
Researchers used a neural network to reconstruct a lost Picasso painting - rmason
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614333/this-picasso-painting-had-never-been-seen-before-until-a-neural-network-painted-it/
======
throwaway66920
That has... so many obvious artificial flaws it’s not even funny.

I’m surprised I got a downvote. Compare the fake (e) to the real (d). The
algorithm appears to have gotten the broad color scheme correct, but that’s
about it as far as the similarities go. There are uncomfortable smudges all
over the painting, the lighting makes no sense, and several details have
blurred together around the hands, feet, everything.

------
abrichr
> _They have taken a manually edited version of the x-ray images of the
> ghostly woman beneath The Old Guitarist and passed it through a neural style
> transfer network. This network was trained to convert images into the style
> of another artwork from Picasso’s Blue Period._

Perhaps a more accurate title would be something like "Researchers used a
neural network to stylize a manually retrieved lost Picasso painting"

Original paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05677.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05677.pdf)

------
egypturnash
This looks like poop. It didn’t even do a good job of faking brushstrokes,
much less guessing at what the colors might have been. It’s a half-assed job
that’s not doing much more than a style transfer phone app could do.

Doing this right, imho, would entail taking x-rays of every Blue Period
Picasso possible, and training a network to output the visible image when
given an x-ray. I don’t know offhand how many paintings were in that period,
so there may not be enough work to usefully do this.

~~~
pvaldes
> it didn’t even do a good job of faking brushstrokes

That part could be intended. There is a blurred line between recreation and
falsification and maybe they wanted to mark clearly and a plain sight that is
not a real picasso work.

> It’s a half-assed job

100% agree with that, this is not even a lost painting. It was there all the
time. Is a discarded try, a misfit that didn't pass the painter's test.

------
JonathanFly
This is a neat idea, but the execution was kind of minimum-viable-attempt.

You can do this yourself though, just google some famous paintings with X-RAY
images and try it. I doubt this is very accurate but it is fun.

I posted a few
[https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1175966107091574784](https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1175966107091574784)

~~~
JonathanFly
In particular
[https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1176355623857991681](https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1176355623857991681)

------
herodotus
This title is misleading. The painting was recreated, not retrieved. The title
of the article itself is "This Picasso painting had never been seen before.
Until a neural network painted it."

~~~
Yuval_Halevi
I actually prefer your title

------
lopmotr
So much "research" is just people doing normal mundane work but they happen to
be familiar with the process of publishing research papers so they do that for
whatever they can think of. This particular work is more like a hobby or
perhaps some curiosity for art historians to look at. They didn't do anything
that we couldn't already and obviously do anyway.

------
d--b
Jesus it looks like crap.

Compare with the two other painting, the guitarist and the one they used for
style transfer, it just has nothing to do.

Maybe the problem is that they took too much of the underlying painting, which
was either very unfinished or damaged.

Anyways, this is quite useless.

~~~
scotty79
> Jesus it looks like crap.

Maybe that's why he painted over it.

------
discreteevent
"Computers are useless they can only give you answers" \- Picasso

------
tobr
Top third of the screen is covered with a cookie warning, bottom third is
warning me that I’ve read 1 of 3 free articles, when I scroll down to read
this article they already count as read, there’s a big empty space, followed
by a prompt to subscribe to some newsletter, followed by _four lines_ of said
article, which fade over into a button to _actually_ read it - followed by an
attempt to distract me with a _different_ article.

I get the hint, you really don’t want me to read the article, so I won’t.

~~~
llarsson
Browsing with JavaScript off, and all I get is the contents, an image, and
some "related articles" at the end. It truly is the best way to browse in
2019. Deeply ironic, considering all the time and effort web devs have put in
to creating all the annoyances you list.

