i seem to be getting the simple gray box quite frequently

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bananaface
Tax avoidance has never been easier

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curiousgal
inb4 a French student steals the model and makes a fortune selling this
artwork in an auction.

~~~
wimpypistol
Hmm.. I may or may not speak French. Thanks for the idea.

