
Pikazo - peterjliu
http://www.pikazoapp.com/
======
alexandrerond
There seems to be a bit of confusion here between art and beautiful
compositions.

Art is not art because it looks nice or because it looks like something else
that is widely accepted as "art".

I see art as something produced by an artist combining genius + technique.

Genius usually implies being original, but also stating what the piece of art
represents in contrast to the existing ones (what boundaries it breaks, what
pre-conceptions it revolts against, what is its purpose (even if it's purpose
is to have no purpose) etc.).

Technique means work and expertise. Sometimes genius is so overwhelming that
there is little technique needed. Sometimes technique is so skilled that it
overwhelms genius.

The makers of this app are probably artists (there's certainly a lot of genius
involved in devising a way to produce such compositions, and work). What you
create with your app probably not art though, regardless of how amazingly
beautiful it turns out to be.

That's not to say artists may not make use of such tool to make art, but
they'll have to find ways to be original. The fact that a button can be
clicked to produce a result automatically destroys much of the artistic value
of the outcomes. But hey, it's beautiful :)

~~~
ramblerman
If a computer makes up a joke and it's funny does it count? I think it does.

Art is a lot like humor, it works for people because it just 'works'. That is
what matters. Not the hard work, and 'genius' of the creator behind it, that's
just vanity.

Would bohemian rhapsody not count as art if it was made up by a machine?

~~~
alexandrerond
No, it wouldn't count. Because then we would have some thousands of bohemian
rhapsodies. An art expression would perhaps be the whole bunch of works
together (if you managed to give them a sense of being), and the artist would
be whoever devised the program that created them. But individually, it would
be have the same art value as those pictures sold in IKEA. Beautiful yes, but
not art by themselves.

Edit: art is not art because "just works" or because it's likeable. Art goes
way beyond what just works or the search for beauty. See the Viennese
actionism for example: [http://www.theartstory.org/movement-viennese-
actionism.htm](http://www.theartstory.org/movement-viennese-actionism.htm)

~~~
riquito
> No, it wouldn't count. Because then we would have some thousands of bohemian
> rhapsodies.

The computer broke after completing the work: now does it count? I don't
understand your idea of art, isn't there beauty in the result? You give
different value if the same result has been reached by a computer, chaos or a
human?

Do you have to know how the piece has been produced to decide if it's art or
not?

~~~
pegasus
Yes. A rock that's been pleasingly shaped by desert winds is not considered
art. But if we'd later find out that it was actually a man-made artifact, it
would become a candidate for this label.

~~~
tbirdz
So then the computer software that generated the joke would be considered the
work of art instead of the jokes that were generated? After all, the software
was man-made, even though the generated output was computer-made.

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ronreiter
Is this done with the deep learning research that was published here a couple
of months ago?

~~~
nness
I was just thinking that. Seems it might be based on the description. Kinda
interested how they'd do it in a speedy way on mobile devices. Hope they
didn't just knock-off the open-source code though.

~~~
kidzik
"Stiefvater [...] described it to me as 'black magic,' and doesn’t even fully
understand how it works. He downloaded it from Github, where a computer
programmer he’s never met posted it."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/14/heres-
what-it-would-look-like-if-picasso-had-painted-the-presidential-portraits/)

~~~
qarl
Yes. That was back in September. Before Pikazo or Deepart even existed.

Let's refrain from making nasty implications about each other, shall we? Thank
you.

~~~
kidzik
No nasty implications sounds fair to me. Good luck!

~~~
qarl
Ok good.

Would you also mind retracting your claim below that we have "misappropriated"
your technology? Perhaps we're having a language problem - "misappropriate" is
a crime in English. If you honestly believe a crime has been committed, I
would strongly urge you to discuss it with us (somewhere other than this
public forum). We've tried a few times now to reach out to your team, and have
not heard back.

Thank you.

K.

~~~
kidzik
I am sorry, I didn't mean any legal accusation - it just feels a little odd
that the description of the app sounds as if you invented the technology
without ever referring to the original work.

~~~
qarl
Yeah - I think you're right - that's a fair complaint. In the original
description I had a link to the paper - but somehow that got lost in the
versioning. I'm traveling right now, give me a couple days to fix that.

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franze
Two examples:

[https://goo.gl/photos/9Ujw2Ssb5EtQyvH59](https://goo.gl/photos/9Ujw2Ssb5EtQyvH59)

[https://goo.gl/photos/oHN4PqV6CRMgvssVA](https://goo.gl/photos/oHN4PqV6CRMgvssVA)

~~~
pokoleo
Two more examples:

[https://imgur.com/a/fwrfe](https://imgur.com/a/fwrfe)

I've been slowly coming back to this app for weeks. It works well combining a
photo with a clear focus, and a patterned one.

A few weeks ago, they dropped the resolution of the photos. After seeing a
preview of what a smaller resolution one looks like, I'd be happy paying extra
for a large-sized one.

~~~
kidzik
[http://deepart.io/latest/](http://deepart.io/latest/)

------
meric
Is it using this algorithm?

[https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-
style](https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style)

~~~
antoniuschan99
Maybe not? His other app(ituens) has a link to a youtube interview:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRL9J6DoCgs&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRL9J6DoCgs&feature=youtu.be)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/joy-of-programming-
painter/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/joy-of-programming-
painter/id998696401?mt=8)

------
thristian
_Created by the image scientist behind landmark visuals seen in Myst, The
Matrix, 300, and Second Life..._

I wonder who it is. The press-kit linked on the website just says "Developer:
qarl".

~~~
tobr
Karl Stiefvater is a graphics programmer who's been involved in, among other
things, Riven (Myst's sequel) and The Matrix. He's been playing with the
neural algorithm of artistic style on his blog recently (e.g. [0]). In 2015 he
also started a YouTube series, "The Joy of Programming"[1], although as far as
I can tell only two episodes have been released.

[0]: [http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=144](http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=144)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRL9J6DoCgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRL9J6DoCgs)

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Kiro
So I guess I'm not alone wanting to do an app like this after seeing
deepart.io. Kudos to Pikazo for getting it out there. I'm sure it will be a
huge hit.

~~~
krasin
There's also [https://dreamscopeapp.com/](https://dreamscopeapp.com/) which is
on App Store for at least 3 months (may be more, I am not sure)

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GraffitiTim
I wonder if this could be the beginning of many artists being replaced by AI.

~~~
tluyben2
I don't think it is possible to replace an artist. The definition of artist,
that I could find, is recursive so that's the first problem with that.

Then the appreciation is subjective; to replace an artist you would need
something like; 'I like Rembrandt but now I like this guy instead'. I used to
like Jean Michel Jarre then Beethoven then Iron Maiden then Slayer then ...
etc. I still like all of these and can get excited when hearing any of them.
No one of them replaced the other.

So we might have MORE artists. Once we accept that computers can make art
'without' humans. I am fine with that, but this example is definitely not a
very good example. To me it looks like fancy filters.

~~~
gravity13
> The definition of artist, that I could find, is recursive so that's the
> first problem with that.

Huh?

~~~
tiagobraw
The artist is someone who makes art. The problem is to define what is art. Its
when the artist (or others) says so.

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huuu
This is scarier than I thought. For me this passed the Turing test for art.

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tanakian
well, photos do not become "incredible artwork" or "art" just because means of
expression change.

there are photos that are considered to be art, without applying such effects.
and there are photos that are not considered to be an artwork.

latter will more likely become more tasteless and ugly with those filters
applied, while former don't need such filters in order to be considered the
art.

~~~
a_ecker
Of course a bad photo doesn't become art by applying a filter. But artists
have always used tools to create art. Now they have another powerful tool that
lets them do amazing things that wouldn't have been possible a year ago.

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romaniv
Question for someone who has this app. Can this convert a photo to anime-like
or cartoon-like rendering a-la A Scanner Darkly?

~~~
alpatters
I don't know Scanner Darkly and I don't have the app. But I have done a lot of
my own images using the same algorithm as that used in the app. And, yes, it
can definitely render photos is anime or cartoon like styles.

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xinyhn
Anyone know the name of the song used in the video?

~~~
Schwolop
From the bottom of the page: "Music performed and written by Adult Fur."

~~~
xinyhn
Thanks!

