
Artbreeder – Extend Your Imagination with GANs - etaioinshrdlu
https://artbreeder.com/
======
joelS
Hey! this is Joel, the maker of Artbreeder (originally called ganbreeder). The
project was inspired by interactive evolutionary algorithms and novelty search
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s))

The goal was to make a tool that reflected the collaborative and explorative
aspects of creativity. Also to make GAN's (and high-dimensional spaces more
generally) accessible to everyone in a fun way.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

~~~
j4nt4b
Awesome work! I love this concept, but I'm a writer who's interested in
collaborative generative writing. Do you know of any efforts to create
something similar for writing, such as poetry or micro-fiction? If not, I'm
curious if you could point me in the right direction for putting something
like that together.

~~~
joelS
Hey, thanks! I dont know about anything collaborative and for writing.
[https://aidungeon.io/](https://aidungeon.io/) Maybe collaborative to play.
And then there are a lot of writers exploring fine-tuning text models like
GPT2 for personal use.
[https://twitter.com/MagicRealismBot](https://twitter.com/MagicRealismBot) is
one of many examples. [https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fine-tune-
gpt-2-so-you...](https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fine-tune-gpt-2-so-you-
can-generate-long-form-creative-writing-7a5ae1314a61)

Maybe you should make it!

~~~
j4nt4b
Thank you!

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weeb
This is really interesting and fun!

One bit of UX feedback - I played about with children, cross breeding and
editing genes and never figured out a mental model for what interactions
caused a derivative image to be previewed vs being used to update the current
seed image.

Clicking on images often saved them, though I'm not sure what that means for
me, the user. Do I need to save a child image in order to derive from it? Even
if it's just an intermediate result I want to play with? When I breed images,
I see the image on the left is updated, but it doesn't seem to update the seed
image being used in the 'Children' tab, or the genes available for editting? I
ended up saving and then re-opening images as a relatively safe workflow, but
it would have been a lot clearer if there was more UI feedback showing me
what's a preview and what's an input at any point.

All those questions were rhetorical btw, just talking through my user
experience :)

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stekern
This is a super-cool project. GANs are extremely interesting to experiment
with in a creative manner. One thing I often miss in these websites, however,
is what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of GAN visualization -
namely, a video feature for showing latent interpolations. I guess this is
often skipped because inference is done server-side and there's (naturally)
limits enforced to avoid excessive use of resources.

In that vein, I've created a webapp [1] that runs entirely client-side using
TensorFlow.js, and let's you generate videos of latent interpolation, images
and tweak with parameters using a less-conventional generator trained on many
different datasets.

[1]:
[https://www.thispicturedoesnotexist.com](https://www.thispicturedoesnotexist.com)

~~~
joelS
Very cool! Artbreeder does have an animation tool, just go to create ->
category -> animate

best, joel

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panzer0
As a game master, it's basically an infinite source of NPC portraits and some
are even PC-worthy.

~~~
citizenkeen
Right?! If only I could reliably get elves, orcs, dwarves, etc.

~~~
tsukurimashou
you simply need to find a relatively big database of those and train a GAN
against it!

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syntaxing
This was much funner than I expected and the results were really impressive. I
read the site title and I was like ehh, its probably another style transfer-
like generator. Nope, this is probably one of the best generators I played
with!

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ttul
[https://artbreeder.com/i?k=de694b3944a30732a426](https://artbreeder.com/i?k=de694b3944a30732a426)

Jean Luc, is that you?

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tartoran
This is impressive, but at the same time can't help but notice art is kind of
its way out when no skills nor time spent doing anything can be exchanged for
just one click and generate art. I watched the intro video and the narrator
was mentioning "no skills are needed", "anybody can do this", etc and I can't
stop thinking how making art is at anybody's fingertips and yet means so much
less. I looked through the generated images and wow, one and one are not bad
looking, but after a few hundred images i said OK and closed the tab. I had a
quantity overload. So where is the human if novels can be auto generated and
have a plot and be good novels and where movies can be made in such a way too
with auto generated music and dialogue and so on. You get my drift. It's cool
but what is it for, art or entertainment? Is this just a phase that will go
away?

~~~
joelS
Hey! So I feel a lot of creativity is 'combinatorial', i.e knows what two
things might go well together. Artbreeder kind of gamifies that by making it
very easy. So many images may look similar but some people can really develop
their own style with time.

Also, often my favorite part of artbreeder is when artists take what they save
as the inspiration or building blocks for full works. It's really an
inspiration tool, but saying inspiration-breeder is a mouthful.

More generally, I think computation can meaningfully augment human creativity
by providing surprise and break us out of our loops.

Best, Joel

~~~
wnkrshm
How was the training data acquired though?

~~~
gwern
Humans generate art by selection. There's no reason you couldn't have an art
ecosystem where AIs do all the generation, humans do the selection, and that's
how it bootstraps. AI Dungeon 2 and 15.ai are already taking steps to close
the loop by using human interactions to score outputs and train on them
("preference learning").

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rubyfan
this is really wild and sort of causes my brain some distress in the same way
that scene from Alien Resurrection when Ripley is in the clone lab with all
the failed human alien hybrids

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renewiltord
This is amazing! What a clever concept to use these for inspiration.

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fxtentacle
It's a pity that you cannot upload your own image(s) as starting points.

My theory is that because this is built be using pre-trained BigGAN models,
they do not have access to the encoder to convert an image to the latent
space, but instead only to the generator that converts the latent space to an
image.

Accordingly, they can only remix parameters in latent space, but not locate
the latent space that a real-world photo would reside at.

~~~
gspr
> It's a pity that you cannot upload your own image(s) as starting points.

What do you mean? Click for example "create" -> "portrait" -> "upload".

~~~
fxtentacle
Apparently it works for portraits. I tried the general case, which doesn't
offer an upload.

~~~
fxtentacle
It sure is quite slow at ~1 hour per uploaded portrait. That looks more like
an exhaustive parameter search to me, than a trained encoder network.

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mkarliner
Sorry, but this site has a terrible, incomprehensible, user interface. No
help, no tooltips on mysterious icons, no UX flow.

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tgvaughan
I always thought it would be amazing to have something like this for composing
music.

~~~
dimmuborgir
Magenta Studio

[https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio)

------
anamexis
Pretty bizarre: this site reliably causes graphics glitches for me. MacBook
Pro 16" \+ Chrome.

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

~~~
splintercell
Restart your machine and report if the problem still exists.

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jelling
How many images do I need to mark as interesting before it generates
something? I did about 20 on iOS but nothing. Really interested in project
though.

~~~
joelS
Marking them interesting doesn't update the model. If you click on any mage
you can 'breed' it with others, or go to the create age to compose or upload
something!

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hoerzu
I had the same idea for dogs:
[https://need4breed.github.io](https://need4breed.github.io)

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jlee124
Weird and wild and fantastic!

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zapt02
They forgot one more use case: nightmares! ;D

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xtiansimon
This is a cool project. Generating 'new' and creative images with computation
is very interesting topic. I was particularly curious about the architectural
and interior explorations from this user [1].

I signed up and explored what the free account permits [3,4]; however, I have
to say I feel the same about this project as I did about "NLP Tool for
Technological Research" (30 days ago) [2]. Unless you can upload an image
you're familiar with, something you've worked on, I just don't understand what
I'm seeing.

Personally, I enjoy studying composition. I enjoy abstract works of
Suprematists, Cubists, Futurists, Abstract Expressionists. All of which I
think could be more or less reimagined with computational means.

So for my WOW, I want to see what Artbreeder does to an image I'm already
familiar with, or how it can imitate other visual styles.

In the last case I really need to see the input, because if the results appear
similar to the input there will be copyright issues. In one of my experiments
[5] I used the mixed images feature. This provides a graph which gives the
appearance of showing how the image was created. Then again, not seeing any
code, I don't know for sure what else was used which may or may not be subject
to copyright. I'm not saying the project should be open source, but maybe
there is some detail that can be exposed, and used to recreate the effect with
a different image. If you can do that, then QED the result is not cribbed from
un-cited sources. It's just computational pixel-pushing (heck, is it?).

I did some graphic design work early in my career and when we "appropriated"
an image to be part of a photoshop composition, the rule of thumb was always
you should not be able to reference the source from what you sampled. Some
people spoke about 5-10% of an image; however, if you were doing something
with any significant visibility and didn't pay for the source, the first rule
was make it unidentifiable.

I don't have any particular need for images right now. This is just my first
impression based on my experience and what I can't get enough of--more
abstract art, or something that takes an image I've studied, have intimate
familiarity, and says, This will look much better upside down! haha

[1]:
[https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=03b855cd8c852c56b338](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=03b855cd8c852c56b338)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847429)

[3]:
[https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=ee55675001b83a64f71f](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=ee55675001b83a64f71f)

[4]:
[https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=14366daddf2f12087211](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=14366daddf2f12087211)

[5]:
[https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=a8ec4e77d27dc33f92f3](https://artbreeder.com/lineage?k=a8ec4e77d27dc33f92f3)

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sharemywin
really cool.

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oklol123
This kills the arts

~~~
coldcode
Not really, it can only make derivative art.

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chrismsimpson
Art should not be easy

~~~
tsukurimashou
my little brother is making music and was quite depressed when I showed him
AIVA, I can understand the mixed feelings of 'real' artists

