
AI Gahuku: AI Generator Will Turn Your Photos into Renaissance Paintings - superasn
https://ai-art.tokyo/en/
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DeathArrow
This is what I've got using chimp pics:

[https://imgur.com/a/hkG0rJg](https://imgur.com/a/hkG0rJg)

[https://imgur.com/a/YZ3oWUm](https://imgur.com/a/YZ3oWUm)

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imhoguy
That is creepy and genious. So who is the author of the artwork now? AI?

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qchris
There's actually been some litigation around this topic recently. The general
consensus seems to be that authorship gets assigned to closest version of the
person who initiated the creation process of the resulting artwork. So, in
this case, I believe it would be the person that selected and uploaded the
photo to the service would have authorship--the actual process is considered
to be more of a blackbox tool being used by that person. A (way more)
sophisticated digital paintbrush, if you will.

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dylan604
Wouldn't this be similar to using Photoshop or any other image manipulation
tool? Adobe does not get ownership of output of their software. Why would we
think some random website offering image manipulation would be different? As
you say, the software is just a tool in the image creation process.

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StrangeDoctor
what gets really messy is the training data. Renaissance paintings are
(hopefully?) all public domain, but what would be the case if I used living
artists' work, or the collection of disney cartoons?

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johannes1234321
The pictures themselves are probably public domain, the photography of the
picture however might be protected (photographer picked angle, lense,
lightning, ...)

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mrb
Combine it with
[https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/)
and you've got a generator of completely fictional renaissance paintings. Here
is one example, quite good:

[https://imgur.com/a/9F7xoC0](https://imgur.com/a/9F7xoC0)

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secondaryditto
did most of the subjects in renaissance paintings actually exist, or were they
just imagined people/faces?

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ipsum2
Does anyone have an example to look at? The ones in the header are small and
darkened.

Edit: here's Trump and Obama, using their official Whitehouse portraits:
[https://imgur.com/a/iWeX9tl](https://imgur.com/a/iWeX9tl). Pretty funny
results.

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basch
Try this. It's interactive so after you submit, you can choose your style.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Glynn_S....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Glynn_S._Lunney.jpg)

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ipsum2
Thanks - I didn't want to contribute to HN's hug of death, doing inference is
probably very expensive for them.

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wenc
I wonder about that? In most cases once an algorithm is trained, running
inference is just a function evaluation, which is usually computationally
inexpensive.

(the training is the heavy compute part)

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jw887c
Yeah this doesn't work for non-white folk. Just makes us look like white folk

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johnzim
That's almost for the best. The representation of non-European ethnic facial
features / skin tones in renaissance art appeared to mostly be one of two
groupings:

1) Accurate, naturalistic portrayals that almost certainly had an actual human
sitting and;

2) Color choices / features that are to humans of other skin tones, what that
picture of a cat in the still life painting is to our feline friends:
[https://twitter.com/chelsesaurusrex/status/99512793958585139...](https://twitter.com/chelsesaurusrex/status/995127939585851392)

There are some really interesting examples in this article (although
explicitly African):

[https://thewalters.org/wp-content/uploads/revealing-the-
afri...](https://thewalters.org/wp-content/uploads/revealing-the-african-
presence-in-renaissance-europe.pdf)

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ggggtez
It's not really kosher to suggest that it's "for the best" that it doesn't
work well for other people. :)

It's not like paintings of darkskinned people don't exist for the AI to learn
from, even if you don't like the style that was used at that time.

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drcode
It really captured the personality of our president well:
[https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/ai-
gahaku.appspo...](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/ai-
gahaku.appspot.com/o/twitter-images%2F035177eb-e209-42de-
ae0d-88c7d9294c3b.jpg?alt=media&token=34b5c7b7-73f1-4814-a501-3abb681135c7)

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amiantos
Maybe this should be titled "nightmare generator" because most of the pictures
I have tried, especially of my wife, have ended up with very frightening
distortions. Might be cooler to pair this with cubist paintings instead, so
the facial defects seem more like features.

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Daub
As a painter, I’m genuinely impressed with the results. However, the system is
not capable of taking much initiative. It will reject anything other than a
full-face portrait. Of all genres, portraiture is the most convention-driven.
For example, 90% of most portraits are three-quarter view, with side lighting.
Effectively, there are only a very limited set of solutions to the problem.
Applying the same approach to a landscape painting would be a different class
of problem altogether.

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superfamicom
Tips for best results: no teeth, no beards, no dark skin, looking directly at
the camera tends to make one of the eyes perfect and the other wonky.

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basch
This worked pretty well as a test picture.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Glynn_S....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Glynn_S._Lunney.jpg)

OR, REO look good. RE1 turned him into David Tomlinson.

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hkmurakami
Ah title is misspelled, page says “Gahaku”, which is a slightly archaic term
in Japanese for artist/Painter with a connotation of being a highly skilled
and respected master of the craft.

There’s also a sarcastic net slag meaning to the term as well but the creators
are probably not using the term with that intent.

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tomc1985
Can they not use the word "masterpiece" on the site? A masterpiece is supposed
to be superlative.

You can't call every single output a "masterpiece"

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4weekoldroses
As a representational painter, I've been waiting for someone to do a write-up
on how/why these 'AI' paintings aren't going to be equivalent to human
paintings until 'AI' is itself equivalent to humans.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen one yet. Maybe I'll have to do it myself.

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tomc1985
IMO most 'generative art' is about as creative as a markov chain text, just
with images as the input instead of words. It'll be a while before anyone can
assert any sort of equivalence to human creativity and have it taken seriously

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samcheng
Someone should do this with the "Getty Museum Challenge" photos that are
circulating social media right now!

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lerie1982
Would like to try it but, "I’m sorry but we are having a lot of traffic at the
moment. Please try again later."

There also doesn't seem to be a "retry" button, unless I'm missing something,
I have to keep selecting and uploading my image.

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koushikn
Art Transfer from Google works similarly:
[https://artsandculture.google.com/camera/art-
transfer](https://artsandculture.google.com/camera/art-transfer)

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etaioinshrdlu
Not really though. That google demo looks like a single-pass feed-forward
neural network trained to perform style transfer. The textures and colors get
replaced while overall content is stayed the same.

This project seems to work by finding your image in the latent space of a GAN
model, and then re-synthesizing a new image from that vector.

It's more like generating a whole new image which is targeting the overall
look of an existing image, while jointly having optimized the generated image
to look like it comes from a set of renaissance art.

Edit: on second thought, this tool might be running too quickly to be doing
optimization to find an image in latent space. It might just be fancy vanilla
style transfer done nicely. Hard to tell.

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LudwigNagasena
Quite ironic to name an AI that can only paint white people with a Japanese
word.

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leogout
I wear glasses. I've tried with many photos of me with glasses and it always
looks like it can't handle it. Do you think it is because it was trained with
paintings at a time when glasses weren't common ?

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cwoolfe
Great work! Although it is interesting to me how it doesn't work very well for
non-white faces. Which totally makes sense given that renaissance art training
data reflects the time and place in which it was created.

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dylan604
From someone that is not an ML/AI evangelist, how is this great work? None of
the images I've seen remotely look good. I have yet to see something that a
real life painter not suffering from a stroke would be willing to have
released.

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masonic
We've already seen the beta version:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-19349921](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19349921)

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ElonsMosque
I mean I’m aware there probably weren’t many black people during the
renaissance. But it would be even cooler if this worked for people with
different shades?

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xivzgrev
OH GOD PUT IT OUT WITH FIRE!!

It’s a cool tool but added about 200 pounds to my face.

P0 roadmap feature request: flatter the subject, like Instagram does.

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hobs
Service seems to be overwhelmed.

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kumarm
Nice. Worked well for me for several photos. Is this model open source?

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babo
It clearly shows a strong bias, practically turns a woman into a man.

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wardnath
Most mashups remove my beard, more sample cases would be great.

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kristopolous
Great work, calling it The Hapsburger would be amazing.

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imhoguy
It is not me! To guillotine! :)

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smitty1e
This is the sort of great work that invites the question of whether "can" ==
"should".

It's awesome that the work of great artists can be reduced to an algorithm.
That effort is its own kind of art, and will see application (e.g. restoration
work) far and wide. It could help with tutorials for students to get into
these older styles.

Despite all of the intermediate goodness, I still want the no-kidding product
I buy to have had some actual human imperfection and idiosyncrasy injected.

As explored by Rick Beato in the musical context here =>
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-8EbHkc8tc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-8EbHkc8tc)

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new2628
I think you give these projects too much credit. They do not reduce the work
of great artists to an algorithm and they do not turn user's photos into
renaissance paintings. These projects are technically impressive and
interesting, but art is not going anywhere.

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smitty1e
That would appear to be the position of the moderation.

